Family Therapy Beyond Postmodernism

Practice Challenges Theory

Carmel Flaskas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134739301
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

Postmodernist ideas are widely used in family therapy. However, it is argued that these ideas have their limits in meeting the richness and complexity of human experience and therapy practice. Family Therapy Beyond Postmodernism examines postmodernism and its expressions in family therapy, raising questions about:
* reality and realness
* the subjective process of truth
* the experience of self.
Alongside identifying the difficulties in any sole reliance on narrative and constructionist ideas, this book advocates the value of selected psychoanalytic ideas for family therapy practice, in particular:
* attachment and the unconscious
* transference, projective identification and understandings of time
* psychoanalytic ideas about thinking and containment in the therapeutic relationship.
Family Therapy Beyond Postmodernism offers a sustained critical discussion of the possibilities and limits of contemporary family therapy knowledge, and develops a place for psychoanalytic ideas in systemic thinking and practice. It will be of great interest to family therapists, psychotherapists and other mental health professionals.

Chapter 1

Connections in Postmodern Times: An Introduction

I want to write about the complexities of postmodernist ideas in systemic family therapy. I came to this theory project via practice concerns, and it was practice which was at the same time continuing to interest me in some ideas from psychoanalysis and the kind of space that may be created for them in the current systemic context. This book has come to be an exploration of the postmodern turn in systemic family therapy which intersects with particular psychoanalytic ideas as a way of extending systemic thinking. Though this last sentence is succinct enough, it does not really give much sense of the connectedness of the topic, and so I will use the first part of the introduction to lay things out more carefully, before moving to a discussion of some embedded commitments of the project, then outlining the structure and chapters of the book.

The Project of the Book

The postmodern turn is both the context and the focus of my enquiry. Postmodernism came belatedly to the systemic field, yet its influence has been dramatic. Some postmodernist ideas initially slipped in the back door in the early 1980s, via second order cybernetics and theories of constructivism drawn from biology (Dell 1985; Efran and Lukens 1985; Keeney and Sprenkle 1982). These ideas were framed in a modernist way— with familiar exhortations that they should become a foundational base for systemic therapy, continuing with systems metaphors drawn from cybernetics and biology. Nonetheless, they introduced the postmodern opposition to the idea of a knowable external reality and moved, through the emphasis on circularity, to contextual and relational understandings. They also debunked the modernist fantasy that the observer is separate from the observed by insisting that the therapist is always part of the therapist-family system, and therefore not able to assume the position of ‘acting on’ or ‘intervening in’ the family system.

However, it was not until the very early 1990s that the explicit interest in postmodernism emerged, and the whole set of postmodern oppositions came to be laid on the table. The rejection of the modernist assumption of objective reality was held alongside the rejection of a singular and external truth, the rejection of the desire for certainty, and any related modernist description of the therapist as observer-expert (Doherty 1991; O’Hara and Anderson 1991; Parry 1991; Sluzki 1992). Taking on board this postmodern critique led to different theory and practice ideas—so we have since seen the flourishing of the narrative metaphor in systemic therapy, the elaboration of collaborative descriptions of the therapist position and the therapeutic process, and the use of social constructionism as a way of understanding the social world and our experience of it. Thus, over the past 15 years, in quite a decisive way, systemic therapy has stepped away from cybernetics and biology toward sociology and social psychology, and to a lesser extent, toward philosophy and literary theory.

There is no question that the postmodern turn has been creative of new theory and practices and liberating with respect to the censorships of the earlier systems metaphors. At the same time, I have experienced an uneasiness about the implications of any full immersion in the constructionist/narrative metaphors which have accompanied the postmodernist turn. The unease arises in practice, and the concerns flow around the questions of what it might mean to suspend any interest in external reality; or in the process of truth; or indeed to find ourselves relying on understandings that largely confine human experience to constructions and language. These kinds of concerns are beginning to surface in the literature (Flaskas 1995, 1997b; Frosh 1995, 1997; Held 1995; Lannamann 1998b; Larner 1994; Pilgrim 2000; Pocock 1995), and I think their timing reflects a sufficient period of development of narrative and constructionist ideas in family therapy to allow a second stage of thinking about the implications of the postmodern turn.

