Every family, considered as a transactional system, tends to repeat these patterns with a high frequency and consequently gives rise to redundancies. The latter enable the observer to deduce the rules, often secret and generally implicit, governing the functioning of a given family at a given moment and helping to maintain its stability.
If we define the family as a self-governing system based on rules established through a series of trials and errors, then its members become so many elements of a circuit in which no one element can be in unilateral control over the rest. In other words, if the behavior of any one family member exerts an undue influence on the behavior of others, it would be an epistemological error to maintain that his behavior is the cause of theirs; rather must we say that his behavior is the effect of past interaction patterns. The study of this type of family transaction is therefore the study of fixed behavioral responses and of their repercussions.
We have spoken of an epistemological error; the latter results from the arbitrary separation of a given behavioral pattern from the pragmatic context of the preceding patterns with which it forms an infinite series.
When I speak of "epistemology" I am not referring to an esoteric discipline reserved for professional philosophers. Every one of us, by his very being in a world he has to share with others, is bound to take a stand vis-à-vis his particular mode of existence, and hence to adopt a certain epistemology.
Again, when I speak of epistemological errors or bad faith, I am referring explicitly to a common error of modern Western culture (and hence of psychiatry): the idea that there is a "self" capable of transcending the system of relationships of which it forms a part, and hence of being in unilateral control of the system.
It follows that even such behavior patterns as reduce the ostensible victim to impotence are not so much stimuli as responses. In other words both partners in the transaction are mistaken --- the manipulator who believes in his omnipotence no less than his apparently powerless victim.
But if both are mistaken, where does the real power lie? It lies in the rules of the game played in the pragmatic context of the behavioral responses of all the protagonists, none of whom is capable of changing the rules from the inside.