7
The Continental Divide
The Death of Bateson
The period leading up to and away from 1983, when I decided to move up to New England, has always felt to me like a continental divide. It is the place at the spine of the continent where the flow of water reverses course. When, in 1980, Gregory Bateson died, the event intensified a malaise I had already been feeling. I had often observed that a death in a family released upheavals, like underwater tsunamis, that could impact shorelines far away. In the family of family therapies, Bateson’s death seemed to identify a schism that had always lurked within its history but was never sharply perceived. In trying to understand this rift, a position became clear to me that deeply challenged the way I thought about my craft.
My devotion to the field of family therapy had been channeled through the persons who introduced it to me. When I was eight, I played Miranda in a children’s theater version of The Tempest. I never forgot the emotions of wonder and awe (my own emotions, surely) that went with the line Miranda speaks on first seeing the shipwrecked nobles: “Oh brave new world that hath such creatures in it.” I bestowed upon the survivors of the Bateson group, gathered under the roof of the MRI after Bateson’s departure, the same type of uncritical admiration. Thinking at first that the group was united in the glow of a common achievement, I later realized that they had many philosophical differences among them. The discord between Bateson and Haley had been sharp enough that Bateson referred to it in later writings (Sluzki & Ransom, 1976, p. 106).
I first realized this split in the late ’70s, when I had the chance to meet Bateson for the first time. He was speaking at Roosevelt Hospital to a group of psychiatry residents. I remember their confusion when he challenged the term schizophrenia. He told them it was a “dormitive principle,” using the tautology that Molière’s learned doctors employed to explain sleep. The hostile residents threw dart-like questions at him, and he deflected them with his usual rambling indirection. Squatting on a low set of steps at the end of the room, rather than standing behind the podium, he seemed to care nothing for the rules of academic dignity. I noticed that his shirt had a triangular gap where it met his belt buckle. Beguiled by the flow of words and the swirl of smoke from his cigarette, I waited with fascination to see how long the ash would get before falling on his chest.
After the talk, I took my courage in hand and went up to introduce myself. You have to remember that for me this was the equivalent of being presented at court. Doing the honors for myself, I said, “Mr. Bateson, I wrote a book on family therapy with Jay Haley, and I wanted to meet you. My name is Lynn Hoffman.” I am fairly tall, but he was even taller, and I felt him considering the top of my head. Then he said, referring to our book, “Oh, Haley and Hoffman. That Hoffman.” And he turned to the next person. I was perplexed. Being connected with Haley was not the right letter of introduction, but I had no idea why.
The answer came much later from a young newcomer to the Ackerman staff, Bradford Keeney, who had just published a book on cybernetic epistemology called The Aesthetics of Change (1983). I thought of Keeney as a Fourth of July sparkler. He was a captivating talker and despite the fact that you couldn’t always remember what he had just said, you wanted to listen to him anyway. Keeney had visited Bateson in California shortly before he died and had published some of their conversations in the form of metalogues. When I told him about my disappointing meeting, he told me that Bateson still carried strong feelings about his disagreement with Haley, and that I shouldn’t take it personally.
Around this time there came an event of the sort that congeals one’s loyalties. Keeney had written a paper critiquing the “pragmatic” point of view in family therapy because it was based on a strategic rather than an aesthetic set of values (1982). He cited Bateson for support, and his paper was published along with two other pieces that took a similar view. A number of defensive comments came rushing back to Family Process, mostly from supporters of the strategic schools of thought. Then Haley sent in some pages of a manuscript that he claimed to have found stuck to the bottom of a chimpanzee cage. His “sample” consisted of sentences taken in alternating order of appearance from the three first pages of each article. Because the articles were written in an abstract latinate prose, this patch job was almost believable. Of course, you had to assume that the author was a mad philosopher with a tin ear and very poor writing skills.
Haley’s pastiche rather cruelly ridiculed Keeney and the two other writers, whose language seemed to come from the same New Age science vocabulary, but for me the event was useful because it opened up the schism in the field. Haley (1968) had placed power at the center of his theories about family systems. He believed that in “pathological” family systems, each family member tried to control the behavior of the others, forcing the therapist to take control at the level of the therapeutic process. Bateson had disagreed with the emphasis on power. In a comment on Haley’s history of the Bateson project, he says,
As I saw it, he [Haley] believed in the validity of the metaphor of power in human relations. I believed then—and today believe even more strongly—that the myth of power always corrupts because it proposes always a false (though conventional) epistemology, (in Sluzki & Ransom, 1976, p. 106)
In other words, “power” was the kind of abstraction that did not mean anything in itself. You had to specify: is it power over? power that enables? the power of faith? of force? Words like “crime” and ‘”play” were similar abstractions. Bateson called such words epistemological errors because they turned complicated processes into noun-like abstractions while ignoring the context that gave them their meaning. Bateson’s position had an incendiary effect on feminist critics of family theory, who naturally wanted to defend the concept of power. They kept asking, “What do you mean, the myth of power? What about battered women? That’s not a myth.” They liked Haley’s problem-solving approach because he acknowledged power and believed in directives for change.
