Good lord! It’s the collective consciousness of therapists! What a horrifying thought.
I have been reading an excellent book entitled “The Developing Mind” by Daniel Siegel. Neurobiology dontchaknow. But very accessible to someone as partially educated as myself, who can’t quite get a grasp on locating the different bits of the brain.
The focus of the book is on how early developmental experiences impact on how your brain is formed. Bad experience, screwed up attachment patterns, crap parents… et voila – your brain is formed in a certain way, resulting in dysfunction and, if you’re lucky.. therapy. Think early trauma resulting in PTSD-type responses.
One of the discussions is inevitably around heredity-versus-environment, describing the way that behaviours (functional and dysfunctional) are handed down from generation to generation. This led me to postulate- what if dysfunctional behaviour specifically is a tool for interfamily group social cohesion? – the same way that having a kid that looks like his father, encourages the father to stick around long enough for the mother and child to not get eaten by wolves.
Because dysfunctional behaviour, weird communication methods can become ways in which families inherently communicate (and control each other) – whether or not they make sense. Like in some families, if your mom says “oh, has that dress shrunk?” she means you’ve put on weight, but passive aggression is how you communicate as a group. To people outside of the family, spouses etc, it will probably look crazy, which only serves to increase the cohesion of the family group. Anyway, it’s just a theory of mine.
And it’s a theory I would propose would be supported by the way families freak out react when someone in a dysfunctional family finally gets round to having some therapy and starts breaking those cycles of stupidity.
All we’d need is a couple of generations of therapy to really screw with evolution.. and to put all the therapists out of business. Oh, and this cartoonist.. so.. erm.. maybe not.
