Understanding and Defining Family Myth as a Discourse

Relevance. The proposed theoretical study will, first, clarify the understanding of the phenomenon of the family myth in the context of postmodern development of psychological scientific knowledge. Secondly, it is connected with a demand for psychotechnical renewal of psychological practice focused on constructive interaction of a person in a family, realization of his values, his preferred identity in the conditions of modern realities. The peculiarity of this practice consists in acceptance and understanding of the person’s history without concretization and amplification of the helpless, painful and pathological aspects of this history. Methods. Theoretical analysis of scientific sources, comparative analysis, generalization. Objective. To substantiate the possibility of considering the phenomenon of family myth as a discourse. Conclusions. Presented a new interpretation of the phenomenon of family myth in the context of the narrative approach in psychology. Family myth is defined as a discourse that is reproduced in family communication in the form of beliefs without obvious authorship, excluding their critical reflection, taking control over the behavior of family members in order to maintain the family system homeostasis and meet the criteria of family identification. The proposed variant of interpretation of family myth as a discourse opens up possibilities of psychological work with it in the format of deconstructive listening practice, which is understood as a special type of listening where any life story is seen as an actively constructed story, questioning the immutability of any life narrative. By moving through the mythological construction through a detached (critical) position, thanks to other sign-symbolic constructions, one has one’s own text (narrative) as the preferred story of one’s life.

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