51 pages • 1 hour read
Augustus Y. Napier, Carl WhitakerThe Family Crucible: The Intense Experience of Family Therapy
Nonfiction | Reference/Text Book | Adult | Published in 1978A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 9-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary: “A Partial Resolution”
Whitaker calls Napier to regretfully ask him if he is free for an emergency appointment with the Brices. Napier agrees, sad to sacrifice time with his family. The meeting was called after Carolyn and Claudia had a major altercation that resulted in Carolyn hitting Claudia and bruising her face. Carolyn explains that she was frustrated with the lack of help at dinner time, and her frustration toward the whole family, Napier reasons, was taken out on Claudia. Whitaker is sure that allowing Carolyn and Claudia to argue in therapy and finish what they have begun will help, but Napier is nervous throughout, worried that physical violence could recur.
Carolyn and Claudia are given the chance to argue and express their emotions, and Carolyn decides to give Claudia an ultimatum: Either obey her mother, or leave the family home permanently. Sensing her mother’s newfound strength and her father’s decision to side with his wife, Claudia becomes nervous at the prospect that her parents will give up on her. She attempts to leave the meeting and stomps toward the door, but finds it locked from the inside. Everyone in the room starts to laugh, including Claudia. Napier gently encourages her to sit back down, and she does after hearing her mother’s softened voice. Listening to Claudia talk about how she always feels blamed for the family’s problems, Carolyn begins to feel guilty and embarrassed. Napier sees the fight as the family’s attempt to return to its old patterns in fear of change, and this realization seems to relieve Claudia the most.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Releasing”
At the next meeting, Carolyn and Claudia sit on the same couch and act more friendly toward one another. They have begun talking at home and even gone for a walk together. The family wonders how to avoid large conflicts in the future, and they are advised to voice concerns more frequently, and rather than blaming each other, they are encouraged to talk openly about their emotions. The next meeting is similarly peaceful, and Napier and Whitaker simultaneously agree that perhaps it is time to end therapy, at least for now. Carolyn and Claudia are visibly uncomfortable with this idea, but the other family members are eager to give their newfound strength and independence a test run. Carolyn agrees as long as the door to therapy remains open, which of course it does.
In reflecting on the family, Napier and Whitaker decide that the major fight between Claudia and Carolyn represented the family’s overall willingness to fight for their unity. An unconscious process followed in which the family acted out what was necessary to find this strength. The family then entered a period in which they tested what they had learned and gained from therapy so far.
Chapter 11 Summary: “The Underlying Crisis”
While not all married couples fear examining their issues, Napier points to a “marriage crisis” (146) in which it has become increasingly common for married couples to allow problems to fester for years. Distance and anxiety grows, and anger hides under everything. Needs and desires are suppressed as couples seek to avoid facing their marital problems. One spouse may become the scapegoat and become ill, focus obsessively on work, or begin an affair. Another couple that Napier worked with experienced a gradual cooling of the marriage, which led to an intense yearning for the passion of the honeymoon years. The stagnation in their marriage caused panic and eventually led to the husband half-consciously seeking out an affair. He ultimately began a passionate and guilt-ridden affair with a woman from work. When the sexual relationship between the husband and wife floundered, the wife became suspicious, and the truth was eventually revealed. Days of arguing and long-overdue emotions were released, followed by intense lovemaking. When the husband was reluctant to end his affair despite this progress, the couple entered therapy.
Napier and Whitaker believe that affairs are more complex than one spouse simply “cheating” on the other. Lack of emotional openness between partners contributes to the possibility of an affair; in other words, it is “unconsciously agreed in advance” (154). Napier explains that married couples know, intuitively or consciously, what is happening in their marriage, even if they do not speak or act on it. In the above example, the husband’s childhood experiences with an overly dependent mother instilled in him a deep fear of being smothered and controlled; at the same time, the wife had her own fears of abandonment. Napier believes these two people unconsciously chose one another in an effort to relive, with a better result, their deepest fears. Similarly, as the wife took on a motherly role in the relationship, she reminded the husband of his own mother, and their sex life deteriorated. Napier notes that an affair can either be a sign of the end of a marriage or it can be the experience that forces a couple to finally address their issues. He insists this is best done with the help of a family therapist.
Chapters 9-11 Analysis
Napier’s inner world is exposed in his writing, making him feel more like a novelist conveying emotional truths and less like an analyst clinically describing his observations. He often finds himself reminded of his own family and those problems which he believed were either long since dealt with or which he never thought he would be able to address. Napier also admits to errors in the therapeutic process that he and Whitaker undertake with the Brice family, such as when they allow Claudia to be scapegoated during an argument one day. By admitting to flaws in their approach, Napier shows himself to be a learner, not an expert, and makes this feel like an acceptable status to hold. Rather than assuming he knows everything, he gains credibility by confessing that he makes mistakes. Even Whitaker, who is more experienced in therapy than Napier, continues to learn and grow. Whitaker’s insistence on continuing to learn and grow is one of the foundational elements of his therapeutic approach, and one that becomes particularly moving when he manages to convince David’s elderly parents that they too still have the potential for Growth Through Initiative, Insight, and Self-Awareness.
Because the family system is itself largely unconscious, change often happens unconsciously and unpredictably. The Brice family frequently surprises Napier and Whitaker with moments of affection, levity, and wisdom. The family’s collective unconscious is what initiates change within the family system, and if this system can intermingle with the system that exists between the co-therapists, it can be extraordinarily powerful. None of this can happen without work, however, and almost everything within therapy comes down to the patient’s decisions in the process.
When the Brice family decides to pause therapy, it is part of a longstanding pattern that Whitaker and Napier have observed, but their reason for returning (when Carolyn strikes Claudia), is completely unexpected. In Napier’s view, an effective therapist will allow these ebbs and flows without resistance, considering them to be part of the family’s unconscious path toward a better life. Napier views the entire course of a life as organized by unconscious drives that can approach the mystical in their apparent prescience. He suggests that Carolyn and David began their relationship with the unconscious knowledge that this marriage “would eventually force them to face their central life fears” (159)—in other words, that it would generate precisely the crisis that has led them to their therapeutic relationship with Whitaker and Napier. Neither could have known that at the time they fell in love, but the “plan” that forms within the unconscious has its own internal logic.
The conflict that occurs between Carolyn and Claudia is, like all other issues within the family, not confined to those two members or to be totally blamed on them. Carolyn is in the process of Growth Through Initiative, Insight, and Self-Awareness, and she asserts that she will no longer tolerate Claudia’s behavior. At the same time, Claudia senses that her mother is finally becoming immovable and actually relents. The result is that the mother and daughter become closer than they were before, despite Carolyn’s poor decision to lash out physically at her daughter. Their body language at the following meeting strongly indicates a change between them, and this change only continues to trend toward a closer bond with time. They sit beside each other and look at one another with fondness. The door is now open for the family to address the real problem: the marriage.
