Exchanging Voices

A Collaborative Approach to Family Therapy

Lynn Hoffman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429913372
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

For this book, the author has not only compiled her writing for the last ten years, but she has written her own commentary about the personal and intellectual journey which led her from one paper to the next. The papers themselves read like a chronicle of the major ideas of the past ten years, but her commentary sheds a new light on the process of learning. It enables the reader to understand the way one woman has listened to the voices of a changing environment, and listened to the changes in herself in order to expand her thinking and her practice as a therapist.

CHAPTER ONE


The case against power and control

How did I begin this journey? In 1981, as I was finishing Foundations of Family Therapy, I was trying to write an epilogue for that book and had the problem that my prophetic abilities weren’t working. The reason was that the road ahead had a ninety-degree turn in it, which I at that time couldn’t see. However, clues were appearing, as if to a cosmic puzzle. I was fascinated by Harry Goolishian’s and Paul Dell’s interest in applying the ideas of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ilya Prigogine to family systems (Prigogine & Stengers, 1984). Prigogine believed that time was a one-way street into the future and that change was not the exception but the rule. However, which change would happen depended on how far the system in question was driven from equilibrium and which pebble in the dam, so to speak, began to crumble first.

I liked that notion. I had come to feel that human events meandered messily like bad eighteenth-century novels instead of occurring neatly in nice repetitive turns. So instead of imposing upon them the feedback loops of cybernetic theory, I began to contemplate them as if they were like waterfalls and streams. I said to myself: “Don’t think of repeating cycles, think of rivers in time.”

Gradually I began to realize that change by design, which had been the rallying cry of the early family therapists, didn’t fit the new analogies. As the course of therapy became more subservient to chance, the centrality of the therapist diminished. At around this time, Harry Goolishian began to send me videotapes of sessions in which his former strategic brilliance played no part at all. I didn’t know what to make of these rather drifting, aimless interviews, but looking back I see that they were harbingers of his later work. I rather jokingly told him I thought that what he was doing was “imperceptible therapy”, without any realization that there would come a day when I too would be doing “imperceptible therapy”, and of my own accord.

Another clue was the discovery that the original Bateson group, like the Gods on Mount Olympus, had had their differences. In 1978, I had joined the staff of the Ackerman Institute for Family Therapy and shortly thereafter Bradford Keeney came on board. He and I developed the friendship that is so special to two outsiders. A year or two before Gregory Bateson’s death in 1979, Keeney had spent two or three weeks with him, soaking up his famous seamless stories and incorporating them into a dialogue between himself and Bateson, which I read.

It was Keeney who told me how strongly Bateson had disapproved of Haley’s emphasis on power and control. Given his distrust of what he called “human conscious purpose”, it made sense that he would look askance at the control-oriented family therapy that had come out of his research project. His views on the subject, later elaborated in the posthumous book Angels Fear (1987), which was edited and contributed to by his daughter Catherine, reinforced my own.

Then I read Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (1984). I had not plunged into the feminist family therapy movement because it reminded me too much in its fervour of the Marxism of the community I grew up in. Nevertheless, I was convinced that the gender revolution in the United States constituted the most important large-scale movement of my lifetime. It was also important for my tiny corner of the field of mental health. For instance, the results of Gilligan’s research on male and female value-systems suggested that where men tended to stick to abstract principles of justice and truth, women (American middle-class women, at least) would often bend the rules in favour of relationships. Findings like these had immense implications for family therapy as I had learned it.

I became particularly aware of the unconscious sexism of all styles of family therapy. Up to that time, most family therapists had accepted them without question. Even when colleagues of mine applied feminist principles to their practice, they focused upon particular injustices like mother-bashing but did not question very much the models they had been trained in. Mainly pioneered by men, these styles went from a benign paternalism to an extreme focus on hierarchy, secrecy, and control. Even feminist versions kept therapists in a power position in relation to the people the therapists saw. How else could they “empower” them?

I began to ask questions. Why were there no styles that represented the ideals of connectedness and collaboration that feminist psychologists were linking to female development? Where was the family counterpart to the relational perspective of Wellesley’s Stone Center (Surrey, 1984)? To become another activist seemed too close to becoming another kind of expert, so for the moment I stayed quiet on the subject. I still continued to search for a less hierarchically organized family therapy that would enlarge the options for all.

In 1983, I decided to relocate from New York City to Western Massachusetts. I told people that I was looking for “religious freedom”, meaning that I wanted a space in which I could explore a style for family therapy analogous to Gilligan’s different voice, and I felt that I could not do that within any established institution that I knew. I had no clear vision of what sort of practice could possibly come out of this search; philosophically I was convinced, but pragmatically speaking I was still totally locked into a view of therapy where the therapist held the reins.

Shortly thereafter, at a conference called “Maps of the Mind, Maps of the World”, organized by the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, I met an elfin genius from Vienna called Heinz von Foerster. His enthusiasm and accessibility belied his reputation as one of the giants on whose shoulders the first computers had been built. Despite the 80-odd years he bore so lightly, I fell in love with him at once and jumped at an invitation to visit him for lunch at his house in Pescadero. Another Renaissance man of similar charm and talent, Ernst von Glasersfeld, was staying with him, so I got to know them both.

