Introduction

My Mother’s Ashes

This book traces my journey from an instrumental, causal approach to family therapy to a collaborative, communal one. When I first became acquainted with the field in 1963, I assumed that a therapist was supposed to fix a system that was in trouble. Over the course of time, the description of the problem changed from a maladaptive behavior to a dysfunctional family structure to an outmoded belief. In all these cases, however, the therapist placed herself outside the arrangement in question. This assumption of objectivity led to a therapist stance that was aloof and distancing, but it was congruent with the rational, scientific norms of the day.

By the seventies, I became aware of a shift in the zeitgeist. Anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1972) had already cast aspersions on the Newtonian mind-set, with its dreams of controlling the physical universe. Cognitive researchers like Humberto Maturana, Heinz von Foerster, and Ernst von Glasersfeld went on to challenge the idea that we can ever know what is really “out there,” because our perceptions are filtered through the sensory screens of the nervous system. Paul Watzlawick (1984), one of the early researchers in family communication, summed up this situation by describing the knower as the pilot of a ship that is navigating a difficult channel at night. If he gets through successfully, he does not know what was really there, only that he has not hit a rock.

By the eighties, this skepticism was amplified by an intellectual movement called postmodernism that had a long history in European thought. Its adherents were a brilliant group of linguists and literary critics that were influenced by philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953), Jacques Derrida (1978), Michel Foucault (1972), and Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984). Put all together, the effect of these writers’ work was to undermine the truth claims of philosophy, the objective standards of science, and the assumptions of social and psychological research. The postmodernists accused the modernists of believing in “totalizing truths” and “grand narratives.” The modernists declared their opponents to be relativists without values. The quarrel spilled over from the academy into other fields, including family therapy, where it created much argument but also an explosion of new energy and ideas.

Meanwhile, out in the real world that some of us no longer believed in, family therapy was losing its borders and becoming a goal-oriented, shortterm type of work. The managed care movement, with its demands for accountability, had pushed the field up against the wall. Our research results, although not any worse than other brands of therapy (Shadish, Ragsdale, & Glaser, 1995), were not outstanding, in part because our approaches had not emphasized outcome. Despite years of experimentation, family therapy had reached no firm conclusions and seemed mainly fortified by the assumptions of popular psychology and the loyalties of small believing bands. I was shocked when, as recently as 1994, I began taking one of the new drugs that alter serotonin levels and experienced immediate and lasting relief from catastrophic fears that had crippled me throughout my entire life.

This experience left me more confused than ever before. Even if emotional suffering were partly a matter of brain chemistry, there were obviously other influences. How did one decide what they were? In a kind of mission creep, each successive approach to family therapy had added a rich new bank of suspects to the roster. Starting modestly with schizophrenia, we moved on to parent-child problems, marital woes, developmental lacunae, traumatic events, life-stage stuckness, gender discrimination, sexual abuse, violence, addiction, poverty, and all the injustices of race, ethnicity, and class. Following an increasingly medical vocabulary, every difficulty was being turned into a disease, a deficit or a disorder, and claims and counterclaims were proliferating within what was now calling itself behavioral health.

This seemed like a good time to assess the family therapy field. As it evolved, it resembled a version of the scissors, stone, paper game of my childhood, except that it kept marching up a set of stairs. Family therapy trumped individual therapy, systemic therapy trumped family therapy, feminist therapy trumped systemic therapy, multicultural therapy trumped feminist therapy, and so on. But this formulation implied an upward and onward progression, which I distrusted. Also, each of these models pointed to a different location for distress, as well as a different recipe for how to handle it, and each had enough good points to make it hard to choose between them.

One solution was to set aside the models. In explaining why, I find myself revisiting the story of my mother’s ashes. My mother, Ruth Reeves, was a textile designer, one of the first artists to put modern design on cloth. Equally in love with folk design, she spent the last ten years of her life in India, creating a catalog of village crafts and textiles for the Indian government. In 1966, having been diagnosed with cancer, she was sent back to the States. Her young Indian assistants thought they would never see her again, but after only three months of treatment, she came back, appearing to have risen from the dead and eager to complete her work.

