The Unexpected Third

Hanneke Meulink-Korf, Aat van Rhijn

• Publisher: CLF Publishers
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781868043996
• eBook ISBN: 9781868045013
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

'We believe that a person always stands before God, hand in hand with others, and at the same time with others before God.'With these words the authors, theologians and therapists, alert us to the importance of understanding a person within her or his relational network (context). This context refers not only to the current relational network but also to the generations before us and the generations to come. In this way the conflicts of the past generations but also their resources, influence the people of the current generation and this in turn has an influence on the unborn generations. Family loyalty predetermines the choices we make and the priorities we set. How can family loyalty be a liberating motivation as a legacy for living with each other but also for meeting with others outside the family and even outside their own heritage and influences regarding e.g. ethnicity, culture, politics and religion/church? The aim of the contextual pastoral care approach is to develop a greater understanding between people and culture within their specific contexts and participate in restoring trust and trustworthiness within their relations. In this way God is in our midst on our journey towards fairness, trust and hope. This intergenerational dialogical approach was inspired by the work of the Hungarian /American family therapist and psychiatrist, Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, and was later in turn inspired by scholars such as Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas. The Unexpected Third is used in many pastoral courses, academic, post-academic and practical, in the Netherlands and in Eastern-Europe. It is received as a meaningful contribution to Practical Theology and Pastoral care for individual counselling, family care and also for reworking certain conflicts in the parish and community.

Chapter 1

Introduction to Nagy’s contextual approach

At the beginning of this chapter, we describe the work of the psychiatrist-psychotherapist Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy. Many concepts from his work are more fully discussed later in this book – and especially our application and amendment from multiple inspirations and specifically focused on pastoral counselling. But first we want to introduce Nagy’s work – of course interpreted and illustrated in our way, but without reinterpretation, so that the reader will be enabled to judge our subsequent elaborations and combinations and even to choose and take a different approach.

In the field of the Humanities (social and cultural sciences) there are varying models and ways of analysing concrete human relations. It may be theoretically conceivable that Practical Theology and Pastoral Counselling should make do without (non-theological) ways of analysing as used in the Humanities; but if such is attempted in practice, their work loses touch with daily reality. That is true when it comes to counselling, but also in verbal meditation and prayers in worship. How could we lead worship or lead in courses, prayer or sermons, if we do not understand in a carefully-realistic way the reality of the participants (ourselves included) and preferably also of absent interested parties? We write, in parentheses, ‘ourselves included’, but this is probably a major condition: that we try to be aware, as much as possible, of our own position, our own desires, and also our own interests. Many pastors and counsellors have in this way discovered that they are not only part of one context of relationships, but of several. Few people can say: ‘My entire family consists wholly of Dutch -Reformed Frisian farmers’ or something like that.

The plurality that also exists in our own lives hopefully protects us against any tendency to simplistically classify other people. We see the work of Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy (in short: Nagy) as a meaningful contribution from the Humanities to Practical Theology and pastoral counselling, in terms of both pastoral practice and pastoral theory1. However, we will write not only about his work, but also about the work of other psychotherapists and especially of family therapists. The field of family therapy (including the relevant linguistic field) is based on a breadth of knowledge and experience that you, as a pastor, can only ignore at your peril.

Nagy introduced a specific approach to counselling, which has become known as contextual therapy. One must realise that the word ‘therapy’ has a fairly broad meaning. In the American context ‘therapy’ denotes not only psychotherapy, but also psycho-social support and care. The word ‘contextual’ is discussed more fully in the course of this chapter and further on in the book.

Nagy was born in Budapest in 1920 as the son of liberal Roman Catholic parents. In 1948, after having completed his medico-psychiatric training in Budapest, he was the only member of his family to depart to the United States (via Austria). There he has lived and worked ever since. He claims to have no relationship with a church and he does not belong to any religious denomination. Nagy left Hungary not only with medico-psychological knowledge and skills, but also with some experience in biochemical research. He continued this research in his first American years. He worked with individual patients in the same neuro-psychiatric hospital in Chicago where his laboratory was situated. He hoped, through his scientific research, to find a key to understanding and ultimately to curing serious psychological suffering, including the suffering of people diagnosed with schizophrenia. His research in this direction, however, was not successful. Yet, he did not have to go through a total reorientation. A Budapest teacher, Kalman Gyárfás, who had also emigrated to America, was Nagy’s mentor for some time, and had already encouraged him to search solutions in other directions. Gyárfás stressed the importance of interpersonal relationships for the psychiatric patient.

