Collaborative Therapy

Relationships And Conversations That Make a Difference

Harlene Anderson, Diane Gehart, Harlene Anderson, Diane Gehart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135926250
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy Counselling
• Index: Psychology

Collaborative Therapy: Relationships and Conversations That Make a Difference provides in-depth accounts of the everyday practice of postmodern collaborative therapy, vibrantly illustrating how dialogic conversation can transform lives, relationships, and entire communities. Pioneers and leading professionals from diverse disciplines, contexts, and cultures describe in detail what they do in their therapy and training practices, including their work with psychosis, incarceration, aging, domestic violence, eating disorders, education, and groups. In addition to the therapeutic applications, the book demonstrates the usefulness of a postmodern collaborative approach to the domains of education, research, and organizations.

PART 1

An Invitation to Collaborative Therapy: Relationships and Conversations That Make a Difference

As our world shrinks, globalization and technology are catalyzing social, cultural, political, and economic transformation. With an associated, ever-increasing spotlight on democracy, social justice, and human rights, the importance of the people's voice, singular or plural, becomes further relevant to how we respond to the unavoidable complexities inherent in these transformations and the effects on our individual and communal lives. The shifting circumstances and increasing complications of contemporary life challenge us to reassess the relevance of the traditions of our social and psychological theories and our practices for social and personal change, including how we conceptualize the people we work with, their problems, and our role with them. This challenge calls for creative yet pragmatic and effective ways to address the ever more multifaceted nature of human experience and to work across a multiplicity of cultures and values. My professional career has been devoted to an evolving philosophy and practice of therapy that has benefit with respect to theses challenges. It is a never-ending journey.

My collaborative approach has evolved over the past three decades, alongside this challenge and the questions that accompany it. My approach is one among others being developed by kindred scholars and scholar practitioners who collectively share an interest in therapy as a relational and dialogic activity (Tom Andersen, Kenneth Gergen, Lynn Hoffman, Lois Holzman, Sheila McNamee, Peggy Penn, Jaakko Seikkula, Lois Shawver and John Shotter). All of us have been largely influenced by the writings of thinkers such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Gregory Bateson, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Lev Vygotsky, and Ludwig Wittgenstein among others. The above authors variously use the terms collaborative, dialogical, open-dialogue, conversational, constructionist, relational, and postmodern when referring to therapy. I dare to say that these authors refer to their respective work more as an “approach” to, or as “assumptions” about, therapy rather than a theory or a model. I also dare to say that none of these therapy perspectives is held above others as a meta- or better approach. Those of us who are proponents of these therapies or what Lynn Hoffman refers to as “the art of withness” (Chapter 5 this volume) have found that these perspectives offer us as practitioners and educators, along with our clients and students, opportunities to broaden and deepen our options, possibilities, and capacities for effective action. Or, as Wittgenstein would say, the ability to go on and, I would add, “as human beings with one another.”

Writing the introductory chapters for this book has been like creating a collage—reviewing snapshots of the highlights of the theoretical and philosophical developments that I encountered along the way to my collaborative approach. I had to decide which ones to select and where to place them. There was always the chance that I might pause too long at one snapshot and bypass a significant one. There is the risk that in putting my words in print, others might take them to be carved in stone. What is important is that this is an endless journey.

Collaborative Therapy: Relationships and Conversations That Make a Difference has three parts. Part 1 has two sections: The first section, Collaborative Therapy Then and Now, provides an overview of the evolution, assumptions, and characteristics of collaborative therapy. It highlights the practical and performative nature, setting the tone for the chapters in parts 2 and 3 that follow. I begin in Chapter 1 with a discussion of postmodern, social construction, and contemporary hermeneutics and discuss how, combined, they influenced the ideas central to my approach: collaborative relationships and dialogical conversations. I also review the influence of the narrative metaphor, the significance of thinking in terms of “person(s)-in-relationship” instead of individual(s), and the notion of self-agency. In Chapter 2, I go back in time and talk about the historical roots of collaborative therapy; in Chapter 3 I expand on the notion of dialogue, highlighting listening, hearing, and speaking and their relevance to dialogue. I then share tips for enhancing dialogue. In Chapter 4 I present the philosophical stance that is the heart and spirit of collaborative therapy and its characteristics. I also discuss the effectiveness of collaborative therapy and address the question “What's next?” Both Chapters 2 and 4 expand on ideas presented in Chapter 1.

