The genosociogram is “a kind of genealogical tree” to visualize the history of a family in the broad sense, that is, close relatives, friends and pets. In it, the person writes down important elements of his story and what he learned from his links with other members of his family. Both memory lapses and memories can be included.

Subsequently, the person completes his family history with testimonies, important dates that he will have gleaned over several generations, with the aim of establishing correspondences between events, facts, ages and dates.

Graphic conventions

To draw a genosociogram, we use:

• A circle to indicate a female person.
• A square to indicate a male person.
• A double bond to signify a marriage.
• A simple link to represent a free union.
• An oblique line to signify a separation.
• A double slant to signify a divorce.
• Numbering for successive unions.
• A vertical link to indicate parentage.
• Numbering for the order of the children in the siblings.
• A horizontal line to indicate twins.
• Dotted lines to indicate the adoption of a child.
• A dotted circle to indicate a miscarriage.
• A cross to indicate that the person is deceased.

The genosociogram allows both to update the nature of the relationships between the different members of the family, to specify the roles of each one, to discover those close to them through their history and to be situated in a generational perspective where each one asserts himself as a link of family history.

It also makes it possible to highlight unresolved events and their effects on subsequent generations, and to identify family repetitions over several generations.

The ultimate goal is to understand your life differently, to discover the causes of dysfunctions and to formulate new life choices.

Birthday syndrome refers to the work of Anne Ancelin Schützenberger and Joséphine Hilgard. It highlights a possible link between the onset of an illness or psychosis and a traumatic event in family history. A birthday reaction could, according to this theory, occur in a person when their child reaches the age where they themselves have experienced a traumatic event. For example, a mother could experience depression when her daughter celebrates her tenth birthday, the age she was when her mother or father died. This also applies to people who reach the age their parents were when something traumatic like a cancer for example. Anniversary dates are all occasions to see this anniversary syndrome appear. To explain the phenomenon, the American psychologist Rosenthal speaks of automatic realization of predictions: the worry and anxiety triggered by the approach of the anniversary date would actually lead to accidents or the occurrence of an illness. 

According to Anne Ancelin Schützenberger, two intergenerational transmissions are possible: conscious transmission, which results from discussions between family members, and unconscious transmission (or transgenerational) supposedly conveyed by the unspoken, secrets, impressions.

Several psychiatrists like Françoise Dolto and Jacob Levi Moreno also think that transmissions are possible through the uterine route. The mother would thus communicate her dreams, and therefore her unconscious world, to her child during pregnancy, thus permeating family events of several generations. This communication from unconscious to unconscious, still subject to controversy, has been dubbed “family co-unconscious”.

The parental projections could also constitute a transmission channel. The child is often the bearer of expectations and projections on the part of his parents, even of his family in the broad sense, which would imprint on him life choices drawn up as well on the professional level as on the private level.

The family atmosphere and all the signals such as behaviors, attitudes, gestures, phobias, fears, blockages, the way of communicating verbally or non-verbally, the unspoken would also imprint traces of events in the child traumatic events likely to resurface sooner or later. 

Family loyalty invisible was developed by psychoanalyst Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy. It designates a set of unconscious loyalty rules that govern the places and roles of family members, and which is summed up by the adage “What we have received from our parents, we give back to our children.” “. To illustrate this fundamental notion of psychogenealogy, we can cite 3 concrete examples:

• A boy unconsciously fails in his studies so as not to exceed the social status of his parents.
• A girl takes care of her siblings following the death of her parents and never gets married.
• A woman takes care of her aunt because she has helped her parents a lot. 

Each family has its secrets, but some are clearly shameful. Murder, suicide, incest, mental illness, bereavement, homosexuality, adultery… It is these taboos that can become real ghosts for family members. In 1978, two psychoanalysts, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Török put forward the hypothesis according to which these ghosts are capable of inducing a priori incomprehensible acts and behaviors: by insidiously entering the unconscious of family members, they could influence their behavior and be passed on to subsequent generations.

Today, knowledge in psychology, physiology and neurology does not validate the foundations of such discipline. Anne Marie Schutzenberger herself acknowledges that these are above all based on her observations.

The major problem with psychogenealogy is that it relegates chance to the background or even contests its existence. By trying to associate each event with another detectable event in the family tree, it runs the risk of inducing false memories : we speak of manipulation by suggestion. The person then firmly believes in false memories induced by the therapy. This is not a problem to be taken lightly: several associations such as FRANCEFMS (False Memory and False Souvenirs) fight against therapies likely to cause this kind of abuse and remind us that many family problems are generated by these false memories. which may lead the individual to break up with his family.

In addition, psychogenealogy sometimes impresses by the statement of several rather disturbing coincidences, in particular at the level of dates. In reality, these coincidences may just as well correspond to simple coincidences when calculating the probabilities involved for each situation. In his work The Paranormal, H. Brioch submits an enigma which illustrates this phenomenon.

What is the probability that in a group of 50 people taken at random two people were born on the same day? Our logic encourages us to weigh 50 people and 365 days, and therefore evaluate this probability at 50 chances out of 365 which represents a probability of about 14%. In fact, it is 97%!

« The unconscious has a good memory. ». Anne Ancelin Schützenberger, Ouch my ancestors!