Culture and Reflexivity in Systemic Psychotherapy

Mutual Perspectives

Inga-Britt Krause

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429912467
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The therapeutic relationship is increasingly becoming a central topic in systemic psychotherapy and cross-cultural thinking. Here, experienced systemic psychotherapists offer their reflections and thoughts on the issues of race, culture, and ethnicity in the therapeutic relationship. The aim is to develop this area of systemic practice, to place culture squarely at the centre of all systemic psychotherapy practice as a model for all psychotherapy practice, to encourage both trainees and experienced systemic psychotherapists to pay attention to race, culture, and ethnicity as central issues in their own and their clients' identities, and to inform researchers who use qualitative research techniques such as ethnography. This book moves the issues of culture, race and equity into the centre of psychotherapeutic practice, including that which involves therapeutic encounters across culture, racial and ethnic divides. It develops an approach to cultural transference and demonstrates that thinking about culture, race and ethnicity does not belong at the margin.

Chapter One
Culture and the reflexive subject in systemic psychotherapy

Any history or genealogy must remain incomplete, because it depends on the starting point of the author and how much context he or she includes. History and genealogy are themselves contingent, and I do not pretend to be able to offer a comprehensive account of the life of reflexivity in systemic psychotherapy. I do offer punctuations, which I hope will give food for thought. Much hinges on what we consider a system to be. Do we consider a system to be like a mechanical or a physical body, or a language structure with attributes, which wholly or partially exists outside the consciousness of the persons who engage in it? Or do we consider a system to be a series of transactions with attributes which are wholly accessible and transparent to those who consciously are engaged or choose to be engaged in it? Or a bit of both? And what are the implications for reflexivity of these two positions?¹

An incomplete history of reflexivity in systemic psychotherapy

A historical account of reflexivity in relation to cultural differences in systemic psychotherapy must begin with Bateson and particularly with his two postscripts (1936 and 1958) to his ethnographic study Naven (Bateson, 1958; Krause, 2007). This starting point also allows us to draw parallels between systemic psychotherapy and anthropology. I think that we want to do so not only because Bateson was an anthropologist, but also because there are similarities in what systemic psychotherapists and ethnographers do. For me this also articulates two feelings of bewilderment. The first relates to my discovery (as an anthropologist) that Bateson’s ethnographic work among the Iatmul people, despite yielding extraordinary insights (Bateson, 1972a; Berger, 1978; Nuckolls, 1996; Strathern, 1988; Wilder-Mott & Weakland, 1981), held no interest for trainers and teachers of systemic psychotherapy during my own training twenty years ago. The second relates to the more recent disappearance of the concept or the idea of a “system” from much teaching and writing in systemic psychotherapy. This is a subversion, because one way or another, and whichever particular school of systemic psychotherapy one follows, the notion of “system” is still a central assumption, theory, or concept in the discipline. It is what distinguishes us from other psychotherapies.

“Schismogenesis” has also virtually disappeared from our vocabulary and our training. It is Bateson’s term and it appeared first as a description of gendered processes of interaction in New Guinean Iatmul society generally and in one Iatmul ritual in particular. In 1936, Bateson described schismogenesis as “a process of differentiation in the norms of individual behaviour resulting from cumulative interaction between individuals” (Bateson, 1958, p.175). I have discussed the details of how Bateson arrived at this description elsewhere (Krause, 2007). Here, I want to reiterate the difference between this early description of schismogenesis and a later one. This later description defined schismogenesis in a new language as

An implicit recognition that the system contains an extra order of complexity due to the combination of learning with the interactions of persons. The schismogenic unit is a two person subsystem. This subsystem contains the potentialities of a cybernetic circuit which might go into progressive change; it cannot therefore be conceptually ignored and must be described in a language of a higher type than any language used to describe individual behaviour. [Bateson, 1958, p. 297]

This second definition moved the description of relational dynamics from a level of synchrony, as a kind of “snapshot” of the relationship between relationships, to one of a short-term process in which change could be captured through the notion of feedback, learning and learning how to learn, and where the explanation of any given behaviour or communication could be explained by the context in which it is taking place (Bateson, 1958, p. 200; Krause, 2007, p. 122). There is, however, another difference between the two ideas of schismogenesis, which speaks more clearly to our present concern with reflexivity. In 1936, and in his ethnographic fieldwork, Bateson had been preoccupied with the thought that how he interpreted his fieldwork data might not be how the Iatmul themselves would interpret it. The question was, how could he be sure that his own interpretation was correct, or even relevant? He concluded that he could not be sure and that, in fact, no one can be sure because the way anyone explains any bit of culture depends on one’s own point of view. This is Whitehead’s idea of the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”, referring to observations being presented as if they are “hard” or objective data, instead of points of view (Whitehead, 1925).

