Gill Gorell Barnes
Family therapy training in Britain has now been established for over twenty years, yet many issues about the requirements of training within the field remain unresolved. One of the missing agreed ingredients in the variations of the training recipe has been the "person of the therapist" and the therapists' use of self within the work that they do. Is "the use of self" important, and how is "self" to be defined within a framework that sometimes argues for a multiplicity of contextually defined selves rather than a "core" self? Put a slightly different way, how are training courses to develop the appropriate complexity within trainees' thinking and responsivity to equip them for the variety of complex interpersonal encounters their work is likely to entail? A major stumbling block in training has been to find a model for attending to such questions which offers overall congruence to a systemic approach to work with relational systems, rather than relying on a model of individual "therapy for the therapist" seen to devolve from an intra-psychically oriented model.
The United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy and the recent introduction of a European Certificate in Psychotherapy have each made it a requirement for qualified practitioners in all forms of psychotherapy to have done "personal work" for some hundreds of hours as part of their qualifying training. While many therapeutic trainings have not seen psychotherapy based on a psychoanalytic model as suiting their own form of training, and many have substituted the experience of the kind of therapy that they are teaching as part of what the trainee must undergo subjectively, family therapy and systemic training has never decided that therapy for therapists within the context of their own family should be a part of the training of all family therapists. Some courses have had discussions about "bringing the family of the trainee in" as part of the training experience, but this has never, to my knowledge, been mandatory and, indeed, might be seen by many families as an infringement of civil liberties. If work on the "self", however defined, is to be a training requirement with sufficient depth and meaning, how then is it to be done?
Judy Hildebrand, in her long experience as a clinical trainer and supervisor, has gone some way towards addressing this gap in the field, through the work she has developed with trainees over the last ten years. Taking as her starting point the need to devise ways of looking at the self which reflect some of the immediacy and complexity of the experience of family therapy, in which transformation of experience can take place from a number of different positions simultaneously, she has worked with students using experiential and reflective tasks that promote greater self-reflexivity, lead to an increased perception of the complexity of the process of change in oneself and in others, and make a difference to competence in practice. While she does not claim that the personal and professional module she describes is an alternative to personal therapy, she suggests that as a path in its own right it offers a way for each systemic therapist in training to develop some of the necessary edges of experience for considering the reverberations between self and other in the arena of the therapeutic interview.
The module she describes also reflects some other aspects of the systemic approach. Work takes place in public, within the context defined by the course, the boundary being held by all the participants, including the module leader. Trainees are therefore encouraged to voice aspects of their personal experience in ways that parallel the experience they will be asking of family members. Action, reflection, and narrative about personal experience form part of the learning about "self in context". Experience is shared with others in a process of mutual learning and teaching. In working with others while working on the self, trainees are offered an experience of shared emotional and cognitive change which characterizes much of what may take place in a family session.
This book is therefore very welcome, not only in its own right as a contribution towards the development of therapeutic complexity in systemic training, but also as a contribution towards the ongoing debate about what constitutes systemic therapy and the role of the therapist.