But the feminists’ objections melted in the face of my commitment to Bateson’s views. Just before he died, he gave a lecture in a huge barn-like structure on Union Square in New York. It was raining and the roof leaked. Bateson, looking very tired, produced his usual seamless stories like colored scarves out of a magician’s sleeve. During intermission, he sat behind his table, looking down at his notes. I felt that this was my last chance to present myself. I came to the far edge of the table, kneeling down to be more in line with his face, and said, “Mr. Bateson, my name is Lynn Hoffman, and fifteen years ago, in Palo Alto, you changed my life.” He looked at me, puzzled, and then he smiled and said, “Why thank you, lady. Thank you.” That was it, and I went back to my seat. He died a year later.
But I was back on track. The idea of a less-purposive therapy had once more taken me by the hand, and this was when I thought of moving away from Ackerman to pursue what I thought of as “religious freedom.” I also wanted to renew my life in a country community like the one I grew up in, where small was beautiful and I could live by my wits. I had read in the paper that the five college area around Amherst, Massachusetts, was a newly popular spot for retirees. My youngest daughter was about to finish up at Hampshire College, and a number of colleagues who lived in New England were pressing me to come there. In deference to my daughter’s request to “stay out of her back yard” until she graduated, I waited until 1983 and then bought a Greek Revival farmhouse near the University of Massachusetts.
It was the sort of obliging house that crumbles one bit at a time so that you can keep up with the repairs. I was particularly pleased by the two huge weeping willows that flanked it. Nobody told me that its immense branches would keep falling down in windstorms, endangering my house and that of my neighbor. I was afraid that the rare Greek Revival barn in back would fall down too, but it just swayed in place like a quiet drunk. I loved that house because it was so different from my Upper East Side efficiency apartment, which never needed me to care about it and never gave anything back. Not only the house but the university community around it seemed to welcome me with open arms.
When I arrived in Amherst in the spring of 1983, someone told me that, “The concrete never sets on the University of Massachusetts.” This saying alluded to the building programs that were constantly tearing up the campus, but it seemed also to apply to the School of Education, which had a particularly powerful history of tearing down traditions and building up new ones. It had been revitalized in the ’70s under the aegis of educator Dwight Allen, who actively sought out African Americans and other minorities for the faculty, played down the necessity for advanced degrees, and created a renaissance in teaching and consulting.
Fortunately, I did not arrive at the University of Massachusetts as a total stranger. In 1978, the Chairman of the Department of Psychology, Harold Raush, had asked me to attend a conference he had designed called “Close Relationships.” Himself a pioneering researcher on the interaction patterns of couples (1974), he had read my paper on “Deviation-Amplifying Processes in Natural Groups,” and was sufficiently impressed to ask me to be one of the discussants. This was the first time that I had been noticed by anyone from the academic world, which I always stepped into with the awe of the outsider. Later acquaintance with the Psychology Department was disappointing, however. Except for a few social psychologists like Raush, it consisted of a psychodynamic clinical wing and a very behavioral research wing.
It was the School of Education, not the Psychology Department, that was the birthplace of the University’s outstanding family therapy program. Family therapist Evan Imber-Black, its founding mother, had been asked by psychiatrist Karl Tomm to teach at the University of Calgary in Alberta just before I arrived, and the vacuum she left behind suctioned me in. There were many gifted family therapists working all over the Valley, and many gifted teachers like Janine Roberts, the director of the Family Therapy Program at UMass, who had replaced Imber-Black. Soon after I arrived, social work educator Ann Hartman came to Northampton as dean of the Smith School of Social Work, along with her partner, researcher Joan Laird. I became an adjunct lecturer, first at UMass, then at Smith, and later at psychologist Catherine Kikoski’s Marriage and Family Therapy Program at St. Joseph College in West Hartford. I continued to give workshops in the U.S. and abroad, and I always had a study group going on in my home.
I also set up a private practice. The Valley was well known for its thriving cottage industry of therapists of every stripe. A young woman called me while I was still in New York, saying she had heard I was coming to the area and asking if I could see her. When I said that I wouldn’t be arriving for some months, she asked for a recommendation. I gave her the name of a man I knew. She said she wanted to see a woman. I told her that I had heard that there were 400 women family therapists in the Valley alone. She said plaintively, “I am one of the 400 women therapists.” She didn’t want to go to any of them because she knew them, and because they were young like herself. I realized that it would be a plus to be the Oldest Living Woman Family Therapist in the Valley.
