Ethical and Aesthetic Explorations of Systemic Practice

New Critical Reflections

Pietro Barbetta, Maria Esther Cavagnis, Inga-Britt Krause, Umberta Telfener

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781138346192
• eBook ISBN: 9780429793967
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In Ethical and Aesthetic Explorations of Systemic Practice, the four co-authors come together to rhizomatically consider how systemic theories can be reinvigorated in the present day.

This fascinating book uses the ideas and work of renowned anthropologist Gregory Bateson as a springboard from which to examine the fundamental tenets of systemic theory and practice, as well as looking to the work of Deleuze, Guattari, Maturana, Varela and von Foerster. Including contributions from a range of renowned therapists, each chapter examines the guiding principles from a critical perspective, asking questions around the ontology of the therapeutic encounter and the technique of therapy itself.

This revivifying volume will be of interest to systemic professionals, and those looking at how the systemic community can continue to grow and evolve.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Why Ethic and Aesthetic in Systemic Practices

Pietro Barbetta, Maria Esther Cavagnis, Inga Britt Krause and Umberta Telfener

DOI: 10.4324/9780429437410-1

How to Introduce a Book that Aims to Critically Explore the World of Systemic Practice?

The clinic is a world in itself, populated by many styles, each with their own recognizable tunes. Practice – clinical practice – is a word that is familiar to clinicians; perhaps too familiar to support an engagement with it in a curious way. Not the curiosity that is now paradoxically institutionalized in the training of systemic therapists but the curiosity that informed Bateson (1979) and the impetus of the word “systemic” as an epistemic alternative to mainstream ideas in the social sciences. This book wants to connect with that spirit, with the search of different territories for a systemic practice. Throughout the last 45 years, systemic practices have been entangled within different kinds of frames, strategic, structural, social constructionist, narrative, etc. Nonetheless, in our view, all the frames we mentioned have a kind of transcendental premise: the strategic model hides the premise that the therapist should win the (psychotic) game; the structural model seems to recommend the reverence to generational hierarchies; social constructionism has the naïve idea of “collaborative” practice as linguistic practice, taking for granted that “collaboration” is a “good practice”; narrative model frames the person within a character of the narrative, like in a text. War, hierarchy, collaboration and textuality are the ways in which the systemic models have framed the systemic practice.

In this book we foster an out-of-frame approach, based on the difference between epistemology and ontology. An ongoing reflecting search for the multiple senses of reality.

Such a search might require us, as it did with Bateson (1979), to carefully re-engage with the order of the things, as Foucault (2001) would say, so as to look at its interstices in search of differences. Rather than going up into new interpretative worlds, we are interested in staying in the immanent plane where theory and practice meet and engage in a stochastic process, where the final outcome is not known (Bateson, 1979). Such an exploration needs not only to clarify – shed light – but also has to move/transform the position from which we started the exploration. Such a search with a difference requires us to start somewhere, not because origins are important per se but because such a gesture helps us recognize the material dimension of the exploration. As we stated, this is not a book aiming to identify abstract possibilities but to engage with material conditions in search of transformation, going back to the origins and, through this (re)turn, reinventing them. In this case, the materiality we want to explore is that of clinical practice, in particular, the insights that Bateson and subsequent systemic thinkers have proposed for the work in the clinic. At the same time there are authors not usually thought of as systemic thinkers, but whose work can contribute to this “reading back” and who sometimes seem to be nearer to Bateson than some contemporary systemic psychotherapists. We are thinking here of writers such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987), Michel Foucault (2001) and some social anthropologists who followed their paths. In this introductory chapter we offer the premise of the following book. Coherence is not necessarily what we are looking for; to the contrary we had a very long period of conversation about styles and approaches, with the aim, as in the title, to give the reader an ethic and aesthetic approach to systemic practice.