In the second section, “Other Voices: Netting and Expressing,” the first four chapters are supplemented by two scholar practitioners and dear colleagues: Lynn Hoffman and Tom Andersen. For decades, each has been at the forefront of the epistemological and practice development and the critical analysis of the “ideological shift” that this book is about. Each is, as am I, occupied with an ever-present inquiry: How can therapy have relevance for people's everyday lives, and what is this relevance? Hoffman, in Chapter 5, continues to earn her reputation as family therapy's historian and soothsayer. She establishes “a train of forebearers” and “distinguished ancestors” through which she sees the field currently and develops her prediction for its future direction. She refers to the community of therapy practices such as the ones described in this book and discusses some of the authors’ works, specifically, as having “an elusive quality” called “withness” that is “represented by those special kinds of conversation . . . that give us our bearings in the matter of social bonds.” In Chapter 6, Andersen's dialogical perspective, as Hoffman suggests, takes the “world of the senses more into account.” He concentrates on the importance of the “not-spoken,” the body movements that accompany the spoken word: they cannot be separated. Andersen's wisdom, compassion, and humbleness has influenced therapists around the world, and notably in the area of social justice.

Collaborative Therapy Then and Now

CHAPTER 1

A Postmodern Umbrella: Language and Knowledge as Relational and Generative, and Inherently Transforming

HARLENE ANDERSON

My introduction to postmodern thinking flowed from my interest in contemporary hermeneutics, dialogue, and social construction. The thread that connects these three perspectives is a similar viewpoint of knowledge and language: a viewpoint that places central importance on the concepts of language and knowledge as relational and dialogical activities that give meaning and understanding for making sense of our lives and navigating our worlds. Combined, hermeneutics, dialogue, and social construction, and postmodern assumptions offer a broad challenge to the culture of the helping professions. They invite us to examine and reimagine the traditions and the practices that we have assumed in this inherited culture. These traditions include the ways that we “understand” a person and attribute meaning to their words and actions, develop descriptions of them that are arrived at from that understanding, relate to them, and our role in the relationship with them.

I begin this chapter with a description of my current postmodern umbrella. I then backtrack and trace my view of social construction and contemporary hermeneutics, and the relationship between them. Lastly, I discuss the ideas of narrative, person-in-relationship, and self-agency.

A Postmodern Umbrella

Postmodern is a term that refers both to the late-20th-century movements in art and architecture, and in contemporary French philosophy. Broadly speaking, I use postmodern to refer to a family of concepts that have developed among scholars within some social science and natural science disciplines that call for an ideological critique—a questioning perspective—of the relevance and consequences of foundational knowledge, metanarratives, and privileged discourses, including their certainty and power for our everyday lives. Specifically, postmodernism challenges these fundamental and legitimizing Truths with a capital “T” and the foundations on which they are generally based. Mainly, it challenges the truth and centrality of individual knowledge, an objective knowable world, and language as the carrier of truth (Gergen, 2001). The truths and the assumptions that flow from them are inherent in our everyday lives, and we often take them with passive acceptance or unwittingly for granted.

Although the postmodern family includes some diverse traits, the notion of knowledge and language as relational and generative is an important and consistent one that runs throughout it. This notion markedly contrasts with the Western tradition of individualism: the individual as an autonomous knower who can create or discover knowledge that can be passed on to others. Knowledge, in this tradition, represents an objective reality that is observer-independent: the knower is separate from that which he or she observes, describes, and explains. It is fixed and tangible. In this tradition, knowledge is conveyed in language and language can correctly represent knowledge. Language represents or mirrors Truth. It is an outward description of an internal process.

Knowledge

Postmodernism takes a quite different perspective of knowledge: knowledge is socially constructed; knowledge and the knower are interdependent; and all knowledge and knowing are embedded within history, context, culture, language, experience, and understanding.¹ Postmodern advocates, therefore, that we entertain truth with a little “t.” Dispensing with the notion of absolute truth and taking a position of plurality does not imply nihilism or solipsism. It simply suggests critical reflection of our truths, keeping all truths open to critique, including postmodernism as well.

Equally important, postmodern favors local knowledge, knowledge developed within a community of people in which they actively engage in its development. Local knowledge might be thought of as participatory knowledge or relational knowing as opposed to objective or observer-independent knowledge. As such, the knowledge will have relevance and utility for its participants. Perhaps another way to think about local knowledge is that it is a dialogical reality. This is particularly pertinent to research. The traditional research emphasis is on the outsider observing and studying the subject, looking for similarities and patterns from which theoretical knowledge is created and which can then be used to describe and know a person or multiple persons as a member of a group or classification. The knowledge, subsequently, is used to support and explain actions such as categorizing and predicting. Such knowledge can be thought of as the privileged, dominant, or authoritative discourse that postmodern holds in question. Postmodern shifts the emphasis to the inside inquirer; focus is centered on learning about the first-person-lived experience and about the uniqueness of it instead of similarities and patterns. Difference is valued.

