Family Constellations

[2] Family Constellations diverges significantly from conventional forms of cognitive, behaviour and psychodynamic psychotherapy.

The method has been described by physicists as an example of quantum mysticism, and its founder Bert Hellinger incorporated the existing pseudoscientific concept of morphic resonance into his explanation of it.

[1][3][4] Practitioners claim that present-day problems and difficulties may be influenced by traumas suffered in previous generations of the family, even if those affected are unaware of the original event.

Hellinger referred to the relation between present and past problems that are not caused by direct personal experience as systemic entanglements, said to occur when unresolved trauma has afflicted a family through an event such as murder, suicide, death of a mother in childbirth, early death of a parent or sibling, war, natural disaster, emigration, or abuse.

Małgorzata Talarczyk of The Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Clinic, Poznań University of Medical Sciences in Poland has criticized the family constellation method as not meeting many of aspects of the Polish Code of Ethics for Psychiatrists.