Family Crucible in the Book the Family

Family Crucible

In the book The Family Crucible, family therapists Carl Whitaker and Gus Napier (1978) team up to help a family with dangerous levels of discontent and animosity towards one another. At the center of the rift are the adolescent daughter Claudia and the mother Carolyn. At the periphery are the 6-year-old daughter Laura, an 11-year-old son Don, and the father David. On the surface, it is Claudia's behavior problems that are blamed by both parents for the family's woes. However, during the first meeting with the entire family present, it quickly becomes clear that problems with the marriage may be to blame. This essay will examine the parenting dynamics uncovered by Whitaker and Napier during their family therapy sessions, including the parenting styles used and attachment matrix that exist in the Brice family.

The Brice Parenting Styles

On the surface, the father appears to have an authoritative parenting style because he demands that Claudia be respectful to her mother. However, his primary concern about Claudia's behavior seems to be that she gets along better with her mother. He does not appear to intrude into Claudia's life to the degree that the mother does, nor set authoritarian behavioral guidelines. He seems to truly care about Claudia's suffering, but may be indulgent at times simply to avoid conflict with either Claudia or Don.

The mother comes off as having an authoritarian parenting style with respect to Claudia. This parenting style is not apparent with respect to the other two children, Laura and Don, and therefore may have developed recently in response to the emerging marital problems. The mother appears to be somewhat detached from her other two children as well, although both Don and Laura seem secure in the knowledge that they are integral to the family structure. Overall, Carolyn is probably a good, dutiful, caring parent, yet remains emotionally detached to some extent from her children's lives. The authoritarian, and thus intrusive, side of Carolyn is therefore probably the product of a disintegrating marriage and the formation of a family triangle between father, mother, and Claudia.

Attachment Status

Based on the behavior of Laura and Don, both appear relatively secure in their relationships with their parents. Laura is content to sit quietly and draw or play jacks while the emotionally volatile therapy sessions take place. When Claudia became really upset during the second session, Laura at first seeks the comfort of her mother before one of the therapists intervenes. At that point Laura is comfortable providing comfort to her sister Claudia. This suggests that Laura believes she is both deserving of love and that the primary source of love and security is her mother. By comparison, Don is a relatively carefree personality who appears relatively unconcerned about the ongoing family strife. This suggests that Don is likewise comfortable about his place in the family and feels deserving of parental love, however, later sessions uncover traits in Don that are more consistent with an anxious-ambivalent attachment status. This emerges after Claudia switches places with Don in the marital triangle.

Claudia, however, is definitively anxious-avoidant (Moretti and Peled, 2004), although this was not always the case. Based on what occurs during the therapy sessions, it is hard to imagine Claudia seeking comfort from either parent. By comparison, it is easy to believe that Claudia would fear rejection and/or punishment should she seek comfort from her mother. With respect to her father, Claudia would expect rejection.

Luckily, this process of alienation is only a few years old and seems not to have impacted the attachment status of the other two children to the point of crisis. If the family had not sought professional help, though, the destructive interactions between the parents and Claudia would probably have undermined the health of Laura's and Don's attachment to their parents. The shift would probably have been towards an anxious-ambivalent status as their need for reassurance grew (Moretti and Peled, 2004).

Therapeutic Interventions

From Napier's (1978) view, both the wife and husband had become uncomfortable with the degree of dependency that had formed during the first years of marriage and were busy distancing themselves from each other. The father worked too much and the mother spent too much time being a housewife and tending to her mother's needs. The first order of business would be to encourage the couple to begin confronting each other about their concerns, rather than using their children as go-betweens. As Napier suggests, the next step would be to encourage them to become autonomous adults capable of being their own therapists.