What I appreciated most, however, was the social justice bias of the Family Therapy Program. Soon after I arrived, I asked Roberts if we could create a Milan-style team at the University’s Clinical Services Center. Alexander Blount, who was the director of an innovative halfway house called Crossroads in Holyoke, also joined us, as well as the late Stuart Golann, who taught in the Psychology Department at UMass and was a pioneer in the community mental health movement. As the project did not pay anybody, it collapsed into myself and Roberts during its second year, but I still felt privileged. Roberts was a brilliant hands-on practitioner whose work reminded me of raisin bread, because it was so stuffed with rituals, tasks and stories. Roberts and Blount had been hosting a yearly participants’ conference at the University, where the many family therapists working and studying throughout the Valley presented their ideas to each other, and by attending them I got to know my new community in record time.
It was at a special workshop hosted by the Family Therapy Program that I was “presented.” I was the therapist for a role-play mother and daughter. The daughter’s symptom was intractable asthma, and soon after I started the interview she began very realistically choking to death. It was a bad moment, as I saw my entire reputation going down the drain. In the nick of time, William Matthews, an Ericksonian hypnotherapist who taught in the School of Education, saved the day. He crashed the interview and calmed the daughter down with an elegant hypnotic induction woven around the metaphor of a jazz riff. This was my introduction to another gifted colleague. For several years we did co-therapy and workshops together, each learning from the other.
My move, however, placed me in a new period of uncertainty, much like the time twenty years before when I had jumped into an unknown field with no institutional support. Now, as then, I felt only a vague connection with my guiding star. I had let go of the entire objective universe in the hope that a “zen” of family therapy would appear. Of course it didn’t, but the answer was spinning away behind my back, like those times in the wash cycle when the machine is silent and you think it’s turned off. Unbeknownst to me, the road was readying itself below my feet.
The Different Voice
A year after I came to Amherst, I attended a conference at the University of Massachusetts called “Is the Earth a Living Organism?” I had the uncomfortable feeling that this was going to be the New Age equivalent of four days in church. I could not have been more wrong. Among the speakers were Lynn Margolies, the molecular biologist; chemist James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis; physicist George Wald, the Nobel prize winner; and writer Mary Catherine Bateson, who was at the time dean of Amherst College. This stellar cast held a large audience of fuzzy-looking people spellbound for four days. They told story after story until science began to look like legend and magic began to sound like common sense.
It was at this event that I first met Catherine Bateson. She invited me to her home and showed me sections of Angels Fear (1987), the book she and her father were co-authoring at the time he died. Daughter Catherine was now composing the metalogues (the imaginary conversations between father and daughter that the elder Bateson had created for Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972), but this time it was the daughter who put words in the father’s mouth. In “Persistent Shade” the last metalogue in the book, a ghostly father complains about the misuse of his ideas, and says, “The engineers get hold of them. Look at the whole godawful business of family therapy, therapists making ‘paradoxical interventions’ in order to change people or families, or counting ‘double binds.’ You can’t count double binds.”
Here was yet another message about the dangers of conscious purpose. For both Batesons, schemes designed to control human behavior were as chancy as schemes to control nature. As I knew from experience, such schemes often backfired in serious, unexpected ways, but since they bolstered up many forms of psychotherapy, they persisted. The first inkling I had that any other theorists were thinking along similar lines was when I read In a Different Voice by Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan. This book gave me an experience of sudden light. Let me explain why.
Gilligan was a different feminist from the kind I knew. I had danced around the edges of the Women’s Movement of the ’70s, amazed at the insights it produced. However, as with the Marxism of my youth, there was too big an element of “Who is not with us is against us” to make me happy. Gilligan, in pointing to the idea that women have an epistemology of their own, offered me another way to think. Of course, Gilligan did not act in a vacuum; she was influenced by innovators like Nancy Chodorow (1978) and Jean Baker Miller (1976), who had created what Miller called a new psychology of women. Miller observed that where men tended to view their relationships as adversarial in nature, women viewed them in a framework of connection. Failure to recognize this difference, Miller said, had seriously distorted the field of psychology and done great injustice to the study of women’s lives.
Like the Minoan female athletes who somersaulted over bulls, Gilligan took these ideas by the horns. Noting that the classic study on stages of moral development by Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg (1981) was based on respondents who were all men, she set out to replicate this study in a format that included women, too. In so doing, she got some strikingly different results. At the highest stage of moral development, Kohlberg had found that his subjects followed abstract principles of truth and justice. Gilligan found that this was true of her male subjects, but not the women. It seemed that women would bend principles into pretzels to protect relationships.