This book, then, is primarily an exploration of this space of knowledge in systemic therapy. It examines the way in which systemic therapy has embraced postmodernism, the influence of narrative and constructionist metaphors, and it maps both the possibilities and the limits of these ideas for therapy. While it is certainly the case that the project has a critical edge, I would deliberately shy off describing it as a critique. ‘Critique’ connotes a judgment made from outside, assuming (and ensuring) a distancing of the author from that which is critiqued. I do not especially want this position of distance, and at any rate I identify too closely with the systemic tradition to make it possible. I hope that this close identification will turn out to be a strength, for it allows an ‘internal’ discussion that assumes the power of alliance rather than the power of opposition. In assuming the power of alliance, I hope to be able to argue for a position of conditionality with respect to the use of postmodernist ideas in therapy, yet retain a passion for using their potentialities.

But if the main frame of the book is an exploration of postmodernism in systemic therapy, it has a secondary support in its intersection with particular psychoanalytic ideas. Of course, historically systemic family therapy has had an oppositional relationship to psychoanalysis, and in the first decades of its development a dichotomy was created between the self and the system, and between individual and family therapy. At a practice level, this dichotomy was perhaps always something of a challenge to sustain, and it showed itself in its most rigorous form at the level of theory and formal professional discourse. However, the recent theory developments have opened the door to reconsidering the territory of self and relationships. For while cybernetic and biological metaphors dominated the earlier knowledge of systemic therapy, the current relational and contextual focus collapses the earlier dichotomies.

The central issue now is not so much whether you have one person or six people as clients in the room with you, or whether you are choosing, in an either/or fashion, to explore individual experience or the family ‘system’. Rather, it is how you are thinking about who is in the room with you, the relational ideas which inform both the position you speak from as a therapist, and how you might be exploring family relationships and human experience. With this emphasis, the dichotomy of self and system simply disappears in relational understandings that move far more directly into the territory of intersubjectivity. Intersubjectivity is about relationships between, and the way in which the experience and construction of personhood and self takes place in (and is sustained by) the context of relationships. Subjectivity is the way in which we come to experience our ‘selves’ in that relational context. It is all part of a territory which is irredeemably social.

Oddly enough, the systemic opposition to psychoanalysis has tended to persist, and every so often psychoanalysis is wheeled out as the outdated modernist frame against which the new postmodernist ideas of (usually) narrative therapies are posed (Pocock 1997). It is odd because, as you would expect, the effects of postmodernist ideas have been felt within psychoanalysis as well, and indeed the interest in narrative and postmodernist ideas within sections of the psychoanalytic world began before the equivalent move in the systemic field (Barratt 1993; Finlay 1989; Morris 1993; Schafer 1983, 1992, 1997; Spence 1982). Beginning in the early 1980s, this interest has continued, though it is true enough that it remains a tendency within psychoanalysis rather than a dominant theory frame. Perhaps more importantly, a reflex opposition to psychoanalytic ideas is odd because it ignores the extent to which intersubjectivity is a shared space of psychoanalysis and systemic thinking. Long before postmodernist ideas made themselves felt, psychoanalytic thinking addressed the relational context of the intrapsychic world, and many ideas—of attachment, psychic representation, transference and projective identification, to name but a few—are at heart radically relational.

But though the reflex opposition continues, there have also been strong signs of a renewal of interest in psychoanalysis, and this is in large part a response to the opportunities provided by the postmodern shift with its clearer emphasis on intersubjectivity and its greater permission for the inclusion of other knowledges. In the English-speaking context of family therapy, the renewal has been most evident in Britain and Australia, and indeed the leading journals in these countries have each recently published special issues on psychoanalytic thinking and its relevance for systemic family therapy.¹ This kind of formal recognition comes in the wake of a number of publications which link psychoanalysis and systemic therapy (Flaskas 1993, 1994; Frosh 1995; Gibney 1991, 1996; Larner 2000; Maloney and Maloney 1996; Pocock 1995, 1997; Quadrio 1986a, 1986b; Smith, Osman and Goding, 1990). As David Pocock (1997) notes, it also reflects a reclaiming of local knowledges—the work which over many years has crossed the systemic/analytic boundary, regardless of fashion.² From Britain, John Byng-Hall’s work on family scripts and on attachment would be an outstanding example of this kind of local knowledge (Byng-Hall 1986, 1988, 1995a, 1995b, 1999).