She died a year later of a heart stoppage. Her Indian friends took half her ashes and sprinkled them in a place reserved for highly evolved persons where the Jumna and the Ganges rivers meet. The other half was sent back in care of my sister. Shortly after that, I was cleaning out Ruth’s studio with a friend and came upon some metal canisters containing powdered colors: blue, red, yellow, white, gray. I checked each one and then set it aside to throw out. My friend was struck by the intricate design chased onto the copper surface of one of the cans. Looking inside, she said, “I don’t think this is powdered paint.” I looked too. It was my mother!

Thus began a family quandary. We knew she wanted to be buried on the land where she had built her house, but I was afraid that some future developer might come and bulldoze it up. After talking to a number of people, an anthropologist friend came to my rescue. He said, “Look, your problem is not the ashes but the urn. All you have to do is take the ashes out and you can do what you like with them.” This suggestion brought immediate relief. Once her ashes were out of the container, it seemed no problem to bury them in her favorite spot: a mossy place where two streams flowed together, surrounded by ferns and presided over by a tall tulip tree.

I used this story to explain the liberation that comes from throwing away the container. Not only was I leaving the container behind, but I was also abandoning the container that contained the container: in my case, the “modern” worldview. So I asked myself, “What are the biggest hits of family therapy?” I thought that if I just listed some important examples of what therapists did, I might get useful answers. My list of favorite ideas and techniques included triangles, genograms, boundaries, paradoxes, secrets, circular questions, externalizing questions, reflecting teams, and more. It kept getting longer until it began to remind me of a tower of Babel. Baffled, I asked myself how I could reconcile these competing practices, each of which was attached to a competing point of view.

Then I had a rescuing thought. Perhaps the real biggest hit of the family therapy movement was its power to fold back upon itself and change. An evolutionary image came to mind. I began to think of the field as a Jewish challah, or braided Easter bread, with early strands forming, then disappearing, then reappearing in a changed position or on another side. A later strand might compensate for a deficiency in an earlier one, but it was the conversation between the strands that made the entire braid so special.

This analogy had room for innovation and continuity both. Not only was there a place for new strands, but there was a place for new loaves. What particularly interested me about the idea of family therapy as a braid was that, in its self-revising journey, it had become able to critique itself at the level of its own premises. I have always been impressed by the number of family therapists who have used the insights of each new development to rethink their theories and practices rather than getting fixed in one particular school. Interestingly enough, postmodernism has played a helpful role in this process. Let me try to explain how.

In the history of large-scale literate frameworks, Western culture has had at least three: Augustine’s City of God, which defined the place of humans in the heavenly order; the Enlightenment framework, which followed the assumptions of the natural sciences; and now the postmodern view, according to which reality is constantly woven and rewoven on social and linguistic looms. Each framework is true within its own boundaries. Each allows things to be seen that are outside the purview of the others, and one can move back and forth between them, just as one can choose to speak another language. But let’s not forget that the modern framework dates back only to the 18th century, and that postmodernism has existed for scarcely any time at all.

So how has postmodernism changed the landscape of family therapy? As I have said, the ascendance of systems theory in the middle of the 20th century encouraged a theory of dysfunctional family structures and an active technology of change. The technical-rational point of view (see Schoen, 1984) had found a new beachhead in the budding field of family therapy. Then, just as this perspective solidified, an iconoclastic backlash hit. From Plato’s idea that we must learn to “carve nature at the joints,” we moved on to seeing that our conceptual systems create the joints we erroneously think we carve. As a result, the objectivist, one-way approaches of modernism began to be challenged by an interest in self-reflexive, open-ended processes that included therapists as well as clients in the loop.

It has been an engrossing experience to watch all this happen. Holding in mind my braided challah, I want to describe my own sense of how the various strands of family therapy evolved. An article by psychologist Margaret Singer (1997), one of family therapy’s foremothers, inspired my thinking. When I first met Singer in Palo Alto in 1963, she had recently performed a remarkable feat. The research group that had formed under Jackson had proposed that communication patterns in a family with a symptomatic child could be “read” by specialists in family communication. It should be theoretically possible to tell, on the basis of a conversation between the parents alone, whether the symptomatic child was a “schizophrenic,” a “delinquent,” or a “normal.” Singer was the only member of the group who was able to predict the correct diagnosis from a blind sample beyond the effects of chance, and she only did it once. However, rather than tag the theory incorrect, the experimenters preferred to assume that Singer had unusual psychic powers. Various family researchers continued to try to typologize families based on the symptom of the child for many years thereafter.

