Cinderella †Family Therapy Essay

Cinderella’s case conceptualized using a Bowenian transgenerational model According to Bowen, one of the pioneers of family therapy, family can be understood as an emotional unit, which can be best analyzed through a multigenerational framework. Cinderella’s story, which was told by many professional storytellers, including brothers Grimm (19 century) and Charles Perrault (17 century), as many other famous fairytales lacks many important details and characters’ descriptions that a therapist would need for administering family treatment involving transgenerational model. If we would speculate knowing some information about Cinderella’s family members, the transgenerational model would work beautifully. A chronic anxiety of Cinderella, her unstable, submissive behavior, could be explained by anxiety transmitted over several generations. Goldenbergs bring our attention to a few important emotional patterns of an individual:†the selection of a spouse with similar differentiation level and the family projection process that results in lower level of self-differentiation† (p. 89, 2008). Bowen would even build a prognosis for Cinderella’s children to have a reduced level of self-differentiation and being increasingly vulnerable to anxiety (Goldenberg & Goldenberg, 2008). Bowen emphasized that the multigenerational transmission programs not only the levels of self – differentiation, but also programs family’s roles and interactions. Cinderella’s marital problems could be understood very well through the lens of her family behaviours (The Bowen Center, n. d. ). My only major concern about application of transgenerational model in Cinderella’s case would be the early death of Cinderella’s parents ( her genogram is hard to build) and her latter life with the wicket, very directive stepmother, who evidently influenced Cinderella’s fragile and indecisive mind structure. Cinderella’s ability and inability to build attachments to her family members, which were not all â€Å"angels†, should be also considered when providing her with a therapy. Once again, her attachment to her loving father, her godfairy, her stepmother and stepsisters, could be easily incorporated into transgenerational model. Cinderella’s case conceptualized through Bowen’s concepts of triangulation. According to Goldenberg and Goldenberg (2008), the Bowen’s concept of triangulation would allow understanding better Cinderella’s marital problems. Probably, a few first years of Cinderella’s marriage were happy, because it was a big relieve for her to escape the stepmother cruelty. However, even her first marital years could have some initial problems. For example, the prince, who was brought up in a â€Å"normal† family, could not understand or could not believe Cinderella’s stories she told about her family. He would smile when she would share her violent memories with him. The prince mistrust and his ironic smile could initiate some negative feelings and despair in Cinderella. In this case, the stepmother’s figure would be present in Cinderella-prince conflict through Cinderella’s stories. It is particularly interesting that the third person does not need necessarily be present to create a conflict in triangulation (The Bowen Center, n. d. ). When children were born from a person (or two persons) with low self-differentiation, many other triangles and possible shifts and tensions could occur. Cinderella’s case and the object-relations model Goldenberg and Goldenberg (2008) provide a deep insight into Cinderella’s story based on the object-relation model, which is connected to the early Freudian concept of mother-child bonds. Even though the Cinderella’s relationship with her mother was very short before her mother past away, it appeared to be a foundation of many Cinderella’s later issues, such as her idealization of some women characters (godmother; later, some older women-friends), a few conflicts between her ego and id, suffering from deprivation of early attachments, developing insecurity and low self-esteem, and others. All these issues that the object-relations model would discover, could be projected to Cinderella’s later marital problems. A person who survived a trauma of loosing her both parents and the hardship of living with evil stepmother and stepsisters could have a lot of troubled thoughts and experiences that could be projected into her relationship with her spouse and children. I believe that the object-relations model (psychodynamic in its core) could provide the best insight when dealing with Cinderella’s marital problems.