Handbook of Family Therapy
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Handbook of Family Therapy

The Science and Practice of Working with Families and Couples

Mike Robbins, Tom Sexton, Gerald Weeks, Thomas L. Sexton, Jay Lebow, Thomas L. Sexton, Jay Lebow

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eBook - ePub

Handbook of Family Therapy

The Science and Practice of Working with Families and Couples

Mike Robbins, Tom Sexton, Gerald Weeks, Thomas L. Sexton, Jay Lebow, Thomas L. Sexton, Jay Lebow

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About This Book

This new Handbook of Family Therapy is the culmination of a decade of achievements within the field of family and couples therapy, emerging from and celebrating the dynamic evolution of marriage and family theory, practice, and research. The editors have unified the efforts of the profession's major players in bringing the most up-to-date and innovative information to the forefront of both educational and practice settings. They review the major theoretical approaches and break new ground by identifying and describing the current era of evidence-based models and contemporary areas of application. The Handbook of Family Therapy is a comprehensive, progressive, and skillful presentation of the science and practice of family and couples therapy, and a valuable resource for practitioners and students alike.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2004
ISBN
9781135451301

PART I

Understanding Families and Couples

The Foundations of Practice

SECTION INTRODUCTION

The current family and couple therapy intervention models and theories are a product of the dynamic evolution of epistemological foundations of the field. The ways in which we think about the families we work with, their problems, and change are inexorably tied to our concepts of family functioning and family dynamics. Systems theory was the early foundation for family therapy, but we have made significant advances in our understanding of how families work since the application of this general theory to the family. The field has increasingly turned its attention to include a focus on successful “functioning” of families. Thus, increasingly, the foundations of our practice have moved toward family strengths and resiliency and understanding problems with a consideration of social and ecological context, as well as an appreciation of the specific meanings of family members in their unique settings. In changing perspectives the field is increasingly informed by the postmodern and constructivist epistemologies that emphasize meaning. Within the evolution of thinking in this field, a focus on culture and ethnicity has continued to be a primary guide.
Three chapters make up Part I of the handbook. In Chapter 1, Becvar describes how the dynamic evolution of the ideas that form the foundation of the field is also the foundation of the techniques and perspectives of practice. This evolution represents a series of changing eras of thinking and of our own belief systems. The current multisystemic, systemic, and evidence-based ideas are increasingly the foundation of current practice. In Chapter 2, Szapocznik and Robbins present a multisystemic perspective on family functioning and strength-based approaches to family developmental and relational functioning. Couple and family theory is now multi-systemic or multilayered, considering individual dynamics, family functioning, and context. In Chapter 3, Falicov presents an integrative picture of the role of culture, gender, and race as a foundation of practice, research, and theory. These three presentations are intended to be the foundation of the theory, research, and special applications that follow in later sections.

CHAPTER 1

Eras of Epistemology

A Survey of Family Therapy Thinking and Theorizing

DOROTHY S.BECVAR, PhD
The Haelan Centers, St. Louis, MO

INTRODUCTION

The idea of working with entire families was a unique aspect of a transformation in thinking and theorizing that ushered in a new discipline in the field of mental health—that of family therapy. Moving away from a strict focus on individuals and their psyches, consideration began to be given to relationship systems and the contexts in which people live, problems emerge, and solutions may be found. Often perceived as merely a different technique, this shift to working with families, in fact, signaled the beginning of a scientific revolution and the emergence of an alternative paradigm (Kuhn, 1970)
A paradigm, according to Thomas Kuhn (1970), is a set of presuppositions regarding the nature of the world, the problems within that world worthy of investigation, and the appropriate methods for investigating the particular problems thus identified. It is a coherent belief system by means of which scientists know and attempt to understand reality, providing a relatively inflexible framework within which solutions are sought during periods of normal science. The appearance of anomalies not explainable by the rules of the paradigm initiates a crisis characterized by a search for new explanations and a period of extraordinary science in which basic beliefs are subject to reconstruction. A paradigm shift occurs with the establishment of an alternative belief system, by means of which the world is seen from a different perspective and old events take on new meaning.
Gregory Bateson (1972), anthropologist and major contributor to the paradigm shift represented by systems theory/cybernetics and family therapy, used the term epistemology synonymously with paradigms, applying it not only to the theoretical frameworks of scientists but also to the personal interpretive systems used by individuals. Epistemology, in a more general sense, is a branch of philosophy concerned with studying how people know and the ways in which valid knowledge claims based on a particular theoretical framework may or may not be made. Included in such study is the consideration of assumptions underlying a theoretical framework and the degree to which assertions derived from the framework are consistent with these assumptions.
When used to denote personal belief systems, epistemology describes internalized theories that enable people to give order and predictability to their lives, the means by which individual realities are created. Although generally outside of conscious awareness, personal theories are learned in families of origin, in school, and from other meaningful events and encounters in each person’s life. Like scientific theories, such personal theories rest on a set of assumptions regarding the nature of the world, and they guide and limit the way in which one both perceives and creates experience.
The theoretical framework upon which much of family therapy initially was based and according to which the world, including individuals and families, came to be understood is perhaps this discipline’s most distinctive feature. For, from the systemic/cybernetic perspective, more crucial than who is in the therapy room is how the therapist thinks about who is in the therapy room. Indeed, what family therapy ultimately is about, at many levels, is epistemology. And as the field has evolved since its beginnings in the late 1940s and early 1950s, so has its epistemology evolved in terms of philosophy, practice, and research, although often at different rates and in different ways. Thus we may define three epistemological domains and seek to understand the eras of epistemology within each. At the same time, it is important to recognize them as overlapping eras, as explorers in all three domains mutually influenced and were influenced by one another and yet retained a degree of separation by virtue of their focus. Therefore, although appearing to be linear for purposes of the following discussions in which we survey the evolution of epistemology relative first to philosophy, next to practice, and then to research, the developmental process described must be recognized as one that is totally recursive.

