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Fam Proc 16:353-356, 1977

Owning and Disowning: The Structural Dimension

JEFFRY KLUGMAN, M.D.a
aClinical Instructor in Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine.

Stierlin (11) recently examined owning and disowning in the parent-child relationship from a
psychoanalytic-developmental perspective. This paper examines the same phenomena from a structural viewpoint,
deriving implications for the conduct of therapy.
Stierlin (11) has recently discussed the developmental plight of the child who is overowned or underowned by his
parents. The overowned child becomes intensely bound up with his parents, losing ownership and awareness of his
instinctual needs in the process of"id-binding," losing his reality based functioning by "ego-binding," and his potential for
independent self-direction through "superego-binding." The child overowned by his parents then has difficulty owning
himself, and as a result may focus his attention on the effect of his actions on others, instead of the effects of his actions on
himself; self-defeating, or masochistic, behavior may ensue. The parents overown their child in their attempt to disown
unacceptable parts of themselves or in the hope of embodying in their child fantasies they have disowned behaviorally in
their own lives. All family members here manifest a deficit in what Stierlin, following Jacobson (7), calls "the capacity for
self-object differentiation, implying that normally an individual can differentiate the self from objects."
The concept of a breakdown in the capacity for self-object differentiation is a psychoanalytic, intrapsychic embodiment
of boundary blurring. The object-representation and self-representation become confused. This is an analogue of what
Bowen calls "fusion" (1, 2, 3, 4). Fusion is a concept for boundary blurring at the individual's interpersonal boundary. This,
I have shown elsewhere (8), is a manifestation on the individual level of the family system's boundary blurring that
Minuchin and other structuralists call "enmeshment" (9, 10). The behaviors that comprise id-binding, ego-binding and
superego-binding are the same behaviors that characterize the enmeshed, or too richly intraregulated, system (6). The
underowned child, says Stierlin, may become a sociopath (11), a product of a disengaged family system (8, 5). Rigid
individual boundaries develop in family systems with rigid internal boundaries.
There are other repositories for a parent's disowned, split-off parts, than his overowned child, however. One such
repository is a disowned symptomatic behavior, be it a "causeless" depression ("I don't know why I feel like this"), an
hysterical symptom, a phobia, or a compulsion ("It is out of my control"). The unifying feature is that the behavior, along
with its (presumed) underlying, unconscious motivations, is disowned. It is viewed as a sort of foreign body that the patient
wishes treatment to excise. Behavior is overtly disowned.
Another repository for the disowned is a spouse. Here the mechanisms of projection and projective identification are
used, leading to phenomena like intrusiveness, clinging dependency, pathological conflict, unclear communications (i.e.,
assumptions about shared meanings), and pseudo-intimacy. In marital conflict, or other dyadic disownings, behavior is
typically overtly owned but experienced as a reaction to the other. "I'm doing this because of you" or "because you make me
angry" or "for your sake". Thus behavior, and its motivations, is overtly owned but covertly, unconsciously, disowned.
The capacity to recognize and tolerate, or own, ambivalence is an essential for the inner ownership of the self, for
self-object differentiation. Tolerance of ambivalence breaks down through either disowning the negative side of the
ambivalence by projecting, or through getting "bogged down in an obsessive, indecisive, i.e. 'ambivalent' stewing" (11).
Projecting produces a covert disowning, as described above. Ambivalent stewing involves a more subtle disowning. Both
sides are owned overtly, "On the one hand this, on the other hand that." What is not owned is the capacity to resolve
ambivalence, or the capacity to live with it. "I can't make up my mind, I can't live with indecision." This is a disowning of
the active behavior of maintaining the conflict, of the constant balancing and rebalancing of the scales. This is an
unconscious disowning of the motivations that forbid resolutions or tolerance.
The repositories for split-off parts form a sequence. The most distant repository is the behavior of another whom one
influences, e.g., the child used as the repository of the parents' disowned material, the child being overowned. The next
most distant repository is a foreign object, either an overtly disowned behavior as a symptom, an abstraction like a religion
or belief, or a substance or object like alcohol or its containers. Closer is the repository of interpersonal conflict, e.g.,
fighting with one's projected disowned feelings. Closer still is the repository of ambivalence.
Interestingly, therapy often proceeds through this sequence of symptoms and treatments. A child is symptomatic; the
furthest repository is being used. When the child is appropriately treated, often a parental symptom or a marital conflict
appears. The spouse's symptom may be transformed into a couples problem. A couples problem, treated, reveals an
individual's ambivalence. Closer and closer, the disowned parts, the disowned potentials, are pushed toward their true
owners.