Later, in her book “Crazy” Therapies (Singer & Lalich, 1996), Singer compares a number of recent psychotherapies to cults or witch hunts. During the first part of the 20th century, she observes, the treatment of emotional illness moved from a rehabilitative framework based on the work of German psychologist Adolf Meyer to an etiological or causative one based on Freudian psychodynamics and developmental theory. This shift, according to Singer, had unfortunate consequences. Freudian theory had fostered an emphasis on the family as a source of psychic injury, and this view, backed up by developmental research on children, created a hostile environment for parents. In time, we began to see what Singer (1997) and others have called the “blame and change game.” In other words, if you can find somebody in your family to blame, you can change. This idea was key for many individual therapies, but it was often disastrous in family therapy, as a host of humbled parents can attest.

The Mental Research Institute’s interactional view (Watzlawick, Weakland, & Fisch, 1974) was a happy exception to this blaming bias. From the beginning, the MRI emphasized a rhetorical rather than an etiological stance. If you believe that reality is constructed in the eye of the observer, you will naturally try to alter perceptions. As a result, instead of looking for causation and cure, they used language and suggestion to shape a different world of meaning. This approach was a welcome corrective to the blame and change game. For one thing, not only did you avoid pathologizing your customers but you liked them better too.

Another good aspect was the witty, hopeful character of this work. Paradoxical tasks became a way to play-act a problem and have it come out differently. Directives not to change took the customer’s so-called resistance and turned it into a wind at her back. This entire method, in fact, was an intervention into a field that took itself much too seriously. Once you began telling people to do more of what they were already doing, you adopted a habit of acceptance. People might look askance if told to practice stuttering really well for five minutes every day, but there was something about it that was an antidote to fear. Psychiatrist Richard Rabkin (1968) put it best when he said, “I believe that patients come by their problems honestly.”

The downside of this rhetorical strand was the way the customer was perceived. Family therapy was compared by theorists like Paul Watzlawick to a game of chess. The therapist, who knew the rules of the game, was the master player, while the family members were the pieces on the board. Not only is this picture condescending, but it is easy to see that therapists who bought into it would want to hide the thinking behind their moves. If customers knew the reasons behind paradoxical maneuvers, they might object. As a result, the proponents of this view sometimes seemed to be conducting guerilla warfare, not only against a psychotherapy establishment that didn’t take them seriously, but against the families who were coming to them for help.

The third strand to appear, the Milan systemic approach (Selvini Palazzoli, Boscolo, Cecchin, & Prata, 1978), blended elements from both etiological and rhetorical camps. The Milan team targeted a relationship knot which Mara Selvini, the founder of the team, described as an “imbroglio.” This was clearly a causal notion. But the team used a rhetorical technique to untie the knot: the famous counterparadox. One or two persons would interview the family, while the others watched from behind a screen. At the end, the observers would join with the interviewers to compose a paradoxical message to leave with the family. The formal separation between observers and families was further widened by the apparently illogical nature of the message.

In any case, the systemic strand modified itself. The invention of “circular questioning” (Selvini, Boscolo, Cecchin, & Praia, 1980c) gave Luigi Boscolo and Gianfranco Cecchin, who in 1980 started their own training institute, a tool for placing family members outside their accustomed places. It was then easier for them to become aware of the patterns they were caught in. As this form of questioning took off, the systemic hypothesis, with its somewhat accusatory feel, began to be replaced by open-ended reflexive formats. Cecchin’s special interest in qualities like curiosity and irreverence (Cecchin & Lane, 1991) was part of this trend, which focused on an inquisitive hopefulness rather than on descriptions of what was wrong.

In their invention of solution-focused therapy, Steve de Shazer (1985) and Insoo Berg (1994) now brought in a fourth strand. With the help of other colleagues (O’Hanlon & Weiner-Davis, 1989), they replaced the field’s historic interest in problem-talk with what they called solution-talk. Both kinds of talk depended on the use of rhetoric, but solution-talk emphasized possibility rather than pathology and had a vastly more sympathetic feel. In operationalizing this technique, de Shazer and Berg offered some simple and elegant suggestions for covering the grit in the oyster with pearl. “Exception” questions were used to look for any proof that things had changed, and the “miracle question” invited people to imagine how their lives would be if the problem disappeared. As a result of this optimistic outlook, the therapist became an ally and a friend.