This dilemma did not mean that Bateson gave up on contributing to a framework for the understanding of human nature. He continued to think about his own position vis-à-vis that which he was observing (Bateson, 1972a,b,c,d, 1979; Bateson & Bateson, 1987), but his immediate legacy to systemic or family therapy became the idea of recursiveness as a generic ingredient of human relationships and systems. In systemic psychotherapy, this cybernetic understanding led to a language of meta-orders, meta-systems, and abstractions, rather than an interest in how local details might contribute to this process and be understood as part of it (Dell, cited in Hoffman, 1981, p. 343). The role and influence of the observer–therapist became akin to that of a controller or assessor looking in, interpreting, perturbing, or strategizing from the outside. This was in keeping with Bateson’s observation from 1958 that the categories he used to describe Iatmul society were unequivocally processes of knowing adopted by social scientists. It was also in keeping with the prevailing structural–functionalist approach in British social anthropology at the time, in which societies and social systems were considered to be, if not steam engines, like organisms with patterns and processes, which are not, at least not entirely, transparent to those who participate in them.

However, neither anthropologist nor therapist can work without the acknowledgement of contact with their interlocutors, and in anthropology this tension between theory and practice was most clearly articulated in the ethnographic research method of “participant observation”. In this method, the ethnographer lives with, and learns the language of, people she is studying and takes part in daily tasks and rituals, talks to people about what they are doing, observes activities and communications, takes notes about it all, and keeps a personal diary. The complexity of this method and the similarity with systemic psychotherapy were not lost on therapists (Andersen, 1991; Anderson & Goolishian, 1988; Bertrando, this volume; Hoffman, 1981; Tomm, 1984). At one stage, the Milan team divided their trainees into two groups, the supervision “S” group and the observation “O” group (Hoffman, 1981; Tomm, 1984), articulating and perhaps anticipating the debates and the developments that were to come. The method of participant observation does not, of course, in itself exclude the therapist or the ethnographer considering herself outside the system. Anthropology had matured under colonialism and, therefore, had been under the protection of administrators and tax collectors, who often made use of ethnographic data. Similarly, the therapist’s recognition of a need to “join” a system (Minuchin & Fishman, 1981) is not necessarily coterminous with the therapist understanding what goes on in this system or being able to see the world from her client’s point of view. Indeed, an acknowledgement that the communication patterns in a family affect and even draw in the therapist was considered to be an advantage for the therapist in aiming to beat (or cure) the family at its own game (Selvini Palazzoli, Boscolo, Cecchin, & Prata, 1978; Selvini Palazzoli, Cirillo, Selvini, & Sorrentino, 1989).

The continuum of positions, from being outside the observed system to becoming a member of it, captured the struggles and the dilemmas in the development of, and thinking about, reflexivity during the 1980s and early 1990s. It was realized fairly early that the analogy of the homeostatic steam engine for social systems was unsatisfactory (Dell, 1982; Dell & Goolishian, 1981; Hoffman, 1981) and that if a family system is seen as evolving and only to appear to be stable, then the therapist, whether she is inside or outside the system, will not know the future course of it and, therefore, her task is one of facilitation rather than direction (Tomm, 1984). The three guidelines of hypothesizing, circularity, and neutrality described by the Milan team conveyed this much less directive activity of the therapist (Selvini Palazzoli, Boscolo, Cecchin, & Prata, 1980) and the idea of evolution of social systems also challenged the structural–functionalist notion of a system and a society as a tightly integrated whole. This did not mean, pace Bateson, that aspects or levels of a system could not be recursively related in either coherence or in contradiction, as in double bind theory (Bateson, 1972e), and this recursiveness in the interaction between different parts of the system as experienced by persons in it, continued to be articulated, for example, in the way the Milan team thought about and developed circularity. In this vein, Tomm, embracing Cecchin’s emphasis on curiosity (Cecchin, 1987) used the term “reflexivity” to refer to a type of question:

Reflexive questions are questions asked with the intent to facilitate self-healing in an individual or family by activating the reflexivity among meanings within pre-existing belief systems that enable family members to generate or generalize constructive patterns of cognition and behavior. [Tomm, 1987b, p. 172]

From the client’s point of view, such a question might help to consolidate a new choice by orientating a person towards perceptions held by other persons or in other parts of the system, which might help support this new choice. The perceptions and meanings expressed by individual persons are contingent upon, but are not seen to be determined by, the system. From the point of view of the therapist, a reflexive question is a type of question which can be used along with other types of questions (Tomm, 1988) and although such a question might guide the therapist herself to become more creative and in this way more facilitative, it is considered to be a strategy. The therapist can see things that the clients cannot see, and she knows, if not about what change should look like, about how to ask. She has a choice about which intervention to use, as Tomm extensively described (Tomm, 1987a,b, 1988), but an examination of the circumstances of her own perception and meanings, although of interest (Tomm, 1988, p. 14), was kept at arm’s length. The reflexivity, or recursiveness, can be mobilized by the therapist because it is in the family system.

Cecchin pointed out that “curiosity” was not a technique or a strategy, but an attitude or a position of the therapist: a stance (Cecchin, 1987, p. 411). This notion of “stance” signalled a new departure as far as the therapist was concerned. Both Hoffman and Real used it to convey a less directive and more personal disposition of the therapist (Hoffman, 1985; Real, 1990). Now the cybernetic analogy also became somewhat strained. There was a move to introduce a biological one in order to capture the self-generating properties of systems (Maturana & Verala, 1980), and with an increasing acknowledgement of ideology, beliefs (Pearce & Cronen, 1980), and power differentials between men and women (Goldner, 1988; Goldner, Penn, Sheinberg, & Walker, 1990; McKinnon & Miller, 1987), the discipline settled down to accept systems as social systems (Andersen, 1991; Anderson, 1997; Bertrando, 2007; Krause, 2002) even if there was no clear agreement about what this meant. Anderson and Goolishian considered that systems create and reproduce themselves, perhaps around problems in an ecological type of way, with adaptation and articulation of fit held together by indirect communication rather than by design, planning, or predictability. The therapist was considered to be a member, along with other participants, and participated or facilitated (Real, 1990) rather than controlled (Anderson & Goolishian, 1990; Atkinson & Heath, 1990; Hoffman, 1985). In practice, reflexivity and recursiveness was also redefined:

The new format became known as the reflecting team. We thought of the French meaning of the word, not of the English one, which in our understanding comes close to replication. The French ‘réflexion’, having the same meaning as the Norwegian ‘refleksjon’, means: something heard is taken in and thought about before a response is given.… Our understanding of the beforehand-information about a system would inevitably be within our context. In other words, our own context was the background for the information. Therefore, the hypotheses were at least to some extent close to where we were. And we started to wonder how close we were to those with whom we met. [Andersen, 1991, pp. 12–13]

Here, reflexivity is a process between the therapist and her clients with an acknowledgement of the baggage or “prejudices” (Cecchin, Lane, & Ray, 1994) that the therapist brings to the therapeutic encounter. The therapist was in the system, but this did not ensure that she could access her client’s points of view. The system was now conceptualized as a particular aspect of a meaning generating process. Anderson and Goolishian explicitly distanced themselves from the meaning, which persons acquire as part of their development, learning, and general participation in social patterns, and instead privileged the personal meanings that individuals themselves construct as they engage in these social processes (Anderson & Goolishian, 1988, p. 375). In therapy, as in life, this second aspect of meaning tends to be communicated through language, and accordingly systems, including those in which therapist and clients take part, were, first and foremost, considered to be linguistic systems. Therapy now came to be seen as an open conversational domain (Hoffman, 1985), in which therapist and clients are constructing meaning through language collaboratively. This is social constructionism in systemic psychotherapy. Reality and experience are seen to be socially constructed, but the focus is on the individual and his or her relationship to the wider social context and ideol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS
• SERIES EDITORS’ FOREWORD
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE Culture and the reflexive subject in systemic psychotherapy
• PART I: THE INTERSUBJECTIVE SPACE
• PART II: EXPANDING REFLEXIVITY IN SYSTEMIC PSYCHOTHERAPY
• PART III: THERAPY AS A SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP
• EPILOGUE
• INDEX