ABSTRACT
I will gladly comment on Dr. Jackson’s paper since at the Athenian Institute of Anthropos we are operating on the ideas expressed in his opening statement. Currently 1 we are presenting data concerning transaction within the Greek family, which illustrate exactly the point that the individual should not be examined in vitro but within the context of the group in which he lives and within his total sociocultural milieu. The subject under discussion there is the significance of the dependence that the Greek family fosters. Our research data concerning variables related to family transaction such as husband-wife relations, parent-child relations, family roles, attitudes, stereotypes, child-rearing practices, maternal intervention in peer group formation, patterns of diciplining children, investigated on the basis of samples representative of the general urban population, indicate that the Greek family indeed does foster dependence. This is supported by motivational patterns of 12-year-old and 18-year-old normal achieving adolescents as detected by Story Sequence Analysis which show them as being definitely on the dependence pole of the dependence-independence dimension. Reviewers of these findings tend to conclude that this kind of family is a “sick family,” that we deal with a “sick culture.” These reviewers, as we have repeated in a formal occasion recently, 2 examine things in vitro. They do not take under consideration at all the sociocultural matricies within which these family patterns have been developed for centuries exactly because they have a high adaptational value. As further research, supported significantly from cross-cultural studies, 3 has shown, in the Greek milieu the In-Group (defined as family, friends and friends of friends) is perceived as a “mothering” entity with a highly nurturant and supportive role comparable only to mother-child role. Progress in life, from sheer biological survival onwards, depends on the 165skill of the individual in securing and actualizing interdependences in his life. Conclusion: we deal with patterns which cannot be qualified as adaptive or maladaptive but which can be evaluated only in the context of the group and the milieu in which the individual lives. Such conclusions should have been obvious if psychiatry in the late sixties were not still permeated by the most progressive thinking of the past century. The discussant can only agree with melancholy with the conclusion of the writer that behavioral sciences are following the natural sciences with a lag of fifty years. It seems though that we are finally overcoming our intellectual inertia. We are entering a stage in which mental reactions are viewed as multifactorial. Biological, intrapsychic, interpersonal, intergroup and sociocultural variables are perceived not as mutually exclusive causative factors but as processes developing in a multilateral transaction. Nevertheless, in trying to overcome reductionism we should keep in mind that one of the reinforcements of reductionism is the inevitable need for the clinician to focus on something circumscribed in order to function diagnostically and therapeutically. Clinicians using general systems theory will inevitably feel the same need and they will “focus.” We agree with the writer that it makes a tremendous difference on what one focuses in clinical practice. We want only to stress something which we hope that he shares: that the clinician will always keep in mind that he is “focusing” and that by doing so he leaves at the moment much out of his scope and his therapeutic maneuvers.
