In the fortnight before the next session, Nora's family would lock the front door immediately after dinner on alternate days and sit around the table for an hour. A clock would be placed in the middle of the table, and every family member, in order of seniority, would have fifteen minutes to vent his own feelings and views, not least about other members of the clan. While any one was speaking the rest must not interrupt, let alone contradict. Moreover, whatever was said at the table must not be discussed outside the fixed ritual hour.
In this case, too, the ritual proved so effective that the treatment could be terminated in a total of fifteen sessions.
We can now explain what precisely we mean by family ritual.
From a formal point of view, a family ritual is an action, or a series of actions, accompanied by verbal formulæ and involving the entire family. Like every ritual it must consist of a regular sequence of steps taken at the right time and in the right place.
Ritualization may smack of the magical or the religious, but this is not necessarily a disadvantage. It should, however, be stressed that the idea of prescribing a ritual was originally suggested by ethology, and quite particularly by certain intraspecific submission rituals whose sole purpose it is to convey placatory messages. The primary aim is to cure the patient with the help of a group engaged in a common task, that is the performance of the ritual.
We have found that the physical enactment of a ritual is infinitely more productive of positive change than any form of verbalization can hope to be. To return to one of our examples, had we merely told the parents of our little "maniac" that their son was not really ill, and that they must not treat him as an invalid, we should never have effected so rapid a cure. But by uniting the whole family in a carefully prescribed ritual, culminating in the destruction of the child's medicines, to the repeated cry of"You are perfectly well,"we were able to introduce a powerful collective motive and hence a new normative system. In that sense the ritual may be said to work because it persuades the whole group to strive towards a common goal.
In this connection I must stress the widespread use of rituals in modern China. These do not consist of verbal formulæ and slogans to which the individual can turn a deaf ear through selective inattention, but try to foster the idea of social and family coöperation by means of dances, plays, and other public entertainments including, paradoxically enough, a whole range of competitive sports.
The "invention" of a family ritual invariably calls for a great creative effort on the part of the therapist and often, if I may say so, for flashes of genius, if only because a ritual that has proved effective in one family is unlikely to prove equally effective in another. This is because every family follows special rules and plays special games. In particular, a ritual is not a form of metacommunication about these rules, let alone about these games; rather it is a kind of countergame that, once played, destroys the original game. In other words, it leads to the replacement of an unhealthy and epistemologically false rite (for example the anorexic symptom) by one that is healthy and epistemologically sound.
I am absolutely convinced that mental "symptoms" arise in rigid homeostatic systems and that they are the more intense the more secret is the cold war waged by the subsystem (parent-child coalitions). We know that such pathological systems are governed by secret rules that shun the light of day and bind the family together with pathological ties.
Inotherwordspsychiatric"symptoms"tendtodevelopinfamilysystemsthreatenedwithcollapse;insuchsystemstheyplaythesamepartassubmissionritesplayintheanimalkingdom:theyhelptoward
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