"The Sisters" has long been conceived of as an introductory story to Dubliners, which carries the paralysis leitmotif to incorporate the entire fifteen stories of the book. Joycean critics tend to readily connect Father Flynn`s paralysis as a polymorphous concept to Joycean notion of "the moral history" by associations of a sexual disease and consequent readings of "The Sisters" as well as Dubliners as Joyce`s moral opprobrium. Departing from instant evocations of syphilis by the priest`s paralysis, which have dominated Joycean criticism during the last decades, my reading of "The Sisters" shifts a focus from a moral judgment on the priest`s paralysis to the Dublin mindset, which is based upon the Irish ethos of familial relationship coercing extremely emotional togetherness that causes him to be extremely nervous. Father Flynn`s paralysis is psychogenic, i.e. a sort of psychosomatic disease.the body`s response to mental stress. His mental stress comes from the Flynn family`s dysfunctional interactions. In short, the pathogenesis of Father Flynn`s paralysis is a series of negative feedbacks taking place in his family. The priest`s severe nervousness engendering his religious scrupulosity is both caused and causative: his anxiety is precipitated by his siblings` frequent treatment of him as mentally abnormal and, at the same time, their brother`s unusual behavior causes them to be more anxious about their brother`s hypersensitive personality, which in turn makes him more intolerable to their perceptions as such. The family systems view of Father Flynn`s psychosomatic disease is a divergence from a psychoanalytical view of his psychogenic symptom. The Freudian psychoanalysis focuses on the individual by analyzing his inner psychic struggles, whereas the family systems model postulates that enmeshed family structure contributes to the development and maintenance of psychosomatic symptoms. In "The Sisters," the priest`s physical immobility is attributed to family anxiety involving all the family members in a stressful situation.