Nagy followed this path. He connected with like-minded psychiatrists and psychologists in an environment where in the fifties new treatments emerged: the so-called therapeutic community. That term was and is the name given to programs
in psychiatric clinics where patients and staff try to meet on a basis of openness and conversation. Doctor Maxwell Jones had introduced this idea of the healing
community starting from his work with traumatized soldiers in England after
World War II. Central in this therapeutic approach was the idea that it is the community that heals. This idea especially appealed to Neo-Freudian psychologists and psychiatrists. Many of them were already engaged in considering the psychological nature of the bond between an individual and others, following (among others)
the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi. (Ferenczi was convinced there was a fundamental ‘bio-genetic law’ in the psychic field. Ethics with him has no indepen-dent place. Partly because of this, his influence on Nagy has remained limited.) We must also mention Interpersonal Psychiatry, as developed in the second quarter of the last century by Harry Stack Sullivan. He was the first to conceive psychiatry as the study of interpersonal relationships; he made use of these relationships to deal with (seemingly) more intra-personal emotional problems. The therapist is in Sullivan’s work no longer an externally observing expert, but someone who, expertly but especially actively, enters into a therapeutic relationship with the patient, as a parti-cipatory observer and observing participator. In this way the therapist tries to have a beneficial influence from within a therapeutic relationship. Sullivan worked in this way. Nagy was one of the first who applied these relational ideas to working with families. With some colleagues he explored the importance and conditions of the involvement of family members in the treatment of a patient. Relatives were then no longer excluded from treatment in the psychiatric clinic. Several new treatments evolved in the process and new insights were gained into the development and progress of psychological and psychiatric suffering. To Nagy and some colleagues came the realization that their work should not be restricted to the nuclear family and to ‘here and now’ transactions.

The connecting lines between multiple generations were explored, and thus (extended) family therapies evolved. The Netherlands was one of the first countries after the United States where ‘family therapy’ (still aimed at the nuclear family) was introduced in 1967. Nagy and his colleagues David Rubinstein and Gerald Zuk gave an extensive course in Leiden under the auspices of the Dutch Institute for Preventive Medicine. The name of Ammy van Heusden (socio-therapeutic trainer and family therapist), is primarily connected with the introduction of Nagy’s work in the Netherlands. She was a like-minded but also critical colleague of Nagy’s.

Around 1984, the introduction of Nagy’s work was extended to pastors. In addition to Nagy’ name we must mention the names of some other early nuclear-family or extended-family therapists and link them, where possible, very briefly to developments of pastoral theory in the Netherlands. Virginia Satir, also a pupil of Gyárfás’s, especially emphasised the connection between a person’s self-esteem and communication within the family. Carl Whitaker elaborated on a ‘symbolic-experiential’ or ‘growth’ model for therapy, aimed at strengthening individual and collective creativity, through recognition and acceptance of one’s own ‘odd traits’ by the family. The approach of Murray Bowen and several colleagues became known as systemic therapy. Under the influence of biologist and anthropologist Gregory Bateson, families were now seen as a ‘natural system’. Starting from this, Bowen focused on differentiation of members of the family from one another, and on the differentiation of parents from their own families of origin. We follow the line of influence a little further, rabbi and family therapist Edwin Friedman based his famous book From generation to generation – system processes in church and synagogue on M. Bowen’s systemic work. Here the importance of differentiation comes first, especially developed for the position of the therapist or pastor: as a non-anxious presence in the system. That the systemic also influenced the work of pastors in The Netherlands, is due to some pastoral trainers, in particular to Maarten Blom and Jan Bodisco Massink. The influence of the family therapists Salvador Minuchin (structural approach) and Jay Haley (strategic directive approach) seems to have been limited to their own colleagues, professional therapists. But indirectly their thought was important for pastors. Haley’s book about Jesus, ‘The power tactics of Jesus Christ’, has proved influential. And in the studies of the aforementioned M.B. Blom on pastoral counselling to individuals, couples and families, these approaches play a more or less explicit role. Blom has thus contributed to the gradual move away from the Rogerian non-directive approach to a more directive approach in counseling2. In his book ‘Pastor and therapist’, C. Lindijer made a similar move. In a survey he discusses a number of therapeutic schools, including Fritz Perls’s Gestalt therapy, and examines their potential significance for counseling3.

These models were not developed very long ago. Nevertheless many of these names in the history of family and couple therapy, including Nagy’s, will appear dated to many modern system psychotherapists. The names mentioned above are the names of the founding fathers and mothers. Development in many segments of the world of psychiatry, therapy and counselling have been very rapid in the past decades. System psychotherapy has seen major developments since the years of the pioneers; the rise of constructivism, social constructionism and post-modern thinking play an important role. We can summarize these developments under the title ‘narrative thinking’4. (We will discuss this further below.)

But also expertise in transcultural counselling, the elaboration of Bowlby’s attachment theory, contributions from Psychology of Religion5, development of an ecological framework focusing on what the ecosystem means to man6, as well as (other) results from a renewed interest in evolutionary biology and psychology have since arisen. To name two more approaches: in psycho diagnostics psycho-trauma was further described (think of the definition of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, also important for counselling in respect to consequences of sexual abuse7 and people with symptoms after combat situations8) and in psychotherapy attention was paid to Neuro-Linguistic Programming, the NLP approach, which is based on the work of linguists Bandler and Grinder9. All of these findings gave new impulses to thought about human systems and interpersonal communication. More recently a study was published on cross-cultural ministry along the lines of system t...

Table of contents

• Preface to the English edition
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6