The famous stimulus story, used by Kohlberg and borrowed by Gilligan, went thus: if a man needed a drug costing a thousand dollars to save his dying wife but was unable to pay for it, and the druggist refused to lower the price, what should the husband do? The men in Gilligan’s study gave answers that fit with a logic based on principles: since they put the principle of life above that of money, they thought the husband should steal the drug. The reason this answer was obvious to them was because it was congruent with the way they reasoned. One of the male subjects in Gilligan’s study described issues of morality as “sort of like a math problem with humans.”
When Gilligan’s women subjects were asked to solve this dilemma, they were far less sure of the answer. The question about stealing did not fit into their moral universe, which was based on what Gilligan called an “ethic of care.” In accordance with this different ethic, they felt that stealing the drug would endanger the relationships touched by this action, and they looked for a solution that preserved them. One woman, for instance, suggested that the husband “talk it out” with the druggist in the hope of getting him to be more charitable. Where the men resorted to clear rules of logic, the women saw the solution embedded in negotiation and communication, a much murkier context. Gilligan compared these two types of response by using the image of a hierarchy versus a network.
In addition to suggesting that the moral attitudes of men and women were different, Gilligan pointed out what feminists have been hammering at for a long time: women’s customs are treated as inferior to those of men. To quote a particularly nice statement of hers, “In the life cycle, as in the Garden of Eden, the woman has been the deviant” (1982, p. 6). Of course, being thought a deviant when your own perceptions tell you that you are right is a crazy-making situation. In the book Meeting at the Crossroads (Brown & Gilligan, 1992), Gilligan expands her critique to include the field of psychology as a whole. I was struck by one passage that prefigures the more communal practices I will be describing later on:
A relational practice of psychology moves beyond a revisionary interpretation of voices or texts. Such interpretation, in fact, ought to mark only the beginning of a dialogue, the initial move by the listener toward the forming of questions and ultimately toward a relationship in which both people speak and listen to each other, (p. 39)
These assertions by Gilligan and other feminist psychologists had enormous relevance for therapy. Theories of development based on research conducted by men, usually on other men, have created misleading myths about normal functioning. The concept that maturity is a matter of achieving individual autonomy is only one example. For years, individual therapy has been predicated on the idea that the differentiated self is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Popular notions of mental health follow this line, and dependency, often seen as a female trait, is devalued. Witness the derogatory label “codependent” for the mostly female spouses of alcoholics.
Another consequence has been to impose expectations of independence on women whose identity is defined by the web of obligations in which they live. Women are apt to be extremely responsive to family ties and influenced by sanctions against breaking them. They may find it difficult to leave a violent partner or denounce an abusive father. Women who come for help with such situations are often perceived by therapists as uncooperative, but they have their reasons. Because the act of leaving may jeopardize them and their children even further, they often fall into a confusion between loyalty, honesty, and survival as soon as therapy begins.
This dilemma is beautifully spelled out in the article “Love and Violence: Gender Paradoxes in Volatile Attachments” (Goldner, Penn, Sheinberg, & Walker, 1990), which addresses feminist issues in the context of battering but does not favor unilaterally taking sides. Similar perceptions resulted in the revolutionary work of the Stone Center at Wellesley College (Jordan & Surrey, 1986), which puts the quality of empathy center stage. Its practitioners have tried to follow the stories of their clients and really hear them, rather than imposing expectations from above. Their meetings often take the form of therapists sitting with groups of women as they share stories and sympathy together.
Family therapy opinions were also due for an overhaul. The early schools of family therapy had painted a particularly damaging picture of mothers. They were “overinvolved” if they were seen to be too concerned about their children, “disengaged” if they left them too much alone. Family therapists, like the courageous foursome who developed the Women’s Project at Ackerman (Walters, Carter, Papp, & Silverstein, 1988), began to address these injustices and call for changes in the language and practices of the field. Other feminist family therapists (Goodrich, Rampage, Ellman, & Halstead, 1988) put together case books that laid out clear differences between pre- and post-feminist ways of working.
Many of these writers saw therapy as a tool for the liberation of women. They attacked Gilligan’s approach as “difference feminism” and said that it trivialized women by treating them as superior servants. The law weighed in on the debate too. In some states, laws were passed forbidding therapists to see couples in cases of battering as long as the violence continued. When there was a question of sexual abuse of a child, family members would be siphoned off to individual therapists and kept apart, damaging functional family relationships as well as bad ones. Family therapists were often called to account if they presented a systemic framework for such problems at national meetings.