I am inclined to think that the trend to re-embrace psychoanalytic thinking, though very noticeable in Australia, is stronger in Britain. At a sociological level, this may not be surprising, for the development of British family therapy has been more intertwined with the analytic world (Daniel 1998). It may even be that the gap between the earlier theory censorship versus the continuing practice influence of analytic ideas was greatest in Britain. In a 1997 survey in which British family therapists were asked to nominate the three approaches which most influenced their practice, psychodynamic approaches were second only to Milan-systemic in the frequency of nomination (Bor, Mallandain and Vetere 1998).

However the North American situation has been rather different. Historically, psychoanalytic approaches there have either been pursued quite separately in object relations family therapy (Scharff and Scharff 1991; Slipp 1984, 1988) rather than the systemic arena, or alternatively, versions of specific analytic ideas have become embedded in particular models of family therapy. The intergenerational practice models of Murray Bowen (1978) and Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy (Boszormenyi-Nagy and Krasner 1986; Boszormenyi-Nagy and Spark 1973) spring to mind here, while Mike Nichols (1987) has offered an integrative project of the self and system. The current ‘postmodernist’ renewal showing itself in Britain and Australia, though, is not yet as clear in North America, and the closest equivalent has come via the feminist interest in psychoanalysis being brought into systemic therapy. Virginia Goldner (1985, 1991; Goldner et al. 1990) and Deborah Luepnitz (1988, 1997) have made major contributions in this respect, and both these writers are informed by a strong postmodernist awareness.

But this is an introduction, so let me resist any further discussion here of sociological differences in the development of family therapy and simply pull together at this point the connectedness of the topic and its location. My exploration of the current space of knowledge in systemic therapy and the narrative and constructionist metaphors is part of a broader emerging literature which is appreciative of, yet conditional about, the postmodern turn in therapy. The intersection with psychoanalytic thinking is at the junction of the common interest in intersubjectivity, which has in itself come to be possible in the shift to postmodernist ideas. I will be making strictly strategic choices in examining particular psychoanalytic concepts, and my choice will be guided by the dilemmas which emerge in the discussion of the limits of postmodernist ideas. In this sense, I am not attempting any grand integration of psychoanalysis, but rather looking toward particular psychoanalytic ideas that may speak to some current concerns in the theory and practice of systemic therapy. This layer of my project has its wider location in the renewal of interest in psychoanalytic ideas that has accompanied the shift to a postmodernist awareness.

It will probably come as no great surprise now for me to say that the structure of the book reflects this movement from an exploration of the possibilities and limits of postmodernist ideas to a discussion of particular psychoanalytic ideas. But though we could move on at this point to a preview of the chapter structure and how the discussion will unfold, it is important to pause, for there are two themes which are embedded as commitments of the project. Though not so much part of its content, they shape its form, and will show themselves in the way in which I tackle the discussion. The two themes, which are related, are first a core interest in experience, and second, a conditional approach to knowledge in therapy which looks for description and metaphor rather than foundational theory frameworks.

Embedded Commitments: Experience and Conditional Knowledge

So let me begin to make these commitments visible, for when I say that this is a book about theory fuelled by practice, I am necessarily bringing in a background perspective on the relationship of practice and knowledge in therapy. This perspective has a broader context in the nature of knowledge in practice disciplines, and it is also a response to the specificity of the activity of therapy and human experience which is its subject.

One of the great pleasures of thinking in practice disciplines is exactly the central dynamic of practice and knowledge, in all its richness and messiness. Of course there are moments when we yearn to box it up neatly and somehow try to act as if practice can prove or illustrate theory, as if theory has an exalted and privileged position outside the practice it attempts to describe and inform. Yet though we might keep these fantasies for periods of time, or for particular purposes (like learning or teaching), they fortunately have the tendency to break down in the everyday complexities of therapy. For unlike theorising in ‘pure’ academic disciplines, the knowledge of practice disciplines is in constant if complicated interplay with practice. There are, of course, many ways in which practice may be thought about. However, in theorising therapy practice, one is always holding the experience of the realities of practice alongside the theory ideas. Practice gives the momentum for theorising, theory in turn influences practice, coming full circle to challenge the theory ideas. None of this happens in any neat or unilateral fashion. But if we can allow this messiness, there may be a creative reflexiveness that meets the demands of doing therapy in a more adequate way.

