David Reiss (psychologist)

David Reiss (1937) is a Psychiatrist and Researcher. He currently is a Clinical Professor in the Yale Child Study Center, Yale University. His most notable contribution to the field came in 1981, when he published his monumental book, The Family's Construction of Reality. The book thoroughly details the 5-year research, conducted at the George Washington University, on families.

Family construing

The term Family Paradigm is used by the author to define a set of shared beliefs and views that every family has, even though they are mainly present at a subliminal level. His research started off as a way to investigate whether some aspects of family life had influences over the development of schizophrenia in the offspring of the family. Thus, three different types of families were subjected to numerous experiments: families without any psychopathological diagnosis, families with offspring (aging 12 to 30) that had characterial disorders, and families with offspring that had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. The preliminary studies showed that families, when given tasks that dealt with gathering, interpreting and communicating information, differed one another in very specific ways, that could be interpreted as an extension, to the family as a whole, of George Kelly's concept of personal construct, thus becoming shared constructs. Reiss states that shared construing always happens, and follows very specific interaction patterns, that the family has carefully but subconsciously created throughout its life. The types of constructs the family forms are directly derived from the interaction of three polar variables:

By crossing these variables we could possibly obtain eight different types of families, but the authors investigate only four possible configurations, thus dividing families on the basis of their shared construing of the laboratory experience:

Family paradigm and crisis

This, however, is only the way families construe their views of a specific social situation. More generally speaking, though, the family has underlying patterns imbued in itself, which shape these family constructs: the author calls these patterns Family Paradigms. They are built through family crisis: whenever a family enters a state of dissonance that threatens to destroy it, some parts of their paradigm become obsolete, while others rise to help the family get out of the crisis; those parts of the construct that survive the crisis become so relevant and strongly imbedded in the life of the family, that they become organizers of the life of the family from that point on, up to the next crisis. Family paradigms differ, much like constructs, on three dimensions:

The paradigm, then, is the kernel of each family's shared construing of every social situation, and it serves as an organizer of every aspect of its life, even though it operates mostly at a sublimial level. It is preserved, even over long periods of time, by means of two kinds of processes: ceremonials (which are highly emotional, symbolic, episodic rituals performed by the family as a whole), and pattern regulators (which, on the other hand, are non-symbolic, delegatable, continuous routines). Thus, through the routinization of time and space, the family paradigm is constantly reasserted, and thus kept alive.

Cycle hypothesis

The process that goes through the crisis, undermines the old paradigm and shapes a new one, which in turn will allow the family a new set of shared constructs, is circular. Shared constructs, in fact, will shape interaction patterns with each family's social environment, thus creating the basis for new links with specific environments, which will again modify the shared constructs the family has built.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Reiss, David; et al. (1981). The Family's Construction of Reality. Harvard: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-29416-5.
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