Mine was a different battle, however. It energized me to think that the customs of women could influence the customs of men. Mary Belenky and her colleagues Blythe Clinchy, Nancy Goldberger, and Jill Tarule (1986) had recommended that teachers allow students “to glimpse the process of their thinking, to see them groping in stages of imperfection.” In a woman-centered university, they wrote, fewer courses would be conducted in the “masculine, adversarial style of discourse” and more would rely on what Belenky called “connected teaching.” This was especially true in social and psychological studies. Morawski (in Hare-Mustin & Marecek, 1990) attacked conventional psychology, saying that,
feminist scholars have shown that what is reflected in the structure of science are social relations that are fitted to the experiences of men and a hierarchical social world. At the most visible level, images of science and of masculinity are mutually edifying: Both are signified through language as tough, rigorous, unemotional, rational, independent, competitive. This gender symbolism is now entrenched in contemporary psychology, (p. 166)
I found a counter-story for this idea in the Taviani brothers’ eloquent movie Kaos. At the beginning of the movie, which dramatizes five stories by Pirandello, you see a blackbearded Sicilian shepherd in the act of finding a male crow sitting on a nest on the ground. Lifting the bird, he sees that there are eggs in the nest. They are warm. He calls to his fellows, who come running. “Look at this crow,” he says, “It’s a male—a male who broods.” The other shepherds look on in amazement, then they begin to chide the bird: “What’s wrong with you? You’re a male. You shouldn’t be sitting on a nest!” They laugh, taking the eggs from the nest and throwing them at the bird. Then one of the shepherds grabs it. He draws a small bell from his pocket and ties it around the bird’s neck, pushing it off into the air. The movie shows the bird flying over the crags and hills of Sicily, with the bell ringing every time he flaps his wings. Between each story he appears again, flapping and ringing. The “male who broods” ties the stories together with the sound of his bell.
This bell has not been ringing very loudly. I recently heard about a psychologist in Rhode Island who gave to a sample of third graders across the state a hypothetical question that read: “If you were to wake up tomorrow morning and find you had become a girl (to the boys) or a boy (to the girls), what would you feel and what would you do?”The girls were enthusiastic and spoke of the many projects they would immediately undertake. The boys’ reaction was summed up in the statement: “I would kill myself.”
Nevertheless, I was inspired by my own version of the ringing bell. I began to interfere with the formats of conferences and workshops, seminars and classes. Noticing how quickly a seminar would divide into Lions who did all the talking, and Lambs who remained silent (in mixed groups, usually women), I would set up a circle as if I were holding an AA meeting. Everybody would have a space bubble in which to speak. Or I would divide the group into pods and ask each pod to talk together while the rest listened in. This last device harnessed the observation that many women, and some men too, will feel more free to speak in a small group than in a large one.
The down side of this activism was that I was often perceived as imposing my own preferences. At one large conference, I asked my fellow panelists, both male, to help me move the table with the microphones from the stage to the floor. Next, I placed the chairs in a semicircle on the platform so that we could talk with and look at each other when being asked questions by the audience. I objected to the usual “swallows on a telephone wire” format because it makes the speakers compete with each other for audience approval. On that occasion, one of the panelists was Ericksonian therapist Bill O’Hanlon, and after we had given our panel speeches and opened the conversation to the audience, he drew himself up cross-legged on his chair and announced, “I hate being collaborative.” I said to him later that, after years of putting up with hierarchical arrangements at male-oriented conferences, it was now my turn.
In looking for formats that supported a “different voice,” my concern was not about the oppression of one gender by another, but about widening the choice of communication styles. It is not true that a relational vocabulary belongs to women or that a hierarchical one belongs to men. Women have been more apt to learn how to respond to the nuances of relationship than men, but socialization is not destiny. Why not acting classes for women in male behavior, and acting classes for men in female behavior? I was delighted that gender was turning out to be such a myriad affair, and wished to refine and illuminate the concept of a different voice in family therapy for all sexes.
This was not a reassuring time for me. I did not agree with the political stance of feminist family therapy, and I had become uncomfortable with the instrumental stance of many of family therapy’s pioneers. It wasn’t until I left Ackerman that I got up enough courage to publish an article that challenged both positions. In “Beyond Power and Control” (1985), I made my case. I was worried that I might draw upon myself the wrath of the establishment, as Keeney had done, so I published the piece in Family Systems Medicine rather than a family therapy journal. To my relief, the article provoked little notice. However, it contained guidelines for a style of family therapy that later became widely accepted, so I will repeat them here. They were far more prescient than I could have known.
