ABSTRACT
In “The Child in the Family Group”, Winnicott relates the story of a little girl who had named her transitional object “family”. The word “family” is not a psychoanalytic concept. It would seem that psychoanalysis has never been particularly interested in this idea, except for the Systemic schools like those in Palo Alto, or in the antipsychiatry movement represented by Ronald Laing and David Cooper. Winnicott considered that the family structure is the privileged system in the psychic organization. In Therapeutic Consultations in Child Psychiatry, he maintains that, except in the cases where it is truly dysfunctional, the best place for a child to be treated is within its family. And nowadays, the extreme diversity of the family constellation, with its divorces, stepfamilies, assisted procreation, and now the authorization of same-sex marriages and the possibility of adoption, all these factors challenge traditional psychoanalytic theory. Winnicott introduces a new idea, that of loyalty and disloyalty.