Practicare

Such an exploration needs to start somewhere and we feel that it is useful to begin with the word practice. Practice is a polysemic word with a proliferation of meanings, or, to be more precise, practice is a word which produces a differentiation between meaning and sense, concept and expression, ethic and aesthetic. As a concept, practice has to do with ethics; as an expression, it deals with living experience, from the Greek word aisthesis, meaning sensorial, perceptual and corporeal experience. There are multiple facets of practice: dominant and dissident ones. From Greek, praktiké is considered the part of philosophy concerning the action – versus gnostiké, what concerns knowledge. During the Enlightenment and in Romantic philosophy, practice had to do with ethics and aesthetics; starting from Marx, in social philosophy the word “praxis” became the way of going out from interpretation and focusing on transformation (Marx and Engels, 1998). A similar idea, in genealogic sense, comes from Nietzsche – how to do philosophy with the hammer (Nietzsche, 2005) – while in modern phenomenology, there is a distinction between essence and existence (Satre, 1943) where what one theorizes as essence is far from what one does in existence.

Within the aesthetics of complexity, the concept of “enaction” (Varela et al., 2017) indicates a different form of knowledge, not categorial or abstract, like the one we are used to learning within school and academia. It is rather an intuition, which appears in conjunction with an event. Something that does not appear within the realm of necessity, nor within the realm of possibility (or probability). It rather is a third kind of knowledge, which appears in the dominion of contingency: the frog eats flies, at the same time frogs do not simply eat flies, they eat this particular fly that is flying, on the visual panorama of the frog. Cognition is not awareness, it is rather acquaintance, something corporeal, which belongs to the body. This kind of knowledge makes series proliferate; enaction seems to be the condition for producing lines of flight (hospitality, art, literature, music are all practices), or, vice versa, for oppression (restraint, torture, death penalty, abuses are also practices).

It is clear that, in practice, ethics matter. What does systemic practice mean, not only in therapy, but also in research, teaching, training and other different fields of experience? In what way can the authors define what it means, for example, to use the term “practitioner”? The authors of this book have enough experience in systemic therapy. They have been involved as subjects and practitioners in cultural dissonance, multi-perspective therapeutic and political experiences. We are particularly interested in those aspects of critical systemic work that – despite being central to the work – have been neglected, if not forgotten, by mainstream approaches. This is why we have gathered together these few voices who are all inspired to try to think about what might or can be different. In line with the second engagement with Bateson by the therapists at the Milan Group from the 1980s on (Boscolo et al., 1987), this book intends to offer a reading that engages with practice as an ethical and aesthetical activity rather than transcendental “linguistic games”, or “social constructions”. Practice has been with us for a long time. According to etymological dictionaries, it emerged in the English vocabulary early in the fifteenth century from variations of the Old French pratiser and Medieval Latin practicare. It is hard to know what was first, whether it was first a noun followed by its use as a verb and an adjective or whether these permutations were of a different order. What we can say is that by 1600, the word was used in all these Porfirian registers to refer to the application and the effectuation of ideas.

In this focus on the etymology of the word, we can already see the order of the discourse (Foucault, 1971a) that is established surrounding the word practice and its derivatives. In line with the often uncritically assumed linguistic structure of our knowledge – the (in)famous image of the tree of knowledge – the emerging relationship between ourselves and the world of which we are making sense needs not just a theory but also a practice and, in such necessity, our thoughts are pushed into action. Although too early in the exploration, we are already dissatisfied with what we see as a problematic and unexamined relationship with etymology and with the term practice. We feel there is something missing if we approach considerations on practice solely through definitions in themselves, even when we do so taking into account historical descriptions of their origins. We do not want to dismiss the value of these activities. That is, we do feel it is important to both define something, to punctuate the flow of everyday life and provide it with a certain shape, as well as to look at its etymology, that is to look at the variations and movements that such punctuation has had through time. Even when we focus on the case of the verb practice – a verb being that part of discourse which designates actions thus conveying an implicit space for movement and possibility – there is an absence in the definition for the space that always presents itself in the contingent and the unexpected. What we are trying to grasp in our exploration is not a new territory that has been established in the therapeutic world with the creation of a new name – family therapy – but the process of exploring and expanding the definitions that were at the base of such emergence. We are – as we explained earlier – stubbornly sticking to the surface of the systemic gesture, to the encounter with what is contingent and accidental.

