Contenu du sommaire : Secrets, secrets...

Secrets are seen as an attempt to protect as well as a pattern that can produce damage and suffering. Since they appear only in relational context, their relational nature is explored and discussed. Their importance and weight in family relationships is examined, with the goal of understanding when and how they can be harmful. In this sense a central role is played by the prominence attached to the secret by the family members. Other factors, like the reduction of areas of behaviour external to the secret, or the relationship based on the secret contribute to a correct evaluation of the harmful effect of the secret. Based on these factors a classification of secrets is proposed.

Family secrets generate an ego splitting for people who keep them and a kind of crypt with a ghost for their descendant, as a silence, a genealogical unthinking with various trauma related to invisible family loyalties and to the anniversary syndrome. We make the distinction between the trauma as a knock in the reality, and the « traumatism » as a knock in the reality's representation of traumatized people and especially their children. The holes and emptiness generated by parent's problems can be resolved trough psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and psychodrama.

After a description of family secrets emphasizing their basic aspects, such as the unsaid, the prohibition of knowledge, and the suffering of the secret's initiator, the author discusses the transgenerational dimension of family secrets and the impact of the « rule of the secret » on successive generations. He ends by giving some guidelines to help avoiding the creation or maintainance of family secrets.

The author summarizes a one-day workshop on family secrets give by Evan Imber-Black. She presents and discusses various levels involved in secrets and gives a comment on the major ideas presented by the American therapist

If some secrets are imposed or prescribed by an adult to a child in sexual abuse's cases, others are imposed itself when a person, dreading others looks, fears that everybody could know the truth on his own life. Generating shame, their disclosures will be experienced as a humiliation. The author proposes to approach this link between secret and humiliation, and other aspects to which the therapist has to pay attention to avoid that secret's revelation becomes a threat but on the contrary, to help it to represent a constructive step for the relation between the secret owner and « the rest of the world ».

This article examines the consequences for the individual of being forced to promise to keep a secret which will dominate every aspect of her life. Even more, there is how that can influence the therapist's work where his efforts to help the patient risks reproducing the same dynamics as existed between the patient and her parents, that is her abusers.

The collection of the testimony of a presumed sexually abused child requires a great rigour on behalf the psycho-legal expert. Indeed, its statement can have significant consequences on the legal, psychological, relational and economic levels for the child, the presumed offender and the whole family. Beyond the subjective version of the subject, it is the historical truth that has to emerge. Taking to account the methodological requirements of the investigation approach, the authors of this article highlight the compatibility between this rigour which is essential to the credibility of the expertise and the taking into account of the child needs. This child has been treated as an « fetish » object, source of pleasure and excitation for an adult, therefore it is appropriate as soon as the moment of receiving his word to restore a status of subject to him and not treating him like an « object of an expertise ».

All families have skeletons in their cupboards. Therefore it isn't the existence of the secret that counts but the function it has in the family, group or individual economy. It is when the feelings linked to loss, real or symbolic, can not be expressed, or worse, can not be felt, that the feelings themselves become the sinister and unconfessable secret and distorted transmission processes begin functionning. Of course, it is the intersubjective dimension of the « unspoken feelings » that we deal with in clinical work with families.

The author describes here some major ideas about secrets that he will present at a forthcoming Conference on Secrets. Using as an illustration the French movie “Les quatre cents coups” of François Truffaut, he emphasizes the frequency of the reproduction of secrets trough three generations and insists on the function of a secret in the protection of human system's rules as a tool to be used in therapeutic interventions.

If family secrets can be carried trough many generations, first with distortion, then with oversight covered by a heavy silence, secrets can also be created around a recent event that imprisons its various actors. The secret's strength rests first on the interdiction to disclose its existence, more than on the interdiction to reveal its contend. The author presents a clinical illustration of an approach allowing to free a patient (and her family) from the weight of a secret without having to reveal it.

Sometimes, family history and also parents history has been touched by painful events that could not be elaborated. These events became unsaid topics for parents and secrets for children. Family secrets work as a family protection mechanism that protect family from pain and shame linked to past events. When an adolescent seeking for is own identity touches one of these sensitive points, he first tries to avoid it. But when it's impossible for him to avoid facing these parts of family history, bound by the prohibition to know and the impossibility not to be aware, the adolescent may develop loudly delusional symptoms as an attempt to resolve this conflict.

The author presents a clinical situation in which the secret dimension of relations is transmitted from one generation to the other by a relational triadic configuration's control on communication as the interdiction of expressing what cannot be said. This interdiction is further reinforced by an alienation of truth perception's.

At the beginning, family therapy was looking for its own model in nature sciences which approach does not address particularly to human beings. This article proposes to found a new model taking in account its specificities: to be politic human beings only able to experience relation between then.