PHILOSOPHY

In Western society, the prevailing paradigm is based on the belief system proposed by John Locke and those who followed him. Described as the modernistic worldview (Gergen, 1991), this framework assumes linear causality, with reality understood as a phenomenon whose order is recognized rather than created. The world is believed to be deterministic and to operate according to law-like principles. Scientific study is reductionistic and individualistic, the appropriate methodology is empirical and quantitative, and knowledge must be pursued by means of observation and experimentation. Subjects are separate from the objects of observations, and reality and related theories are viewed primarily in terms of either/or, right or wrong explanations. In contrast to the Lockean paradigm, systems theory is consistent with the tradition labeled Kantian (Rychlak, 1981) and at the level of second-order cybernetics, with postmodernism (Becvar & Becvar, 2003). Rather than focusing on the individual and individual problems viewed in isolation, attention is given to relationships, relationship issues between individuals, and the contexts within which these issues emerge. The observer is understood to be part of the observed, with subjectivity inevitable as the one who is observing perceives, acts on, and participates in the co-creation of realities. Interactions are described in terms of a noncausal, dialectical process of mutual influence in which all parties are involved. An understanding of systems is derived from the assessment, or inference, of patterns of interaction, with an emphasis on what is happening in the here and now, rather than on why it is happening or in terms of a historical focus.

Era I: The Paradigm Begins to Shift

The change in epistemology represented by systems theory/cybernetics emerged in the context of research related to weaponry and technology improvement during World War II (Heims, 1975). The new science, named cybernetics by mathematician Norbert Wiener and dating from approximately 1942, was unique in its focus on organization, pattern, and process, rather than on matter, material, and content. Cyberneticians were concerned with feedback mechanisms, information processing, and patterns of communication, studying inanimate machines and comparing them with living organisms in an effort to understand and control complex systems.
Bateson, an early investigator of cybernetic processes, provided the philosophical bridge from the physical to the behavioral sciences, with a particularly significant impact on the development of family therapy. His goal was the creation of a framework for understanding human behavior more adequate than those currently in use in the social sciences. To that end, his thinking was influenced significantly (Bateson & Mead, 1976) by the ideas of recursiveness and of teleology described by Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow (1943, p. 22), “as synonymous with ‘purpose controlled by feedback.’”
Further explorations led to Bateson’s integration of the theory of logical types (White-head & Russell, 1910) with communication and information processing within a cybernetic perspective (Ruesch & Bateson, 1951). Accordingly, he began to view various psychological constructs as informational processes. Indeed, cybernetics had resolved for him the ancient problem posed by dualistic thinking about mind and body; rather than being considered transcendent, mind could now be described as immanent in systems. Next, Bateson began to focus his research on the paradoxes of human communication in general and on schizophrenic communication in particular. By 1949, he and his research team were hypothesizing about the appropriateness of family therapy, questioning the traditional concept of psychosis as an illness, and considering the possibility of defining a schizophrenic episode as a “spontaneous initiation ceremony” (Heims, 1977, p. 153).
The double-bind hypothesis evolved toward the end of 1954 and 2 years later the landmark paper “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia” (Bateson, Jackson, Haley, & Weakland, 1956) was published. This theory proposed that an inability to discriminate between levels of communication was the result of repeated experiences of a double bind in intense relationships. In the context of a relationship between mother and child, the outcome of such a situation was likely to be a pathology in communication and “symptoms whose formal characteristics would lead the pathology to be classified as schizophrenia” (Bateson, 1972, pp. 202–203). Although retaining aspects of a linear epistemology and focusing primarily on mothers as part of the problem, the basic message was revolutionary. At the time, psycho-dynamic theories were predominant, with insight the only means of change (Simon, 1982). By contrast, the Bateson group had described schizophrenia as an interpersonal, relational phenomenon, rather than as an intrapsychic disorder of the individual that secondarily influences interpersonal relationships.
As we discuss later, Bateson was not alone in proposing similar new ways of thinking. In addition, despite his preference for the term cybernetics, generally in the United States it was systems theory, following biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s (1968) use of “general system theory,” with which family therapy became identified. Although considered by many to be less mechanistic than cybernetics, which is derived from an engineering perspec-tive, systems theory, with its biological roots, shares a concern with feedback mechanisms and recursion.

Era II: Paradigm Shift Completed

The fundamental and radical assumption of systems theory/cybernetics is recursion, or circular causality and behavior influenced by feedback. However, in the earlier era of the development of this perspective relative to family therapy, the notion of recursion was applied from a black box perspective, with observers outside a system attempting to observe what was going on inside the system. Using such constructs as boundaries, communication and information processing, entropy and negentropy, equifinality and equipotentiality, morphostasis and morphogenesis, openness and closedness, and positive and negative feedback, the goal was to assess and understand the system. Despite its relational and holistic focus, lacking was recognition of the role of self-reference, and thus the scien-tific revolution was not yet complete.
Only as a distinction was made between first-order and second-order cybernetics, with acknowledgment in the latter of the influence of observers on their observations, could we say that the paradigm shift truly had occurred. Bateson’s particular contributions included his use of language, focus on logical types, rec-ognition of the importance of metaphor, and the idea that informatio...

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