Although the terms of the family mind might have changed, if there is no change in the structure of at least one family member’s mind, it seems doubtful that anyone’s relation to “the family mind” will be different.

either of these might be accomplished without a psychological separation or psychological independence from the family’s agenda.

So perhaps it is true that no member of the family can understand the therapist’s interpretation in its fourth order fullness. So what? Does it really matter if the formulation is over the heads of its clients? Family systems therapists may think not. Many of the theories that guide family therapy express skepticism of the whole concept of the

since the focus of the therapist’s formulation is not inferences but the system that organizes or creates inferences, since its focus is not relationships but the relationship between the relationships, what governs the relationships, and since its focus is not on people as the repositories of their feelings but as active creators of their

While the family, to varying degrees, feels that Jamie is failing at life, the therapist explicitly calls Jamie a success at keeping the family stable, at being a good, devoted daughter, at staying a child who needs a mother’s close attention.

Along the same lines, the formulation attends to more than the feelings family members have inside them, or, we might say, it attends to the family members themselves as something more than the suffering carriers of painful feelings of worry, discouragement, and frustration. Instead, it constructs the family members—each one of them—as active

the therapist’s formulation focuses on the relationships between the relationships, the way the various relationships are all under the governance of a single principle of undiscussed family loyalty and devotion.

because the modern world expects of each adult the capacity for personal autonomy and authority, the self is not only a laborer, it is an arena of labor (we “work on ourselves”). The self itself becomes a project. Accordingly, the “work” of public life—and its attendant mental burdens—needs a bigger canvas than that of paid employment.

Does such a person necessarily “lack ambition,” “a clearly defined set of goals,” “forcefulness” or “enterprisingness,” or are these possibly being evinced on behalf of a different construction of what is most important in the world?