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If this sequence of repositories is kept in mind, they may be used as way stations in the reowning of the disowned. A task
may be structured requiring parental cooperation to relieve the symptom of their child. This will open the path to the third
repository of marital conflict if the task is not performed cooperatively. Perhaps the detour to the second repository will be
usedfor example, one spouse may become depressed. Interfering with a couple's projections by means of
communicational techniques that block fusion confronts each with his unresolved ambivalences, his internal contradictions.
Individual therapy techniques help in the journey from the last repository of the disowned, ambivalence, to the "home" of
the self-owning, the feeling of being "embodied," of "having trust in one's physical integrity (i.e., wholeness and intactness),
and of having a cohesive, nuclear ego" (11).

REFERENCES
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.

Anonymous, "Toward the Differentiation of Self in One's Own Family," in J. Framo, (Ed.), Family Interaction,
New York, Springer Publishing Company, 1972.
Bowen, M., "The Use of Family Theory in Clinical Practice," Compr. Psychiat, 7, 345-374, 1966.
Bowen, M., "Family Therapy and Family Group Therapy," in H. I. Kaplan, and B. J. Sadock, (Ed.), Compr. Group
Psychother., Baltimore, Williams and Wilkins, 1971.
Bowen, M., "Principles and Techniques of Multiple Family Therapy," in J. O. Bradt, and C. Moynihan, (Ed.),
Systems Therapy, Washington, D.C., Groome Child Guidance Center, 1971.
Hoffman, L., "Deviation-Amplifying Processes in Natural Groups," in J. Haley, (Ed.), Changing Families, New
York, Grune and Stratton, 1971.
Hoffman, L., "'Enmeshment' and the Too Richly Cross-Joined System," Fam. Proc., 14, 457-468, 1975.
Jacobson, E., The Self and the Object World, New York, International Universities Press, 1964.
Klugman, J., "'Enmeshment' and 'Fusion'", Fam. Proc., 15, 321-323, 1976.
Minuchin, S., Families of the Slums, New York, Basic Books, 1967.
Minuchin, S., Families and Family Therapy, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1974.
Stierlin, H., "The Dynamics of Owning and Disowning: Psychoanalytic and Family Perspectives," Fam. Proc., 15,
277-288, 1976.

COMMENTARY BY STIERLIN
I read Jeffry Klugman's short paper with great interest, the more so since it takes off from my own paper "Owning and
Disowning." There are several points where I feel the author has not correctly grasped the meaning of what I said. To me
they reflect the fact that the paper's strength its shortness and conciseness, sticking to a few essential points is also its
weakness. It gives hardly an inkling of the complexity and dialectical nature of the processes that are under discussion.
First I find the author's phrase "The Structural Dimension" ill-chosen because of the meaning the word structure has in
psychoanalytical theory (e.g., in the "structural" point of view). Why not simply say "Owning and Disowning: One Further
Dimension," or something like it.
Second, when we consider the interpersonal in contrast to the intrapsychic aspects of owning and disowning, we
realize at once that there is no one-way street. However, the helpless child, who is dependent on the stronger parent's
reality, presents here a special situation. His dependency-and hence his availability as a repository for his parents' disowned
aspects- is existentially enforced upon him, whereas it is a different matter between spouses. Between spouses there is often
a quid pro quo, a collusion (Willi) or a contract, something that Lyman Wynne called a "trading of dissociations." If we
keep this complexity in mind, therapy, too, appears in a more complex light than Jeffry Klugman's short paper suggests.
Here I can mention only two elements that I hold to be important in any therapy that helps the clients to own, or re-own
disowned parts. These are, first, the sense of importance and power inherent in being an overowned child and, second, this
child's (often unconscious) wish to take revenge on his exploitative parents. This accounts then for a relational and
therapeutic dialectic whose complexity I have described elsewhere (cf. references in my "Owning and Disowning" paper).
If we consider this complexity, it becomes apparent that Jeffry Klugman's expos of the therapeutic process seems
simplistic.

KLUGMAN REPLIES
I wholeheartedly agree with Dr. Stierlin that this paper does not do justice to the complexity of the therapeutic process. I
also agree with his statements to the effect that the developing child takes a progressively more active role in the shaping
and maintenance of the family interaction system and that this becomes a source of resistance to change, or perhaps what is
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to be changed, as is the spouses' collusive contract. Interpersonal disowning is a cooperative task albeit that a young child's
cooperation is enforced.
I am rather taken by the term "structural," however, and do not want to give it up. "Structural," for me, refers to patterns
and correspondences between patterns. For example, gratification-seeking is a regularity linking many behaviors, and we
postulate something intrapsychic called "id" to correspond to this pattern. Thus, "id" is a structure. My interest in this paper
is structures (patterns or organizations or regularities) and the way that patterns may be seen to be similar even though the
elements that comprise them are different. Along a hierarchy of levels, blurring of intrapsychic structures corresponds to
blurring of interpersonal structures (dyadic relationships and family interactional systems). "Structural" cannot be limited to
the psychoanalytic structures of ego, id, and superego, just as it cannot be limited to the structures of the family interactional
system, as in the work of Minuchin et al. Structures are where you find them.
Reprint requests to Jeffry Klugman, M.D. 400 Prospect Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06511.