David Reiss (psychiatrist)


David Reiss is a psychiatrist and researcher. He is a clinical professor at the Yale Child Study Center. His most notable contribution to the field came in 1981, when he published his book, The Family's Construction of Reality.

Family construing

The term "family paradigm" is used by the author to define a set of shared beliefs and views that every family has, even though they are mainly present at a subliminal level. His research started off as a way to investigate whether some aspects of family life had influences over the development of schizophrenia in the offspring of the family. Three different types of families were participants in numerous experiments: families without any psychopathological diagnosis, families with offspring who had character disorders, and families with offspring that had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Preliminary studies showed that families, when given tasks that dealt with gathering, interpreting and communicating information, differed from one another in ways that could be interpreted as an extension of George Kelly's concept of personal construct, thus becoming shared constructs. Reiss states that shared construing always happens, and follows very specific interaction patterns that the family has carefully but subconsciously created throughout its life. The types of constructs the family forms are directly derived from the interaction of three polar variables:
  • Configuration ;
  • Coordination ;
  • Closure.
By crossing these variables we could possibly obtain eight different types of families, but the authors investigate only four possible configurations, thus dividing families on the basis of their shared construing of the laboratory experience:
  • Environment-sensitive families
  • Consensus-sensitive families
  • Distance-sensitive families
  • Achievement-sensitive families.

Family paradigm and crisis

According to Reiss, the family has underlying patterns imbued in itself, which shape these family constructs; the author calls these patterns "family paradigms". They are built through family crisis; when a family enters a state of dissonance that threatens to destroy it, some parts of its paradigm become obsolete, while others rise to help the family get out of the crisis; those parts of the construct that survive the crisis become so relevant and strongly embedded in the life of the family, that they become organizers of the life of the family from that point on, up to the next crisis. Family paradigms differ, much like constructs, on three dimensions:
The paradigm, then, is the kernel of each family's shared construing of every social situation, and it serves as an organizer of every aspect of its life, even though it operates mostly at a subliminal level. It is preserved, even over long periods of time, by means of two kinds of processes: ceremonials, and pattern regulators. Thus, through the routinization of time and space, the family paradigm is constantly reasserted, and thus kept alive.

Cycle hypothesis

The process that goes through the crisis, undermines the old paradigm and shapes a new one, which in turn will allow the family a new set of shared constructs, is circular. Shared constructs, in fact, will shape interaction patterns with each family's social environment, thus creating the basis for new links with specific environments, which will again modify the shared constructs the family has built.