Irreverence

A Strategy for Therapists' Survival

Gianfranco Cecchin, Gerry Lane, Wendel A. Ray, Gianfranco Cecchin, Gerry Lane, Wendel A. Ray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429915253
• Subtopic: Education in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Irreverence: A Strategy for Therapists' Survival marks the end result of a collaboration between three creative and highly respected therapists and writers in the family therapy field. It continues the tradition of the Milan group and later systemic thinkers by examining the way a therapist's own thinking can block the process of therapy and lead to feeling stuck. The authors define and demonstrate the use of a concept in the therapeutic field - irreverence - which allows therapists to free themselves from the limitations of their own theoretical schools of thought and the familiar hypotheses they apply to their client families. They illustrate their ideas with some very challenging family therapy cases and include an interesting consultation with the staff caring for a hospitalised patient. The book also extends the notion of irreverence beyond therapy to the fields of training and research where its application is both fresh and profound.

Chapter One
The idea of irreverence

Some people are survivors, and others are annihilated by life's tragedies, and that is just one of the cruelties of living.

Woody Allen

This book is an attempt to describe our strategies for survival in the rough sea of family therapy. When you venture into these choppy waters, you are bound to meet many dangers, whether you are a beginner or an expert.

As a beginner, the first problem you meet is to decide which school to follow. Very soon you could be told that the school you have chosen is part of your personal problems. Then, when you begin to work in an institution, such as a psychiatric hospital, you are told that, "Everything you learned in family therapy training does not fit here". Searching for a life-line you go to conferences where you meet gurus who convince you that they have found the only right way to do therapy. When you try to interview a couple or a family you either end up looking like someone who has been brainwashed by the prevailing patriarchal culture, or make others uneasy by your politically correct feminist leanings.

The most common double-bind you find yourself in is when a supervisor or teacher tells you that everything you are doing is wrong, too mechanical; it should be more spontaneously creative (i.e. just like me). When you try to just talk to a family, the supervisor accuses you of being too conversational and not taking responsibility for change. If your behaviour is more directive and solution-oriented, you are accused of becoming a dictator or colonizer (Jackson, 1963) who does not respect the family story enough.

To make things more complicated, there are still some people who believe family therapy should become a hard science. And what could be harder? As a therapist who is only doing his best to help clients, you are told that your lack of success is due to not having read enough research on family process. Usually you are told something of that sort when your are in the middle of trying hard to help a client solve a problem, and the last thing you need to hear is this type of advice, which implies there is something wrong with you for not being able to handle the family's problem on your own. Then they give you some sage advice, like, "Why don't you make a genogram of your own family to find out what is preventing you from being successful" (like me!).

As an expert therapist, in contrast, you are compelled to repeat yourself, and, often you become addicted to your model. If you are a teacher or a supervisor, your colleagues and students may reinforce this tendency to become stuck, unable to consider other ways of seeing the world. The people you teach or supervise feed off and feed your certainty. When you feel you have created some grand scheme for solving human suffering, you come into contact with other professionals who are equally certain of the correctness of their views. You are shocked to discover that they have no faith in your vision and even belittle what they see as your naive position.

If you dare to push your ideas beyond the safe boundaries of the family therapy enclave, you may be astounded by how little importance family therapy dogma has in the larger socio-political world (courts, social welfare institutions, traditional psychiatry, etc.). For many years, for example, some of the most prestigious and influential leaders in the field of family therapy have attempted to implement well-thought-out systemic models in reforming the foster care programs in major cities around the world. Upon encountering the well-organized structure of such enormous bureaucracies, they have repeatedly discovered the limits of their prestige and ability to influence. Most of the time, the directors of these social welfare programs tell a would-be reformer that his ideas were theoretically interesting, especially to the workers at the direct service level. Unfortunately, however, the would-be reformers remain mystified as to why their ideas and techniques, which have proved very useful in working with an individual or with families, are not acceptable within such a well-established and multifaceted system as a large city welfare organization.

When, as an expert, you venture into publishing an important book or paper, some colleagues become loyal to your ideas and then insist that you stick with those original insights. Any move away from what people expect from you will be resented, or even denied. One frequently hears humorous stories about the profound meaning some people attached to any act of Milton Erickson during the last years of his life. If he fell asleep, it could be interpreted as a paradoxical signal for the person in his presence to relax (whereas it could simply have been that he was sleepy). The danger of becoming labelled as knowing a "truth" restricts both the "expert" and those who would learn from "experts". One of the authors, stuck with the reputation of being a paradoxical therapist, once forgot his role and, upon meeting a family, simply asked, "How are you?" One beginning student who was observing immediately turned to another and commented, "Where's the beef?"

