Family Myths: Living Our Roles, Betraying Ourselves

Abstract

JOYCE BLOCK, PH.D.: Family Myths: Living Our Roles, Betraying Ourselves. Simon & Schuster, New York, NY, 1994, 288 pp., $22.50. Although many factors affect identity development in children, the relationship between the developing child and his or her parents probably represents the most significant influence during the course of the individual's life span. The main purpose of Family Myths: Living Our Roles, Betraying Ourselves, written by Dr. Block, is to examine how families create roles for children--roles that presumably have the power to shape children's identities and to determine the course of adult development. Drawing on ideas from both psychoanalytic and family systems theories, the author presents her views about the genesis and maintenance of identity and illustrates her views using case material, fairy tales, and ancient myths. The six chapters in this book are grouped into two sections. The first section, Mythological identities and real-life dramas, includes four chapters. Chapter 1, the author explains how families tend to create roles for their individual members and suggests that these roles often become self-fulfilling prophesies over time; the role gradually defines the child's identity as he or she comes to believe in the inevitability of a particular story line associated with the role. Chapter 2, the author asserts that the tendency of families to create roles for their members and to mythologize their lives is universal; the family Brain and the family Comedian, the Wild Child and the Sensitive Plant, the Responsible Daughter and the Prodigal Son are offered as common examples of the characters created by families and used to enact family dramas. Chapter 3, Block describes how parental comparisons of children and their siblings can contribute to, and maintain problems in, identity development by misrepresenting reality and defining unrealistic roles for children that are reenacted in later life. Chapter 4 provides an interesting account of how family myths can exert a powerful influence on an individual's choice of a companion during adulthood. According to the author, many individuals search for a companion who will help to confirm their mythological identity and whose behavior will meet their unfulfilled needs. The second section, In pursuit of the 'Real Self', is composed of two chapters that discuss different ways of overcoming the influence of family roles or mythic identities. …