It turned out that these two, together with Chilean cognitive biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, were planning a conference which was to be held in New Hampshire in 1984. Their idea was to replicate the famous Josiah Macy Conferences, interdisciplinary events that took place annually for ten years after World War II. It was at these meetings that the four scientists had met each other, along with researchers like Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, John von Neumann, and Norbert Wiener.

It was natural for family therapists with my background to gravitate to this group that seemed to inherit the mantle of ideas Bateson stood for. I was invited to the conference in New Hampshire, at which I met accomplished men and women from many countries and diverse areas of research. By one of those accidents of fate, Paul Watzlawick, who was to be the presenter for the interest group on family systems, couldn’t come, and I was asked to take his place. Nervous at speaking before such a distinguished audience, I quickly arranged for several other family therapists who were there to share the time with me.

Luckily, my own presentation went well and I made many of the points that are elaborated here in “Beyond Power and Control” (published in 1986) and later in “A Constructivist Position for Family Therapy” (published in 1988). First, I emphasized the connection between a less instrumental style of family therapy and Maturana and Varela’s (1980) idea that living systems are self-creating and cannot be manipulated like machines. Second, I found von Foerster’s (1981) ideas about observing systems useful in reminding family therapists to be aware of their own effect upon the phenomena they observe and their own agendas in interpreting them.

But the most important application to my field was the central tenet of what von Glasersfeld (1984) called “radical constructivism”: the idea that our sensory images of the world, far from representing “things out there”, are literally constructed by our nervous system, the way a computer computes music from digital bits. This non-objectivist doctrine, so abstract when couched in philosophical terms, became a weapon in my hands against the idea of diagnosis and other attempts to assign objective causes for emotional or mental distress. To me, these were harmful social constructs, crude inventions of the human mind to explain mysteries that we as yet had few answers for. Constructivism, as I understood it, offered a rationale for attacking these and other questionable tenets of our psychotherapeutic faith. The following two essays, which in many ways are two versions of the same article, represent my attempts to apply constructivist ideas to family therapy.

Beyond power and control: towards a “second-order” family systems therapy

While in the first quarter of this century physicists and cosmologists were forced to revise the basic notions that govern the natural sciences, in the last quarter of this century biologists will force a revision of the basic notions that govern science itself.

Heinz von Foerster “Notes on an Epistemology for Living Things” (1981, p. 258)

THE “LOST ATLANTIS”

When I first encountered the remains of Gregory Bateson’s research project in Palo Alto in 1963, I had the sense of stumbling on the ruins of an old and remarkable civilization. In the grip of this conviction, I talked to everybody who had been there. I attended the Thursday bag lunch meetings organized by Don Jackson. As part of the editing job I had been hired by Jackson to do on Conjoint Family Therapy (Satir, 1964), I watched Virginia Satir interview families. I ended up begging Jay Haley to let me do a book with him. All the same, I felt that I was merely watching ripples in the wake of a departed genius. I had a keen sense of disappointment about this.

In the ensuing 20 years, I continued to have the impression that I was on some kind of archeological dig, but the time signs were confusing. Was this a Lost Atlantis or a New Jerusalem? Was I unearthing a forgotten empire or helping to build a Promised Land? There was a sense of an evolving outline, but of something already there, the way secret writing is already on the page. Bateson himself noted that people who apprenticed themselves to him were convinced that he knew something that he was deliberately keeping from them. I suspect that Bateson was not only a scientist but a clairvoyant in that he could sense on-coming events before most people had any inkling of what was going on. He had a terrific sense of smell.

By the 1970s, Bateson (1972) had become something of a crusader for the integrity of the biosphere. He began to talk more and more about the dangers of “linear” or non-holistic thinking and epistemological errors implicit in ideas of power or control. Although not active politically, he was not above a bit of epistemological consciousness-raising, as evidenced by the 1968 conference at Burg Wartenstein called “The Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation” and immortalized in Catherine Bateson’s Our Own Metaphor (1972).

Thinking back, it seems clear that the cold-war years set a pattern that was informed by a fascination with control. Early cybernetic research was connected with experiments with guided missiles and rockets. There was a sense of Faustian expansion, as the new technology was used to investigate the brain and to create brain-like prostheses for the brain. Over the ensuing decades, a division began to build in the field of cybernetics between engineers involved in research on robotics and artificial intelligence, often underwritten by the military, and a group of visionary researchers that included not only Bateson but colleagues like Heinz von Foerster, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, and Ernst von Glasersfeld.

This latter group shared the belief that the exploitative use of technology—indeed, the entire Western attitude towards science—was based on a false illusion of objectivity. Von Foerster (Howe & von Foerster, 1974) summarized the two positions by comparing a “first-order” cybernetics in which the observer remains outside that which is observed with a “second-order” cybernetics where the observer is included in the total arc. Varela (Maturana & Varela, 1980), writing in the same vein, contrasts an “allopoietic” or control model for living systems (the input—output model of the engineers) with an “autopoietic” or autonomy model (living systems respected in the dimension of their wholeness rather than as objects to manipulate).

