Enmeshment and Merger in the Parent-Child Relationship

Considering how the collusive, fused family or parent-child dynamic maintains a level of integration and functioning for the participants – perhaps even preventing psychic collapse – it will be proposed that the family’s history may help us to understand its reasons for maintaining enmeshment – possibly as a defense against trauma.

Our speakers will incorporate psychoanalytic, attachment, mentalisation, systems theory and trauma theory, as well as Minuchin’s family work, to make sense of the mechanisms of merger, and why such mechanisms sometimes remain active. We will explore how the client can come to let go of the need to participate in this entanglement, and how therapy can engender new capacities for them, and let go of the introjects that maintain the dysfunctional bond. In so doing, we will consider what needs to be mourned and how. As these clients have effectively been colonised by their parents they may evade the risk of being being taken over again; transference and countertransference dynamics need to be carefully worked with to hold healthy boundaries in mind, and we will look at how.