Bert Hellinger interviewed on Family Constellations, his phenomenological method of doing systemic psychotherapy.
By Humberto del Pozo in Santiago de Chile, September 1999.
(translated from Spanish)

What is the family psyche?

We observe when we work with the family that they are driven by a common principle or force, and I call that a family consciousness. We can observe that a circumscribed number of people are subject to unconscious drives to behave in a certain way. For instance, if in a family one member has been excluded or forgotten, for example a child that dyed early, and is no longer counted among the siblings, then later on in that family, in the next generation only, another member takes up the same fate of that child. This person then wants to die, with nobody knowing why.

And we do a family constellation. That means that in a group, a person collects himself and selects representatives for the members of his family –including one for himself- and places them in a space in relationship to one another, following only his own intuition. And as soon as those people have taken up their places they feel like the people they represent without knowing them. So by means of the Family Constellation,  we get a real picture of what is going on in the family.