“It's hard to be the child of a fish and a butterfly”: Creative genograms: Bridging objective and subjective experiences

This paper describes the use of a creative genogram that combines the client's objective and subjective phenomenological experience of his family constellation. The creative genogram includes personal symbols, colors, and shapes, as well as varying the overall page designs and formats of the basic family genogram. Taken together, the objective and subjective attributes of the genograms create a group narrative of the impact of culturally embedded identities on shared familial experiences. The creative genogram technique integrates a contextualized or “objective” experience of reality with a hermeneutic or “subjective” understanding of that experience. Thus, this interdisciplinary approach helps to counteract the flooding of difficult external realities within social work and family therapy, as well as the exclusive focus on subjective reactions within dynamic and art therapy that ignores the social context. The paper describes how creative genograms were applied through personal examples derived from a group of social work students.