Holes in roles: Article and short video by Al Passo

Holes in Roles

“Holes In Roles”

An excerpt from a video of a public lecture by Al Pesso sponsored by the Psychology Department at the University of Osnabruck (2006)   


Holes In Roles Theory

by Al Pesso, PBSP Co-Founder 

My work with individuals, couples and families over four decades leads me to the notion that human infants enter the world genetically supplied with an innate template (model) that prepares them to automatically (instinctively) recognize and appropriately (intuitively) respond to the various, familial, kinship figures they will encounter as they grow up. Further, as well as having an innate tendency to “see and react to” those kinship roles, they also seem to have the innate, rudimentary potentiality to “take on” and “act the part of” each and every one of those kinship roles as situations seem to require in the family settings they grow up in.

In other words, infants arrive with an in-built knowledge of, and preparedness to meet, all the different familial and relational roles such as mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts, uncles, siblings, mates, and peer figures. Also, they have within themselves – albeit in rudimentary form, regardless of their sexual gender – an innate capacity to act as (take on the functions of) mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, etc. One could call those innate categories of capacities “stem selves” which could be cultivated by external circumstances to reproduce, or “take on” every single kind of role function seemingly called upon by the outside world…..

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