The present study is a result of a n interdisciplinary team's work, where a physicist, a family therapist and a developmental psychologist try to share their knowledge and epistemologies. I n this kind of conflictual companionship, models of one discipline are tentatively applied to another This doesn't imply that the different disciplines are isomorphic, but it provides for unusual frames of reference: questions, possibly essential ones, are reformulated in a new language, or in a perspective which was not accessible within the conceptual framework developed for one particular discipline. Our experience is that this kind of effort, in itself a provocative learning experience, is also conducive to original tentative answers i n all disciplines involved. Be they of theoretical or experimental nature, it is then up to the specialists of these disciplines to validate the evolved propositions in terms of their own categories.The notion of symptom* as dual norm behavior is not new. Many researchers, amongst them Bateson, Haley, and Watzlawick, have been intrigued by the paradoxical nature of symptoms. Recent models have lead to a structurally oriented view of the family, where interactive patterns are analyzed in terms of a rule hierarchy . One can thus consider the symptom as an attempt to obey simultaneously two incompatible rules of different logical level; this representation accounts for the russelien paradoxical quality of symptoms.
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