In contrast to the trap where leaders are expected to maintain a stagnant position of "truth", Murray Bowen seemed to us to have been caught in an opposite position. Being one of the most important and influential seminal thinkers in the field, he spent a great deal of his energy trying to convince others of the scientific truth of his ideas, often showing frustration and irritation towards people who seemed unable or unwilling to understand his model. Not even the presence of a group of loyal followers seemed to diminish his annoyance at being misunderstood.

How then, as experts, can we survive between this Scylla and Charybdis of having people believe you so much that you become trapped, or of you believing so much in your own ideas that you spend all your time trying to guard the faith of your followers? Conversely, as beginners, how can you survive between the temptation to be a loyal student or becoming hopelessly eclectic? Perhaps one answer is to keep attending workshops and conferences, which seems to us to be necessary to sustain the illusion of the importance of family therapy in the world at large.

We, in some way, would like to recuperate the strengths of the family therapy movement, which has remained on the fringe of the culture and of the mental health field. The advantageous position of being on the fringe is a result of the near blasphemy of the originators of the family therapy field, who harshly challenged the prevailing psychiatric dogmas from the 1950s onward. Ironically, in our introducing the idea of irreverence in this book we consider ourselves to be quite conservative in our desire to recover this sense of intellectual freedom and integrity handed down to us by the originators of the field.

How did we arrive at the position of irreverence as an organizing principle for our survival? For many years each of us was plagued by doubts when we were learning, teaching therapy, sitting with a family, discussing with colleagues, and so forth. We were at war against our doubts, and we always felt we were losing because after brief victories these doubts would creep in again. This experience was demoralizing, as long as we considered it a handicap. Our belief at that time was that a responsible therapist should know and believe in what he is doing, without spending half his time brooding over it. Fortunately, after many years of frustration, we got fed up with it.

As is often the case for us when we reach such a demoralized state, we find the stories of Gregory Bateson to be helpful. In the 1960s Bateson was living in Hawaii, where he was involved in research on the communicative behaviour of porpoises. He worked with a group of young researchers who were also interested in studying the behaviour of dolphins, but who had very little money to support the research. So, they set up a program: they would train dolphins to do tricks and invite a public audience to pay a small admission fee to watch the dolphins perform. Being highly ethical, the group refused to show the porpoises repeating the same tricks over and over, because the idea was to allow the audience to watch the trainer teach them new tricks.

The story goes that one day they were working with a new dolphin. The trainer held a fish up, the dolphin jumped, and a fish was given. Later in the day the next audience came, the dolphin came around and performed the same trick, and, of course, the trainer did not reward him with a fish, because the idea was to perform a new trick. Eventually, after repeated failures to attain a fish because he kept repeating the same behaviour, the dolphin performed a new trick, a back-flip, and a fish was given to reward the new behaviour. Unfortunately, when the porpoise repeated the behaviour, it was not rewarded, even though the new trick was repeated several times. Right before the sixth performance, the trainers looked over at the holding tank and noticed that this dolphin was making an incredible amount of noise and splashing: the porpoise had performed six new tricks that had never before been recorded. Bateson's description of the situation was that through this long, frustrating process of repeating the same behaviour in hopes of getting a reward but being frustrated, the dolphin finally figured out that this was a situation in which new behaviour had to be demonstrated in order to gain a reward. The dolphin had learned how to learn.

Not unlike the dolphin in Bateson's famous story, we experienced a creative leap in learning. After years of frustration, we began to experience our doubting as a state of irreverence. Doubt became an asset rather than a hindrance.

In the chapters that follow, the reader will find different examples of therapeutic behaviour that we call irreverence. Many of the actions described will sound familiar, belonging to the paradoxical, strategic, and narrative models. We believe, however, that by using the word "irreverence" we compel ourselves to expand our reflections to encompass issues of pragmatics and ethics and even, if we are not too ambitious, to question the condition of being a human in this changing world.

For the past four or five years we have been fascinated by second-order cybernetics. This theory branched into two distinct directions. One, the theory of second-order cybernetics, emphasized the participation of the observer (therapist) in the system, as with Maturana and Varela's (1980) idea that it is impossible to have instructive interaction between living beings. Moreover, Von Foerster (1981) and Keeney (1982, 1983) proposed that relational reality is co-constructed in a linguistic domain. In addition, the work of Goldner (1988) and other feminist-oriented practitioners also challenges the limitations of first-order cybernetics in explaining the complexity of gender-related issues.

