Systems and Psychoanalysis

Contemporary Integrations in Family Therapy

Carmel Flaskas, David Pocock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367327279
• eBook ISBN: 9780429919701
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book demonstrates how accomplished clinicians can promote the emergence of a richness and creativity that appeals to practitioners of systemic family therapy, not least because of the immediate relevance and usefulness of the ideas. It will be useful to the field of psychotherapy.

Part I
The Unconscious in the System

CHAPTER ONE
Narrative, meaning-making, and the unconscious

Carmel Flaskas

In shaping my contribution to this book, I wanted to tackle some current systemic therapy theory issues. My chapter is, in part, an exploration of the metaphor of narrative, and the liberation and limits of meaning-making through language. It is also about the relationship of conscious and unconscious experience, and the territory that lies between languaged stories on the one hand, and the not-yet-said and the (perhaps) “unsayable” on the other. These topics relate to the process of meaning-making, and the relationship of lived experience to “story”, as well as the relationship of the person who is constructing the story to her or his experience. Although this chapter is primarily about theory and ideas, my interest in it has been carved out in the experience of practice, and it rests on layer upon layer of wondering about the experience of therapeutic change and the process of meaning-making in psychotherapeutic work.

The structure of the discussion is quite simple. I begin by sketching the constellation of language, meaning, and the metaphor of narrative in the current context of family therapy theory. The chapter then moves to explore the complexity of the relationship of language to the realness of lived experience, along with the opportunities for meeting realness in the space between unconscious and conscious experience. Tackling narrative and meaning-making from a different angle, the next part of the theory discussion addresses some broad conditions of transformative narratives, drawing on knowledge relating to coherent attachment narratives, and the ideas of mentalization and reflective functioning. Finally, I offer a rather messy piece of practice with a set of reflections on the resonant themes.

Language, meaning, and the metaphor of narrative

Systemic family therapy emerged historically from a psychotherapy landscape of the early 1960s, predominantly marked by intrapsychic theory and the practices of individual therapy. Its project, from the first, was to frame understandings of individual experience within the context of a person’s most intimate relationships, and to use the leeway of family relationships directly in therapeutic intervention. Over the past forty-five years there have been many different family therapy practice approaches, and a number of twists and turns in theory emphases. Yet, across this time, the enduring parameters of family therapy have been context and relationship.

Having said this, the practice approaches generated within the first two or so decades look quite different to those generated within the last two decades. A reading confined to the internal development of family therapy knowledge tends to yield a competitive narrative about these changes, with the shape of current theories and practices being positioned as meeting the shortcomings and failures of previous approaches. However, I am more interested here in locating the changing emphases of family therapy knowledge within the broader cultural and intellectual milieu. Oddly enough, the continuity of our core interest in context and relationship is less likely to be lost in this broader reading. It also makes it easier to link, rather than divide, the emphases of the different contemporary approaches in family therapy, which in turn makes it easier to draw out core challenges in current theorizing.

The 1980s was a transitional decade in family therapy, for, during this period, bit by bit, we were significantly influenced by a constellation of ideas that orbited around the broader shift to postmodernism. In 1980, the structural and strategic schools were still very much the mainstream approaches in family therapy. Then, the theory was defined by first order systems ideas, and the interactional patterning of behaviour was essentially the main territory of practice focus. By 1990, not only had Milan therapy “arrived” in the English-speaking family therapy world, but it had somehow already managed to become “post-Milan”. This approach became mainstream to systemic psychotherapy in the UK context. It sat alongside the beginning elaboration of “collaborative language systems therapy” (which sits now within the broader umbrella of dialogical therapies¹), as well as the newly named narrative therapy, and the newly renamed solution-focused therapy. (Solution-focused therapy had come from the strategic tradition via a rather short-lived use of the label “brief therapy”.)

Sixteen years later, this grouping of practice approaches— Milan-systemic, narrative, dialogical, and solution-focused—still occupies the main stage of family therapy, albeit with different levels of popularity in different places, and different levels of merging of ideas from the different approaches. In all of this, the earlier biological and cybernetic systems metaphors have become peripheral, while social constructionist and narrative ideas inform the theory arena that now assumes postmodernist parameters. Very significantly, the orientation of practices has shifted from patterns of behaviour to patterns of language and meaning.