Poiesis

It is in this sense and through these transformations that practice, from a systemic perspective, needs a new conceptualization as a de-generate and uncanny word. Systemic practice then not only deals with a certain position and place in the discourse – practice – but also has to deal with the actuality of what is “contingent”, with an openness to, a facing at, the un-usual. It is in fact this latter part, this aspect of practice that faces us with something that one cannot use in the usual way – the interstices of the definition of practice – that we feel is central to what is systemic.

Practice becomes an autopoietic concept in that it needs to constantly produce its own definition in front of what is presented in its space. Practice in the clinic is a fundamentally critical and creative exercise that needs to engage, not with what is familiar and predictable, but with the singularity present in the contingency of the event that is presented to the clinic. Such an engagement is revolutionary in the sense used by Deleuze and Foucault because it is, simultaneously, an engagement with the current discourse and its disruption. In such a gesture, systemic practice pursues supporting the becoming of the event; of the possibilities of life imbued in the presentation of a client and his/her/their moment of life in the clinic. Systemic practice then is not only uncanny but also unhinging. Following these considerations, there are, in the contemporary context, a number of significant questions that demand to be asked.

Scientia

Is systemic practice scientific? If it is so, what kind of science is it? Is it reproducible or reliable? Or is it a kind of idiosyncratic approach, which deals with people who have particular kinds of esoteric experiences? Is it a kind of art? Is it something else? From a systemic perspective, sciences continually attempt to falsify their own hypotheses. As in the Milan Approach, science is something in which one of the ethical imperatives is “never fall in love with your own hypotheses” (Cecchin, 1987) The science of the systemic practice is composed by dissident words: accountability vs reliability, difference in repetition vs mere repetition of the same practice (as in bureaucracy), hypotheses coming from the singular history vs standard diagnostic verifiability. It is in this sense that a re-engagement with systemic practice and science can be best done through an engagement with the ideas of Foucault, Deleuze and others who are rarely listed in current professional definitions. Foucault’s active renaming of his Chair at the College de France as History of Systems of Thought (Foucault, 1971a) is an important gesture in this sense. In order to understand the limits of the current discourse of scientific blind-ness that takes place in current clinical practice, it is important to learn from literature, anthropology, philosophy, and arts, as well as from studying the history of systems of care and cure from the ancient theory of moods (from Hippocrates to late Renaissance), to the modern diagnosis (from Thomas Wills to the DSM-5).

In this sense, for instance, the way in which alchemists such as Paracelsus used the Magic Square to cure melancholia, or the African Marabou use rituals to heal grievances of the body and the mind, have to be observed and studied. Such a knowledge is crucial to identify the interstices of the prevalence of evidence-based practice dominant in the current pharmacy-psychiatric environment, evidence that uncritically relies on “universal diagnosis” and that insidiously screens people through a grid-inventory, positioning them effectively into subjects, subjugated and docile bodies within the same cage. Instead Deleuze invites us to disrupt the monolithic language of science by questioning the presence of different types of sciences, one serving the purpose of the State and one that is minor and nomadic. Such a science is not a science of grids and of docile bodies but a “science of becoming” (Cecchin et al., 2005; von Foerster, 1995)

Nomadic Science

It is not by chance that the most important point of reference for systemic practice is Gregory Bateson. He was an anthropologist (Bateson, 1958),¹ neither a psychiatrist nor a psychologist. This means that his gaze on therapy was from the outside. Regarding therapy, Bateson’s gaze is like “a thought from outside”, to mention the title of a book written by Foucault, dedicated to Maurice Blanchot (1987). It is as if someone comes and observes something fro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• 1. Introduction: Why Ethic and Aesthetic in Systemic Practices
• 2. Two Regimes of Madness in Psychotherapy
• 3. Revolutionary Childhood
• 4. Thoughts from the Outside
• 5. Getting Sick from Psychotherapy: Our Co-Responsibility in Unintended and Undesired Outcomes
• 6. Aesthetics, Ethics and Politics in Childhood Matters
• 7. Clinical Practice as Ecological Aesthetics
• 8. Babel, Bebel and Other Dangerous Glossolalia
• Postscript The Event
• Index