| Abstract: | I was independently told about Averil Earnshaw by three different people in the same six month period. Each of them had heard, or heard of, Averil's presentations on the theme of time-linked intergenerational repetitions, and knew of my own interest in repeating patterns in families. Averil very willingly granted me the interview that follows, and in the course of talking with her, I began to realise that Averil's was yet another story of someone who had formulated an original hypothesis based on repeated clinical observation, and had the courage to present it to gatherings of her peers, only to encounter skepticism, lack of interest, or charges of ‘idiosyncrasy’. Despite Averil's best efforts to show that her hypothesis was consistent with the direction of Freud's own thinking, the psychoanalytic movement had greeted it lukewarmly, and it seemed to me that perhaps it might be of more interest to readers of this Journal, since the older and more psychoanalytically-influenced generation of family therapists (e.g. Bowen, 1978; Skynner, 1976) recognised the general principle of repeating patterns across generations, although not the very particular temporal law that Averil has suggested. The Earnshaw hypothesis is simply enough stated: the emotional and intellectual crises of adults’ lives (including onset of mental and physical illnesses, creative break-throughs and creative blocks) are time-linked to major events in the lives of their same-sex parents at the same age. Often, though not always, says Averil, one experiences a crisis when one is the same age as one's same-sex parent was at the time of the birth of one's next sibling, or even when one is the same age as one's parent was at one's own birth. Averil's short bookTime Will Tell (1995) illustrates this hypothesis with some fifty brief case studies based on biographical data from the lives of famous individuals, as well as with a number of cases from her clinical practice, and examples from her own life. Averil herself recognises that her hypothesis needs to be rigorously tested on a wider sample, but to date, those who have criticised it as ‘merely anecdotal’ have not been willing to undertake such a study. |
