Often, entire families adopt a borderline system of interaction, with the family members’ undifferentiated identities alternately merging with and separating from one another. Melanie, the adolescent daughter in one such family, closely identified with her chronically depressed mother, who felt abandoned by her philandering husband. With her husband often away from home and her other children much younger, the mother latched on to her teenage daughter, relating intimate details of the unhappy marriage and invading the teenager’s privacy with intrusive questions about her friends and
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