In a rather lunatic moment in the middle of a class one day, I found myself trying to say something about the methodological similarity of theory research and empirical research. Without pushing the similarity too far, one can think of empirical research and the way in which data is brought into tension and interplay with hypotheses and research questions, which in turn provide a response to the questions raised by the data. When one works with ideas in theory research, something of the same thing happens. One set of ideas is always brought into play with another, and questions and ideas are generated in a responsive spiral. In both empirical and theory research, it may well be that the tension and the play between the different sets holds the greatest potential for creativity in the development of knowledge.

The beauty of knowledge in practice disciplines is that there is ready-made tension and a constancy of play between practice and the ideas that one is trying to generate around practice. Practice is always both provoking and challenging theory ideas, and the challenge goes from the sublime to the ridiculous and everywhere in between. I get inspired by ideas of radical constructionism and the primacy of meaning in experience, then walk into a room with a family where domestic violence is a daily event, and the mother’s terror seems something more than a meaning or construction. Or sessions in which any ideas about systemic hypothesising or collaborative practice disappear as I mainly try to work out how on earth we might all get through the session before the 6-year-old tries jumping out of the second floor window to the hospital swimming pool below. Or, as was the practice fashion of the time, finding myself overplaying the tentativeness of an idea I was offering the family, only to have a kind and hopeful 9-year-old boy look me straight in the eye and say: ‘you should just say what the idea is—you never know, it might be a good one’. This is a moment in which I feel touched by his directness, and also realise that I have left him holding the authenticity of the experience of the therapy.

We come then to the theme of experience—the lived experience of clients and the experience of ourselves as therapists. When I was toying with a sentence in the first paragraph of this section (where it says that the subject of therapy is human experience), it suddenly seemed a rather absurd thing to be writing, and I wondered if I should follow it up with ‘and the ocean has a lot of water’! I find that even the word ‘practice’ begins to feel reified in this discussion about the relationship of theory and practice in knowledge for therapy, for it begins to sound like a thing in which one’s own subjectivity as a therapist becomes lost, as does any sense of the real connectedness we have with families and clients we work with. But now I have said the ocean has a lot of water, I may as well continue. Therapy is a human activity—indeed, at times, alarmingly personal—and the stuff of therapy is the lived experience that clients bring, regardless of the framework of therapy we find ourselves working in. To take this back to the relationship of theory and practice in therapy, experience is located at the heart of this relationship, for ‘practice’ stands as a shorthand word for ‘the experience of the practice of therapy’ and therapy as an activity directly engages with human experience.

The commitment to experience embedded in this book, then, reflects a particular perspective about therapy itself as well as a perspective on the theory/practice relationship in therapy knowledge. This commitment becomes linked to a position on conditionality about knowledge, for in privileging experience in this way, the power of knowledge is necessarily decentred. In therapy, knowledge becomes something which is more or less useful in describing, reflecting on, informing, or generating practice. It can only ‘hold’ as long as it relates in a meaningful way to experience. And because we are talking about the complexity of social and emotional experience, and indeed the complexity of the very construction of therapy as a particular cultural and social practice, the idea of a foundational knowledge providing a base for practice rapidly loses its appeal.

The postmodern critique has itself been a major force in dismantling the desir...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Connections in postmodern times: An introduction
• 2. The shape of postmodernism
• 3. Social constructionist ideas and the narrative metaphor
• 4. The question of reality and realness
• 5. Truth as a process
• 6. The narrative self an the limits of language
• 7. Postmodernist limits and intersecting psychoanalytic ideas
• 8. Attachment and the unconscious
• 9. Transference, projective identification and time
• 10. Further thoughts on the therapeutic relationship
• 11. Concluding comments
• Bibliography
• Index