Birthday syndrome, family secrets, rehearsals, family history? In this article, you will discover in a few key points what psychogenealogy is, what it consists of, who practices it, how a typical session takes place and to whom it is addressed to find out if this therapeutic method corresponds to your needs.

Psychogenealogy or transgenerational analysis is a therapeutic method which aims to alleviate the discomfort of the person who consults by offering to analyze the genealogy from which it comes to better understand the place and the missions that have been bequeathed to him by the generations. women and men who came before her.

Psychogenealogy accepts the idea that there is transmission from the unconscious to the unconscious and that the traumatic unspoken continues to work in the unconscious of descendants as long as they have not found a way to represent themselves in a way. fair, whether through speech, the manifestation of emotions, artistic representation …

 Thus, psychogenealogy proposes to honor those to whom one owes life while restoring to them the pains, traumas, patterns of thought, of action… in which the person no longer finds himself today. It is therefore a work of quest for emancipation, of individuation in the present that the therapist helps you to achieve.

The therapist is called a psychogenologist or transgenerational analyst, has received specific training from certifying training centers and adheres to a demanding code of ethics, particularly with regard to the issue of the management of family secrets (to be requested at first consultation).

Most often, the person who consults arrives with a specific questioning, a difficulty that concerns him in his daily life: difficulty forming a couple, recurring social or professional difficulties …

The practitioner centers his work on this questioning, the personal quest in the here and now. After an anamnesis (a kind of debated biography), he uses media such as drawing, the staging of figurines, graphic maps, the setting in motion of the body… to help the patient to offer a first representation of his family.

Quite quickly, the person develops a genosociogram which is the snapshot of the family unconscious carried by the individual, of a certain determinism. This is done from memory, by exchanging with the practitioner and initially over four generations, ie up to the patient’s great-grandparents.

The study of the genosociogram is used to go back in family history, to forge links between the past and the present and thus to better understand the origin of the patient’s suffering.

What changes from classical therapy is that one comes, in a way, in consultation with all his ascendant family and his contemporaries. There may initially be a conflict of family loyalty for the patient.

The modality of the sessions varies according to the practitioner, the sessions are regular but not weekly (every two weeks or three weeks) and generally last an hour and a half. About ten sessions provide an update on the first issue.

The psychotherapist Anne Ancelin-Schützenberger allowed the theorization and development of this therapeutic method in France in the 1970s and invented the genosociogram (diagram with its own graphic codes which associates family genealogy and historical, socio-cultural and economic environments). At the same time, Françoise Dolto, Didier Dumas, Nicolas Abraham, Maria Torok… explore several areas of the discipline in their psychoanalytic practice.

My belief is that a traumatic story poorly transmitted from one generation to the next has the power to disturb man, because the brain fails to give him a coherent, rational form that would leave him in peace. We say in our jargon that history is not “symbolized” correctly. It then spins in the head a bit like when we can’t find the exact title of a song, a movie, a book … We know that it is more or less that but not all quite and our thought is not at rest. The obsession sets in, something “is wrong” and encumbers us until we find the exact title, with the right words.

With the work in transgenerational analysis, we can give back “right body” to its family history, reconstitute a coherent version of the facts which will free the spirit and will put it at rest from the sufferings which belong to the past.

The family constellation is one of the many tools of transgenerational analysis, using it in isolation and without therapeutic follow-up with a practitioner can prove to be counterproductive, even harmful.