About a loss of importance of the function of the family rites and its consequences in the irrepresentability of the divorce: identity crisis and palliative therapy

About a loss of importance of the function of the family rites and its consequences in the irrepresentability of the divorce: identity crisis and palliative therapy. - Among the numerous changes which the notion of family has known over time, we are interested here in the normalization/acceptability of the divorce (or separation). We postulate that, in a context where these modifications are less and less ritualized and thus, less and less representable, the family (whose achronic character we shall differentiate from the diachronic) has no access to a social representability/acceptability of its separations. According to us, the family suffers then from an identity crisis of which the child, sometimes on top of his individual sufferings, can be the symptom. Then it remains for the therapists to make up for this lack of representability of separations, while remaining lucid about the limits of their interventions.