What is interesting from the point of view of a family theorist is that a similar division erupted back in the late 1950s between Bateson and some of his colleagues who were developing the first family therapy models. The articles on families and family therapy that were coming out of Palo Alto were imbued with a vocabulary based on war and adversarial games: “power-tactics”, “strategy”, being “one-up” or “one-down” (Haley, 1963). This language reflected the dominant value system of Western science, which was an eminently masculine value system in Carol Gilligan’s (1982) sense. I am often struck by the resemblance between accounts of therapeutic prowess described within this framework and the sexual performance known as “scoring”.

Bateson apparently also had reservations about these models of therapy. His chief quarrel with his co-researchers was over what he called the “myth of power”. A peculiarity of the debate is that even when these younger theoreticians agreed that efforts to control others only begat more such efforts in “games without end”, and subscribed to Bateson’s hunch that a small admixture of complimentary or one-down behaviours might halt such progressions, they advocated this position for strategic reasons. Haley argued in The Power Tactics of Jesus Christ (1969) that Jesus only turned the other cheek to disarm his opponents, and the hallmark of the MRI therapist of that time was the technique of going one-down to be one-up. Thus power was kept as a central core and the masculine value system remained intact. My own thinking was highly coloured by this point of view, as anyone reading Foundations of Family Therapy (Hoffman, 1981) can plainly see.

After a long period underground, this debate began to make its way back into the family therapy field. It was sparked off by the March 1982 issue of Family Process, which contained three essays by psychologists Bradford Keeney (with Douglas Sprenkle), Lawrence Allman, and Paul Dell. Keeney and Allman used Batesonian arguments to question the use of a narrowly pragmatic framework for family therapy. Dell attacked the concept of homeostasis, long a building block of family systems theory. The placing together of these pieces probably made them seem more like a mega-trend than they were. For whatever reasons, the result was a flurry of scathing dismissals from outraged “pragmatic” therapists. Epistemology was renamed “epistobabble” and from then on there was hardly anyone in the field who did not think they knew what epistemology meant.

In my view, these provocative articles and the overkill reaction to them temporarily dampened the free play of ideas in the field. Especially unfortunate was the support given to anti-intellectuals made nervous by the use of terms like “epistemology”. For despite the negative publicity, epistemology is a heart-of-the-matter word. It had a special meaning for the pioneers who put it on the map, among whom were Bateson and the other scientists I have listed.

In using cybernetic principles to investigate the nervous system, these scientists invalidated the field of psychology as we know it. If, as their studies suggest, our perceptions do not represent impressions of an out-there reality but construct this reality in a totally turnabout fashion, psychology would have to find another name: lensology, or the science of lenses, perhaps. Because epistemology already meant the study of how we know our knowing, it was a likely candidate for the job. For family therapists, the ideas around epistemology put into question how almost everybody knew their knowing, and began to point the way to an intellectual revolution that was much more profound than early cybernetic thinking had led any of us to expect.

In the following pages, I outline what I believe are the consequences of this “new epistemology”, or what is being alternatively called “second-order” cybernetics, for the family field. From the researchers mentioned above, I take a number of concepts that carry major implications for systems therapy: the idea of the observing system from von Foerster (1981); the complex that includes autopoiesis, informational closure, and conversational domains from Maturana and Varela (1980; Varela, 1979); and the idea of “fit” from the constructivist position of von Glasersfeld (1984). Related to all these concepts is Bateson’s (1972, 1979) focus on circular organization which he equated, in some sense, with mental process. I try to show that the net effect of the new thinking is to point the way to an overall framework for systemic change that is as much as possible non-hierarchical, non-instrumental, and non-pejorative. But first I will have to send a herald on ahead, saying: “Enter the Observing System, Centre Stage.”

MAPS AND TERRITORIES

Let me start with a quote from a current joke: “I have a sea-shell collection. I keep it scattered on beaches all over the world.” A seashell on a beach is part of an ecosystem. Add the collector, who is speaking, and you have the missing element—the idea in the mind of a person about beaches and shells and their relationship to each other and to that person. This is what I mean by saying: “Enter the Observing System, Centre Stage.”

Heinz von Foerster (1983), whose book Observing Systems sets this stage, opened an address at a conference I attended with the remark, “Gregory Bateson says, ‘The map is not the territory.’ I disagree with Gregory Bateson.” (Pause, for effect.) “I say, the ‘Map is the Territory!’” At the same conference, von Foerster described an encounter with a blind graduate student who was asking his advice with regard to a paper he was working on. In talking about it, the student kept pointing to a spot on the wall behind von Foerster’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Editors’ Foreword
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 The case against power and control
• 2 Joining theory to practice
• 3 The shift to postmodernism
• 4 Definitions for simple folk
• 5 A reflexive stance
• 6 “Kitchen talk”
• 7 Trying to write a postmodern text
• Conclusion
• Postscript
• References
• Index