We can only know the world through our experience; we cannot have direct knowledge of it. We continually interpret our experiences and interpret our interpretations. And, as such, what we create (e.g., knowledge) is fluid, continually evolving, shifting, broadening, and changing. Thus, there is no finality to our knowledge—our meanings, understandings, or realities. What we create, we create with each other. Knowledge is not an individual activity or passive process: knowledge cannot be sent to or received by another.

Language

From a postmodern tradition, language (i.e., any means by which we communicate or express ourselves or respond to others—spoken and unspoken) is the primary vehicle through which we construct and make sense of our world. As philosopher Richard Rorty (1979) suggests, language does not mirror the truth. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953) similarly suggests that language is not an outward description of an internal process and does not describe accurately what actually happens. More exactly, language allows a description and attribution of meaning to what happens. Language gains its meaning and its value through its use: the meaning of a word, for instance, is in its use. We are always in the process of trying to understand and search for meaning. The process and the search itself create meaning. Language in this perspective is the vehicle of the process and search through which we try to understand and create meaning—knowledge about our world and ourselves. Language thus limits and shapes our thoughts and our expressions.

What is created in and through language (e.g., realities such as knowledge, truth, and meaning) is multiauthored among a community of persons. The reality that we attribute to the events, experiences, and people in our lives does not exist within the thing or person; instead, it is socially created within a particular culture and is continually shaped and reshaped in language. What is created, therefore, is only one of multiple and, perhaps, infinite possibilities. Language, therefore, is fluid and creative. Like Gergen, I do not suggest that nothing exists outside linguistic constructions; whatever exists simply exists irrespective of linguistic practices (Gergen, 2001). As indicated in my discussion of social construction, my focus is on the meaning of these existences and the actions they inform, once we begin to describe, explain, and interpret them.

Language, Knowledge, and Words

Both Wittgenstein and the Russian philospher Mikhail Bakhin take a dialogical approach to language and knowledge and to words. Social psychologist John Shotter (2005) refers to Wittgenstein's dialogical approach to language: “… language as primarily rooted in people's embodied, dialogical activities, in their social activities, and not as grounded either in their minds or in the worlds around them” (p. 182). Shotter (2004, 2005) also exemplifies Wittgenstein's perspective on language and words with the following quotes, “Only in the stream of thought and life do words have meaning” (2005, p. 123), “the meaning of a word is its use in the language” (2004, p. iii), and “let the use of words teach you their meaning (2005, p. 6). Bakhtin's (1981) view of words is similar, “The word is born in dialogue as a living rejoinder within it; the word is shaped in dialogic interaction with an alien word that is already in the object. A word forms a concept of its own object in a dialogic way” (p. 279). In these views, words are not the things nor do they represent the objects of which they refer. We are always struggling with each other to understand the words we use, their meanings. We are always foreigners trying to learn the native's local language.

Transformation

By transformation, I refer to the continual newness in our lives such as knowledge, expertise, meaning, identity, and futures that is inherent in the inventive and creative aspects of language. I prefer the word “transformation” or “transforming” instead of the word “change.” “Change” in the psychotherapy field often has the connotation of lineal or circular causality; in other words, one person changing another or a person changing from one thing to another. In the view of knowledge and language discussed above, causality regarding human thought and action is not possible: One person cannot unilaterally determine another's response, perception, interpretation, or behavior. Information does not objectively exist; it is an observer punctuation. Each person uniquely interprets and responds to what appears to be information. Information, like an observer, cannot influence a system in a predetermined way. This view of causality fits with Gregory Bateson's (1972) idea that change is an epistemological error and Humburto Maturana's (1978) idea that instructive interaction is impossible. A therapist, therefore, is not a causal agent or an agent of change. Whether we think of it as changing or transforming, it is something t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• About the Editors
• Contributors
• Table of Contents
• PREFACE: HARLENE ANDERSON AND DIANE GEHART
• Part 1 An Invitation to Collaborative Therapy: Relationships and Conversations That Make a Difference
• Part 2 The Therapy Room
• Part 3 Beyond the Therapy Room
• Subject Index
• Author Index