Thinking back, the emphasis on solutions was a huge corrective. It counteracted the negative effect of the etiological view while adding humanity to the rhetorical one. However, there was a larger difficulty. Where in family therapy was there any awareness of gender? Feminist theorist Rachel Hare-Mustin (1988) accused systemic therapists of practicing therapy within the “mirrored rooms.” Her objection, it’s only fair to say, was part of the powerful movement of critical feminism that was challenging the masculine bias built into fields like developmental psychology (Burman, 1994), language studies (Crawford, 1995), and sexology (Tiefer, 1995), to name only a few. Writers like Elaine Showalter (1985) exposed male dominance in fields like mental health, and journalist Barbara Ehrenreich (1978) took on male arrogance period. Into this battle stepped the Women’s Project (Walters, Carter, Papp, & Silverstein, 1988; see also Goodrich, Rampage, Ellman, & Halstead, 1988), which attacked the gender-blindness of family therapy head on. Another strand was born.

Culture and race were the logical next issues. A lively multicultural movement started up, led by writer-therapists like Monica McGoldrick (McGoldrick, 1988; McGoldrick, Anderson, & Walsh, 1989; McGoldrick, 1998), and Celia Falicov (1998). Ethnic groups were asking to be treated with respect and to be allowed to treat their own. African-American family therapists threw their special agenda on the table (Boyd-Franklin, 1989), and some of them pointed out that using the term “multicultural” could be seen as a way to avoid taking a stand on racism. Amid this useful ferment, leaders of academic family therapy programs like Kenneth Hardy (Hardy & Laszloffy, 1995) developed the “cultural genogram,” which punched more holes in the mirrored rooms. Hardy was one of the first African-American family therapists to bring postmodern social criticism to bear on issues of race.

Then came the narrative approach, which placed privilege itself under the microscope. The originators of this approach, Michael White and David (1990; White, 1995), exchanged the metaphor of systems for the metaphor of stories. Taking their cue from the ideas of Foucault (Rabinow, 1984), they redefined therapy as helping people “re-author” their lives. Foucault had identified some of the institutional and cultural discourses that invisibly constrain and oppress people. White and Epston saw these as discourses of entitlement: the belief of whites that they are superior to non-whites; the belief of men that they have the right to dominate women; the belief of heterosexuals that homosexuals are abnormal; and so forth. Training in narrative therapy began to serve as a re-education movement for professionals who wanted to move out of the solipsism of culture, race, and class. Dismaying in some ways, this proactive stance was a relief after the neutrality of the systemic years.

Another strand now appeared that tucked itself under a postmodern banner and called itself a collaborative approach. Led by the late Harold Goolishian and Harlene Anderson (Anderson, 1997; Anderson & Goolishian, 1988), this group turned for support to the constructionist framework proposed by social theorists like Kenneth Gergen (1994) and John Shotter (1993b). Following Lyotard’s dictum of “incredulity toward meta-narratives” (1984), these therapists also began to question the assumptions that underlay the practice of present-day professionals: the idea of the expert, the idea of objectivity, the idea of control. If you watch collaborative therapists at work, you will see that they do not seem to care about goals and methods. The not-knowing stance of Anderson and Goolishian (1988), the reflecting team process of Tom Andersen (1991), and the poetic activism of Peggy Penn (Penn & Frankfurt, 1994) are examples of a style that prefers to follow openings as they surface rather than imposing a predetermined scheme.

Although my own work seems to belong in this category, I am unwilling to leave other outlooks and methods behind. Many stay with me, if only as presences in my mind. This is why I like the image of the braided challah. It allows me to float in and out of the many currents of family therapy and to reflect back on what Katz and Shotter (1996) call the “arresting moments” of the field. Since the beginning of my immersion in this enterprise, I wanted to see what people did, not what they said they did. The late Donald Schoen’s unusual treatise The Reflective Practitioner (1984) offers many good reasons for watching therapeutic practice from within. Let me explain.