Social constructionism occupies a pivotal theory position in this turn to meaning in family therapy. In its generic version, social constructionism theorizes a social world that can come to be known only in the context of our relationship to it. We construct knowledge of the world we live in through language and communication, and there can be no knowledge of the social world outside the language we give to it. In a recursive way, the language that we then give to our experience of the social world in turn influences and constructs the world we live in. This generic version of social constructionism effectively addresses the process by which we make sense of the social world and the power of the process of construction in continually mediating that social world.

Some more specific theories of social constructionism take one step further. Here the idea is that it is not just that our knowledge of the social world is constructed in language, but rather that social realities themselves are constructed, and exist, within the domain of language. The work of social psychologist Kenneth Gergen (1991, 1994) has been heavily influential in family therapy (Flaskas, 2002), popularized especially through the work of Harry Goolishian and Harlene Anderson in their early elaboration of collaborative language systems therapy (see Anderson, 1997; Anderson & Goolishian, 1988, 1992). Gergen’s theory of social constructionism is an example of this second extension, placing it, as Barbara Held notes, at the extreme end of anti-realism (Held, 1995).² In contrast, the generic version of social constructionism occupies a more moderate position, for, while it theorizes the construction of knowledge and its effects, none the less it still allows for the existence of social and emotional realities separate to (and, in this sense, independent of) their languaging.

The metaphor of narrative is linked with the territory of social constructionism. Narrative theory has a life well beyond the social sciences and sits at a strategic crossroad between the humanities and social sciences. One could think of narrative as the languaged pattern of meanings that “tells a story”. In dialogical therapy, for example, the core understanding is that we construct our world in language, through narrative, and in dialogue and relationship with others (Anderson, 1997; Rober, 2005). Although Michael White and colleagues draw on somewhat different theory in elaborating narrative therapy, we still see the closely related idea that people live their lives, and understand themselves and their worlds, through narrative, through the stories they come to have of themselves and others, and through the power of the stories others have about them (see, for example, White, 2000, 2002, 2007). Presentations in therapy are framed as situations in which the stories that people have come to have about themselves and their difficulties prevent change. Therapy, then, is a collaborative conversation, and it provides a venue in which new meanings and stories can emerge that allow something different to happen. These last sentences could easily sit as a common description from the contemporary grouping of practice approaches in family therapy.

Now, there are two quite serious challenges that we bump up against if we stay too strictly within this territory of current theorizing. The first challenge, already foreshadowed in the discussion of social constructionist ideas, is the question of “realness”. There are many arguments to be found in psychotherapy, and beyond, for not accepting the limits of a forced choice between the ideas of reality being either represented or constructed in the meanings we give to it. To move to a position that allows for the possibility that language both represents and constructs is a helpful step, which brings us to the complexities of the relationship of language to the lived experience of realness.

Second, if the metaphor of narrative is used as the sole anchor point for our practice theory, we run the risk of finding ourselves with an impoverished (and, oddly enough, quite depersonalized) description of the process of meaning-making. Meaning-making has at its centre the person who is trying to create meaning, the realness of her or his lived experience, which is the subject of the meaning-making, and the cultural and emotional conditions of that meaning-making. The content of the narrative itself that emerges is just one part of this process.

These two challenges—how to enrich our understandings of the relationship of language to the experience of realness, and of the location and conditions of narrative in the process of meaning-making—become my point of engagement with psychoanalytic ideas.

Language, realness, and the space between conscious and unconscious experience

The historical reluctance of family therapy to theorize unconscious experience lies partly in its early opposition to psychoanalysis, as well as the behavioural focus of its early practice approaches. I think a number of points of reluctance still hold sway. Included here might be the general lack of fit between the relational circularity of systemic thinking and the assumption that psychoanalysis is still committed to a hierarchical and topographical understanding of unconscious experience, a scepticism about the tendency to privilege unconscious experience as in some way “deeper” and “truer” than conscious experience, a practice distaste for the power the analyst assumes to interpret another’s unconscious, and a related suspicion of unadorned practices of interpretation.