1. An “observing system” stance and inclusion of the therapist’s own context.
2. A collaborative rather than a hierarchical structure.
3. Goals that set a context for change, rather than specify a change.
4. Ways to guard against too much instrumentality.
5. A “circular” (non-causal) assessment of the problem.
6. A non-pejorative, non-judgmental view.
In the meantime, I struggled with valid objections to systemic concepts by feminists like Laurie McKinnon and Dusty Miller. In an important paper on domestic violence (1987), they pointed out that the problem with doing family therapy in situations of battering or sexual abuse was that it put the victim and the victimizer on the same level. Systemic ideas, by assigning equal weight to everyone in the system, were clearly unjust. However, using therapy to further an ideological agenda rather than the goals of those who consulted you seemed wrong, too. And seeing that in the politicized atmosphere of the ’80s any support for my different voice would be long in coming, I turned to a group of unusual researchers who seemed to have inherited Bateson’s mantle. With them, at least, I felt safe.
The Constructivists
Starting in the ’50s, due to advances in artificial intelligence and computing, a group of scientists came along who were redefining the nature of knowing. Among those persons were the visionary biologist Umberto Maturana, the computational genius Heinz von Foerster, the radical constructivist Ernst von Glasersfeld, and the late logician Francisco Varela. These researchers thought of themselves as “constructivists.” Their writings supported an attack on the notion of objective reality that was often confused with social construction theory (of which more later), but in their case had roots in the biology of cognition.
The position that had most implications for therapy was Maturana’s idea that human beings were barricaded behind the sensory architecture of the brain. This led to the belief that we can never really “know” the reality of the world or of another person, hence Maturana’s famous statement: “There can be no instructive interaction.” Another of their ideas was “second order cybernetics,” meaning a system where the loop includes the observer, as opposed to a “first order cybernetics,” where the observer is left out. This was important because it undermined the assumption that the researcher, or therapist, could ever claim objectivity in dealing with human affairs.
This skepticism about “the truth” had always existed in philosophical discourse, but these four researchers challenged it in a novel way: they pointed to the shaping power of the mind’s eye. From then on, one could never refer to family dynamics but only to an observer’s perception of family dynamics. Maturana dramatized this position by placing the icon of an eye in a corner of the blackboard whenever he lectured. This signal cued us to remember that our ideas about the things we saw were not necessarily the way they really were. All we could pick up was a kind of negative knowledge, the experience of the pilot of a plane who lands his craft safely in a fog at night using his autopilot. Even though he knows his knowledge was adequate for the task, all he has really done is to align his indicators correctly on his instrument panel (Maturana & Varela, 1980).
I had first met von Foerster in California in 1982, during a conference sponsored by the MRI called “Maps of the Mind, Maps of the World.” Von Foerster was an engineering genius from Vienna and a nephew of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. He came to the U.S. after the war to take part in building the first generation of computers and became a secretary for the legendary Josiah H. Macy conferences, which started after World War II. During these meetings, rocket scientist Norbert Wiener (1954) introduced the newly named field of cybernetics to an interdisciplinary world. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead were among those who took part in these conversations, which went on for ten years, feeding indirectly into Bateson’s research project in Palo Alto in the ’50s.
With his characteristic effervescence, von Foerster invited me to come to a conference he was planning with Maturana, Varela, and von Glasersfeld in New Hampshire. It seemed that they had got money from the Navy to hold a Gordon Conference (a small meeting on a narrow scientific specialty) on cybernetics, except that their aim was to design a Macy-style cross-disciplinary event. Family researchers Carlos Sluzki and Paul Watzlawick had originally been asked to speak on family therapy but were unable to come at the last minute, so Von Foerster asked me to substitute. Not wanting to do this alone, I asked a few family therapists from the Amherst area to go up with me. I knew that my band of colleagues would help me out.
Suffering intensely at the prospect of having to speak in front of so many credentialed individuals, I prepared my talk carefully. I took the position that the strategic schools of family therapy were founded on first order “input-output” models used by cybernetic engineers. I argued that we had to find second order models that would include the observer. I promoted doubts about the idea of the therapist as a “change agent.” I attacked the belief that we could ever fully understand “the world out there,” let alone the structure of a family system. My talk, like a few presentations in my life before, had aspects of what I thought of as “channeling,” the sense that a spirit is speaking through you. Whoever was giving this talk (the Persistent Shade?), it was received with interest, and I felt that I had passed an invisible test.
This Gordon Conference was followed by several more, bringing some of us family therapists into a wider intellectual world. I remember Haley saying, “Reading rots the mind,” and stating that new ideas only get into the universities ten years after they surface. Even Bateson was what a colleague of mine once called a “vertical genius,” meaning someone who seems to drop out of the sky fully formed and rarely cites anyone else. But the people at the Gordon conferences were from every country, had illustrious degrees, taught or composed or painted or invented, and many represented the cutting edge in artificial intelligence and computer science. It was at one of these conferences that I first heard the term “postmodernism,” introduced by a young literary theorist who was brimming with the ideas of a French philosopher called Jacques Derrida. Her talk seemed so pretentious and obscure that I dismissed it out of hand.