The Swampy Lowlands

Donald Schoen (1984) was a questioning organizational consultant who asked why the technical-rational view of modern science should be the preferred framework for all professional fields. This framework did well in the case of medicine and engineering, but was not so good when applied to what Schoen called the “swampy lowlands” of such areas as theology and social work. So Schoen did something unusual: he watched in person, for hours at a time, while practitioners and students in “soft” sciences like city planning or organizational consulting engaged in their teaching or their craft. Stranger yet, he paid little attention to the times when the practitioner was working smoothly, only to the times when she changed direction or hit a wall.

In a chapter with the nice title “Design as a Reflective Conversation with the Situation,” Schoen described standing behind a student of architecture while she sketched in the plan for a building project. Every once in a while, he noticed that she stopped short, erased lines, or crumpled the paper and started over. At these moments Schoen would ask her, “Why did you stop? Why did you go in another direction?” Generalizing from cases like this, he said he would first get what he called an “espoused theory.” The student would give a cursory but conventional answer. However, if Schoen persisted, the student would usually come up with a reply that was more fine-grained and thoughtful. This he called a “theory-in-use.” It was the kind of theory that arose from the operational level and was usually accessible to the practitioner’s consciousness only when she was experiencing a breakdown.

Schoen called the process of getting at these subterranean theories “reflection-in-action,” meaning that you generalize from your experience within the activity. This mode, he said, puts a high value on metaphoric frameworks like “as if” exercises and the use of “virtual worlds” like sketch pads and stories. Simulated actions like “seeing as” and “doing as” were other examples. Schoen says that this activity is not like ordinary research because the inquirers have no objective quarry in mind but are looking for something far more elusive: the situation’s potential for transformation (1984, p. 166).

I felt that this type of inquiry, which Schoen called “reflective conversation,” was exactly the kind I wanted to undertake in the present book. I wanted to revisit the experiences, ideas, and influential relationships that informed me during my journey, and present them from two vantage points: as I perceived them at the time and as I perceived them looking back. I wanted to create a legacy out of those situations that had acted on me most powerfully, that had wrenched my thinking and my practice out of their usual groove, and that I felt would most interest a beginning practitioner in any number of helping fields.

It is true that I have been selective in the tales I have included and the persons whose work I have highlighted. For instance, I have not included the important solution-focused approach of Berg and de Shazer, or given space to the imaginative tradition blazed by followers of Milton Erickson, or expounded on the remarkable contribution of feminism to family therapy. If I took a third-person descriptive view, as most histories of the field do and as my own books have done, I felt I would be violating my contract with myself. I wanted to include only firsthand materials and focus on the reflective conversation between myself and the ever-changing environment of my profession.

Another reason for being selective was more programmatic: I wanted to create a counter-tradition to the strategic approach that had influenced me so strongly early on. I once asked family theorist Jay Haley why he never told a trainee in one of his teaching tapes the reasons for the directives he gave. He said, “I’m not interested in ‘why.’ I’m only interested in ‘what.’” Then he added, as if he needed an exclamation point, ‘‘Dogma!” At the time, I felt that Haley was excluding the student from the process on principle, but I began to think later that this posture had something to do with the deliberate masquerades of hypnotic technique. Partly in reaction, and partly under the influence of Gregory Bateson’s (1972) notable distrust of “conscious purpose,” I began to move toward a more open, more mutual, and less controlling style.

The stories in this book document my trajectory, seeking out those experiences and events that led to the stance I think of as a “different voice” (Gilligan, 1982). At the start of my journey, as I say in the first chapter, I felt like an arrow shot from a great bow. I had no idea what it was aimed at or where it would fall. At the time, I said to myself that I was crazy, that after a period of madness I would wake up and find myself back in the sane world. To my amazement, that never happened. I continued to experience the sense of being on some meaningful trajectory toward some unknowable destination. Only recently did the arrow fall to earth. Then I finally did begin to feel sane, but only because the perceptions of those around me began to match my own.

In a recent paper, social performance therapist Fred Newman (2000) describes postmodern therapy as a study of the unknowable, meaning the domain of things that cannot be “discovered” in the same way that things in the physical universe can. For this reason, he states that storytelling should be seen as “a non-explanatory mode of understanding the activity of human life.” I like that idea. I want to continue to be not-knowing at the level of the road map while still exploring the road. If you are like me, you will remember the sand tunnels we used to dig as children at the beach, and that delicious final moment when the sand began to crumble and our fingers touched.