The second direction was a move completely away from the cybernetic metaphor, to that of a narrative epistemology. According to Anderson and Goolishian (1988, 1990), White (1989), and more recently Hoffman (1990), human beings are immersed in a narrative in which everyone participates, but which can create problems while simultaneously having the potential for dissolving them. Goolishian and Anderson advocate maintaining openness in the therapeutic conversation as a way of increasing the likelihood that multiple realities will emerge. One could characterize this movement towards non-instrumentality as a position of, "be careful, because if therapists give the illusion that they can do something, then the system will buy the illusion of power". In a sense these authors seem to say that to believe in power is to become an employee of social control, a dictator of what the therapist believes to be "healthy" or "normal" functioning.

In one sense the recent work of Goolishian and others was an antidote for those of us who had become overly infatuated with the concepts of strategizing and intervening. Goolishian, Hoffman, and Andersen's position on instrumentality was very important politically within the field. When therapy is based too much on the instrumentality of how to help people change, it runs the risk of becoming an instrument of the legal system. We consistently hear concern being voiced by therapists who fear that they are being placed in a position of becoming co-opted by the legal system, and therefore fear becoming stigmatized as social controllers.

An advantage of taking the position advocated by Goolishian is that one can avoid the trap of making promises to the family, the courts, and other institutions that one is able to help people change. We feel that therapists who make promises that they know how to communicate, or how to control, risk not only becoming dangerous to the clients but also being manipulated by agencies of social control.

Here is when the doubts that we mentioned earlier began to haunt us. It was in the moment when teachers and students began to ask questions like: If a client asks for help or a suggestion, why not respond? If a situation (e.g. abuse, violence, suicide) requires an authoritarian intervention, why not intervene? If someone looks for an "expert", why not offer one to him? If someone looks for a diagnostic label, why not give it to him as a solution? In essence, the question became: How can a systemic therapist recoup some initiative without falling into an already out-dated model based on the illusion of power and control?

To believe too much in non-instrumentality could result in one being trapped, restricted, and unable to act. One can become immobilized by the fear of being too active. Or, one could fall into the magic belief that changing narrative changes people. Many therapists are under the illusion that simply changing a label always solves even chronic family dramas. If a therapist is convinced that by giving up strategizing he can become effective, then he becomes a believer in the instrument of non-instrumentality. Often, the temptation to control through non-instrumentality comes back to haunt those of us who have gone through this process. Thus, the porpoise jump involves fighting the temptation ever to become a true believer in any one approach or theory (Whitaker, 1976).

In attempting to move to a position of irreverence, the question that must be asked is: Can this shift be made without falling back into the position of believing too much in our strategies or in the absence of strategies? One solution to this quandary is never to become completely seduced by one model or another. The irreverent therapist seeks never to feel the necessity to obey a particular theory, the rules of the client, or the referral system—i.e., the courts or social welfare agencies.

It is important to emphasize that it is useful to have clear in your mind some ethical deontological principles that are part of a lively debate today within the therapeutic community. [The term "deontological" relates to "deontology", defined in Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (1983) as "that which is binding and proper", or, more precisely, to "the theory of duty or moral obligation; ethics".] The key premise is that excessive loyalty to a specific idea makes the individual who embraces it irresponsible in relation to the moral consequences inherently involved. If some disaster happens it is not the individual who is responsible, but the idea (with a capital "I") from which the action springs (such as the position taken by defendants at the Nuremberg Trials, for example, where the claim was that they were not responsible for their behaviour because of excessive loyalty to Third Reich). So, in the field of psychiatry, a total commitment to the idea that mental disease is of biological origin, or that the problem we face is a result of emotional or environmental deprivation, compels the therapist to become a manager of impossible situations. Then the only "ethical" solution is to become an "expert" and "take charge" of the patient's life.

From our viewpoint, which some may consider extreme, this position is irresponsible because the therapist who takes this stance often lacks the capacity to examine the pragmatic consequences of his own...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• EDITORS' FOREWORD
• FOREWORD
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CHAPTER ONE The idea of irreverence
• CHAPTER TWO Irreverence and violence
• CHAPTER THREE Irreverence in institutions: survival
• CHAPTER FOUR Suggestions for training
• CHAPTER FIVE Some considerations for research
• CHAPTER SIX Random closing meditations
• REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX
• ABOUT THE AUTHORS