There are elements of good challenge in these points of reluctance, and there have been parallel challenges within psychoanalysis in the development of its own theory and practices. Early understandings of the unconscious located it within a hierarchical topography in relation to conscious experience: one could think, for example, of the Freudian schema of id, ego, and superego, or the framing of the main relationship between the conscious and unconscious as being that of repression, so that the content of the unconscious becomes that-which-is-repressed (see Rucker & Lombardi, 1998). However, contemporary understandings now locate the relationship between conscious and unconscious experience very differently. Of course, the cultural shift from modernist to postmodernist parameters was not so selective as to affect only family therapy in the world of psychotherapy. Psychoanalysis has not stood still, and nor have its theory and practices been frozen in time.

Theorizing the unconscious lies at the centre of the psychoanalytic project. Relational understandings began to show themselves most significantly with the work of Melanie Klein, though the strongest momentum builds from post-war in the late 1940s (interestingly enough, around the same time as the development of systems theory). The work of Wilfred Bion (see, for example, 1962, 1967, 1970) provides a watershed in post-Kleinian understandings of the unconscious, moving well beyond any simple understanding of the unconscious as repository of repressed “true” experience. His theory offers understandings of unconscious processes as multilayered, and existing in complex relationship to emotional experience and the capacity to think. Donald Winnicott’s contributions, and the shift from a one-person to a two-person psychology, also show the development of relational understandings (see, for example, 1971, 1989). Meanwhile, more recently, and mainly from North America, there have been the emergence of the intersubjective and relational perspectives in psychoanalysis, which show a location within postmodernist parameters (see, for example, Stolorow, Atwood & Brandchaft, 1994; Mitchell & Aron, 1999).

These sets of psychoanalytic understandings all potentially offer particular ways of thinking about unconscious processes and about the struggle to know and name realities outside our (languaged) conscious knowledge. The need for ways of thinking about experience outside conscious languaged stories is probably greater in the contemporary grouping of family therapy practice approaches. When the focus was primarily on behaviour, it was easier to sidestep the unlanguaged, or at least to work around it. With the focus directly on meaning and story, it becomes more pressing to be able to think about what constitutes (in David Pocock’s words [1995]) a “better story” in terms of therapeutic change, and how we try to grapple with lived experience through languaging meaning.

Far from experience being held solely within the confines of language, I think one would be very hard pressed to ignore the powerfulness of experience outside language, for better or worse. Both the most sublime and the most painful human experiences are only ever just approached in language. The mysteries of birth and death are never really able to be captured in words, and so much of how we experience intimate relationships is only roughly translatable in language. The pain of mortality, the limits of the body, or threats of physical violation or psychic annihilation find us in territories in which we may feel abandoned by words. Thus, there are times when language can barely represent, let alone construct, lived experience. Sometimes, far from constructing lived experience, language fragments or even dismantles that experience; nowhere is this more striking than in the area of trauma and abuse. In short, language can represent, construct, fragment, dismantle, or at times come nowhere near, lived experience.

When one opts to work in psychotherapy, it is a choice to occupationally engage with lived experience. Yet, language and relationship still remain our basic tools in working with the process of meaning-making in therapy. It is true that there are many ways in which languaged understandings develop and expand emotional and relational potential, and that there are many ways in family therapy that we invite the development of meaning. However, one of the powerful challenges available in the process of developing meaning is the challenge of incongruence between unconscious processes and the limits of a current languaged story. If you like, we are often prompted to change our story, not just because it is causing us problems, but because it is not measuring up to our experience.

For example, a father’s desire to parent differently to his own experience of being parented might be challenged by the evidence he notices of the resonance and repetitions of difficulties in his relationship now with his children. A belief that someone might have in the strength of a couple relationship might sit uneasily alongside the experience of nursing a constant anxiety in relation to the other. A woman’s story of her specialness, which serves as a nourishing illusion as a way of surviving childhood sexual abuse, could come tumbling down with the birth of her first child, and then living through a time ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
• SERIES EDITORS' FOREWORD
• ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: THE UNCONSCIOUS IN THE SYSTEM
• PART II: EMOTION AND DEVELOPMENT
• PART III: DIALOGUE AND OTHERNESS
• INDEX