After attending these conferences, I wrote two articles relating ideas like second order cybernetics, autopoiesis, and observing systems, to the world of the family therapist. These pieces appear in my book Exchanging Voices (1993), and contain most of the information about constructivism that any family therapist would ever want to know. As it turned out, however, the most important concept I stumbled on during those years had to do not with philosophy but with an ancient Irish story about the Fifth Province. This turned out to be the philosopher’s stone for which I had been searching, and it came to me indirectly through a phenomenon I called the Milan teams meetings. Let me explain what these were.
The Milan Teams Meetings
After Foundations of Family Therapy came out in 1981, I began traveling. My book was translated into several languages, including Japanese, and I became a worldwide lecturer on family therapy. My trips often coincided with the summer conferences organized in the Italian lakes during the ’80s by Luigi Boscolo and Gianfranco Cecchin, which offered an idea exchange for family therapists from many countries. North Americans may have helped to start family therapy, but the Milan teams movement created an international presence that is still expanding today. Many of the people who attended these meetings not only started systemic teaching centers of their own, but also became the purveyors and initiators of some of our best new ideas.
One of the earliest of such teams was the one at Ackerman to which I referred earlier, consisting of Peggy Penn, John Patten, Jeffrey Ross, and myself. But we were only one of many. In London, Ros Draper and David Campbell started a program in systemic therapy at the Tavistock Clinic. Martin Little and Peter and Susan Lang created a program at the Kensington Center based on the communication-oriented model of Barnett Pearce and Vern Cronin (1980). Brian Cade, Bebe Speed, and Philippa Seligman held forth at the Family Institute in Cardiff, Wales, and John Burnham and
Queenie Harris designed a training program in Birmingham. Tom Andersen and his team brought systemic ideas to the University of Tromsø in Norway and Mia Anderssen, Klaus Grevelius, and Ernst Solomon started a research group in Stockholm. There was Michael White’s innovative Dulwich Center in Adelaide, South Australia, and Karl Tomm and Lorraine Wright’s systemic collaboration at the University of Calgary in Alberta. Last but not least, Imelda McCarthy, Phil Kearney, and Nollaig Byrne began teaching family therapy at the Mater Hospital in Dublin. This list does not include the many other innovators in family and systemic therapy in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Europe and the U.K., but it does give some indication of the farreaching influence of Boscolo and Cecchin.
It was around this time that Imelda McCarthy, Nollaig Byrne, and Phil Kearney, whom I first met when they visited the Ackerman Institute in 1981, asked me to Dublin to speak to a gathering of the Family Therapy Network of Ireland. I had been at a Milan conference on the island of Montisola in Italy, and getting to Ireland from there was easier said than done. After sleeping overnight on the floor of the Center for the Study of the Family in Milan, amid the ladders and paint cans of a renovation, I couldn’t get to Dublin until the middle of the day of my workshop. In spite of the terrible Irish telephone system, however, I was able to warn everyone that I would be late and Nollaig and Imelda bravely improvised until I appeared.
When I arrived, I was immediately thrown into the lion’s den of a clinical interview. Here, I was told, was a classic Dublin family: a pair of poor, struggling parents and their two little boys. The terrible thing was that their Dublin accent was as impregnable as a fort, and I couldn’t make out a word. So I sat and pretended to understand while the mother, a very expressive woman, went on and on about something that upset her very much. Finally, out of the fog came a word or two, something about “relations” and “six weeks.” I said, “You haven’t seen your relations in six weeks?” And the mother said, very loudly, as if to a deaf person, “No, sex relations, we haven’t had sex relations for six weeks.” At last I understood. But much to my horror, from the adjoining room, where the entire conference was watching the interview on closed circuit TV, there came the unmistakable roar of muffled laughter.
I don’t know how I got through the rest of that interview and don’t remember anything except the end, when I shook hands with the parents and thanked them. Then I bent down to say goodbye to the two little boys and wish them well. The older one gravely shook my hand and said in the sincerest possible tones, “And the best of luck to you too, Mrs. Hoffman.” Hearing the room next door boiling over with new hilarity, I couldn’t wait to get the family on its way. The family told the clinic later that they had enjoyed the interview very much. I wish I could have said the same.
