Format chosen : Miscellaneous : short biographical note about a psychologist or researcher in psychology we admire (or find challenging)
If there are pioneers in psychology, Anne-Ancelin Schützenberger is undoubtedly one of them. Psychologist, psychotherapist, group analyst, psychodrama specialist and professor at the University of Nice, she is credited with the invention and introduction of transgenerational psychogenealogy into current therapeutic practice.
According to transgenerational psychogenealogy, people are influenced by what has happened … in the lives of their ancestors. It was while working with people suffering from cancer that Anne-Ancelin Schützenberger discovered the phenomenon of repetition in their family history. It was during an interview with a young Swedish woman of 34, suffering from cancer, that she had the intuition that the disease played a part in an unconscious identification of the daughter with her mother. Indeed, the mother of this young woman had herself died of cancer… at the age of 34. This is what she called the birthday syndrome, i.e. “a buried trauma, in the family, which can govern our lives in such a way that everything works together to make the event happen”. The objective of therapy is then to “track down the invisible loyalties that force us to pay the debts of our ancestors” and aims at completing the unfinished tasks of the past. To do this, she invented tools such as the genosociogram, a sort of family tree, listing all the significant events in a family that have caused shame or pain (accidents, theft, burglary, prison, bankruptcy, sexual abuse, murder…) over at least five generations. It allows the person to identify the family knots. Anne-Ancelin Schützenberger’s book “Aie mes aïeux”, which explains the principles of psychogenealogical transgenerational therapy, has since become a best-seller. However, in the face of the craze for psychogenealogy, she declared, “it is put to all uses and we are wrong!”
These fundamental discoveries have their origins in her earlier work on groups and their dynamics, which is less known but just as promising. In particular, she met the psychiatrist Jakob Levy Moreno in the United States, who was working on the exploration of psychic life through theatrical processes (the future psychodrama). She developed her own trademark in the 1950s with the triadic pyschodrama, a mixture of social psychology, psychodrama and psychoanalysis, which is considered a sort of predecessor of family therapy.
Those who knew her, evoke the exceptional personality of Anne-Ancelin Schützenberger, her incredible energy but also her intransigence. Born in 1919 in Moscow, she grew up in Paris. When she was 20 years old the Second World War broke out she joined a resistance network. She wanted to be a psychiatrist but gave up on this wish because of her mother who was convinced that all psychiatrists would end up going crazy. She enrolled in the first academic program of psychology that ever existed, after studying optical engineering (an exception for a young girl at the time).
She was successively Moreno’s trainee in the United States, the founder of the French Sociometry Group, a doctoral student (late in life) on non-verbal communication in groups, and the author of numerous books for the general public (“Précis de psychodrame”, “Ces enfants malades de leurs parents”, “Le Plaisir de vivre », etc.)… his academic and field experience remains unique. As a psychotherapist, Anne-Ancelin Schützenberger never stopped practicing and kept on leading numerous groups in France and abroad and gave lectures about transgenerational psychogenealogy in Australia, Argentina, Sweden and Portugal. To a journalist from Psychology magazine, who asked her in 2009 why it was important at her age (she was 90 years old at the time) to continue to eduacte and consult, she answered “your question is curious! Why do you want me to bury myself when I am not yet dead? Anne-Ancelin Schützenberger passed away in 2018 shortly before … her 99th birthday.
Bibliography:
- « En souvenir d’Anne-Ancelin Schützenberger, Michel Laxenaire dans la revue de psychothérapie psychanalytique de groupe 2019/2 (n° 73), pages 7 à 11
- « Aïe, mes aïeux ! Liens transgénérationnels, secrets de famille, syndrome d’anniversaire, transmission des traumatismes et pratique du génosociogramme », Desclée de Brouwer, Paris, 1988.
- Entretien avec Anne-Ancelin Schützenberger, Anne-Laure Gannac dans le Hors-série n°55 de Psychologie Magazine, 2009