There are books that change a discipline, and there are books that give it a common language. The book in question managed both – and it is not even particularly thick.

When Monica McGoldrick and Randy Gerson published their work "Genograms: Assessment and Intervention" in 1985, it was less an academic publication than a translation project: they translated the chaos of individual family diagrams into a language that everyone could understand.

For the first time there was a binding standardization that also confronted the uncomfortable questions: how does one draw a divorce? A stillbirth? How does one represent that two people live in the same flat but have not spoken for years? These are questions that family trees had never asked themselves – because family trees are more polite than genograms.

Famous Families in the Genogram

But McGoldrick and Gerson were clever enough not to stop at dry catalogues of symbols. They did something that textbook authors rarely do: they made their book entertaining. By analysing the genograms of famous families – with the result that abstract theory suddenly became as gripping as a good novel.

The Kennedys: three generations full of ambition, tragedy, and astonishingly recurring patterns. The genogram read like a study in what happens when a patriarch screws the pressure so high that he drives his descendants even from the grave.

The Freuds: it lacks a certain irony that the very founder of psychoanalysis had a family genogram that reads like a textbook of his own theory – complete with a complex mother relationship, nested kinship ties, and enough material for several dissertations.

The Brontës: how could a family that experienced such an abundance of loss simultaneously produce three of the most significant writers in English literature? The genogram offered clues – and they were less romantic than the myth would suggest.

The book became the worldwide standard reference, was translated into numerous languages, and went through four editions, the last in 2020 with Sueli Petry as new co-author. What began as a working aid for therapists became the required reading of an entire discipline.

A Tragic Loss

The story has a shadow, and it falls precisely on the one who helped make it possible. Randy Gerson, the co-author and visionary, died of leukemia in 1995, in his early forties. He did not live to see his work become the worldwide standard – one of those ironies one finds so often in genograms, and which hurts no less in one's own life than in someone else's.

Gerson had, however, had one more idea that was decades ahead of its time: he founded a company called GenoWare and developed one of the first computer programs for drawing genograms. While his colleagues were still wrestling with pencil and eraser, he already saw the digital future of genogram work – and on this too, he would only be proved right posthumously.