As if to make up for this fiasco, Nollaig, Imelda, and Phil took me to a pub with an old fashioned snug (a corral of solid oak to protect females and clerics), and then to supper at the “Surf’n Turf.” It was a pleasantly bohemian place, with an Irish piper playing in the corner and a poet rising occasionally to declaim his verse. Nollaig immediately took me under her arm and we performed a jig between the tables. After I sat down, badly out of breath, the poet rose to make a satiric Ode to the Irish Telephone System. In fact, he was the same square shape as an Irish telephone box. Next we persuaded Phil’s girlfriend to sing a romantic Gaelic ballad, which she did in a high sweet voice. Finally, just as our meal arrived, the Irish poet stood in the doorway and said he was going to recite one more poem before leaving. He announced the title:“To Masturbation!” As usual, I could make out very few of the lines, but I did hear one couplet, which began: “Does the friar pull his wire?” and I think implicated the Pope. As soon as he had finished, he rushed out, the piper struck up again, and we finished our food.
But this story is really about the Fifth Province. Imelda was a self-appointed channeller from Ireland’s mystic past to family therapists of today. It was she who gave each visitor a tour of Joyce’s Dublin. It was she who acquainted me with the work of Louis Le Broquy, an artist who painted white-on-white ghost faces of Irish writers like William Butler Yeats. And it was she who acquainted me with the literary journal The Crane Bag, edited by one of Ireland’s brightest lights, Richard Kearney. She showed me where, in a piece in that journal, Kearney had written about the legend of the Fifth Province. But perhaps I should explain why it became so important to me.
The Dublin group often encountered family problems, like incest, that in Ireland usually fell between the legal system and the priests. In their effort to find a frame that fit these dilemmas, the group adopted the story of the Fifth Province (McCarthy & Byrne, 1988). It seemed that in the ancient days Ireland was divided into four provinces, each ruled by a king. However, there were often issues that no single king could rule on. To address this problem, or so the story goes, one day a year a place was set aside called the Fifth Province. There the kings could meet to solve conflicts on equal ground. True or not, this story proved to be of enormous help to Irish family therapists when working with families beset by abusive and illicit behaviors. If such things were dealt with at all, they were often left undefined and murky. The idea of a Fifth Province provided a way to get above the limitations of both justice and morality, and find a place where everyone could be heard.
To depict the structure of their work, the group created a diagram in the shape of a diamond. On this diamond they placed the different situations that a family therapist might expect to meet. Each of the four angles would represent one of the parties: this could be a person, a group, or an abstraction, like the legal system. The sides between the angles could be named differently too, according to the character of the relationship between each set: blame, protection, repentance, support. The entire politics of the situation could be represented on this simple map. I will give one example to show how it worked.
In the case of incest, which carries heavy penalties in Ireland and is heavily denied, the Dublin group would not speak of the “system of incest,” which would be traditional family-therapy-speak, but the “system of disclosure.” Disclosure, they said, often creates two warring camps. If incest is denied, this is either in protection of the family or of the father. If it is admitted to, this is usually in protection of the child. If a meeting were attended by the mother, father, daughter, and social worker, each angle of the diagram could represent any one of these persons. A “symmetrical” (equal) version of the diamond would be mother and father versus daughter and the social worker. A “complementary” (unequal) version would be mother, daughter, and social worker, with father excluded.
Whatever the configuration, the diamond showed clearly that the therapist could not side with any of the parties without pulling the family further apart. So the group drew a Celtic spiral in the middle of the diamond that signified the fluid position of the team. For instance, by focusing on disclosure rather than truth, the team stayed at a hovering level that allowed possibilities rather than judgments to be explored. They might bring up a question like “Is incest a crime or is it a sin?” This ambiguity offered a range of solutions from legal punishment to religious expiation, but most importantly it allowed a forbidden subject to be discussed.
The most striking impression I got from watching Byrne, who was a powerful interviewer, was the overwhelming importance of culture. Ireland, the group had told me, is “the country of no clear statements”; the collective Irish mind is “an ambivalent batch.” Since poetry’s medium is ambiguity, the group’s reliance on what one could dismiss as Celtic fairytales seemed very necessary to me. I felt that my own culture could benefit by using this language of ambiguity, if only to counteract our tendency to demand solutions couched in terms of right or wrong. It seemed to me that because we were bonded to a technical-rational code of justice, our legal system had not done well with any kind of family violence, and that we too needed a Fifth Province.
I held this powerful story close to me in the days to come, when it seemed as if incest, molestation, battering, and abuse were raining down on the heads of all family therapists and our collective search for solutions was going nowhere. In the next chapter, I want to introduce a major ally in this predicament, Harry Goolishian. It was Goolishian and his partner, Harlene Anderson, who tied my ideal of a different voice to practice. It was they who rescued me from the dilemmas of family justice. In fact, in their concept of‘‘not knowing,” they seemed to offer a Fifth Province of their own.