9

The Reflecting Team

No Backbone

When I first started at Brattleboro, we were using a Milan-style teaching team. Then, in 1986, Peggy Penn called me from New York to tell me that Tom Andersen (1987) was coming to Ackerman to demonstrate an innovation that he called a “reflecting team.” Penn had been corresponding with Andersen since the days of the Milan meetings and a bond of heightened creativity had evolved between them. They often experimented with each other’s new ideas, and Andersen had asked Penn and myself to seminars in Norway for several summers in a row. I immediately told Bill Lax and Dario Lussardi of the Brattleboro Family Institute and they decided to hold a workshop for Andersen in Vermont. Penn and her colleague Marcia Sheinberg had also been using the reflecting team idea, so we asked them to come too.

In a foreword I wrote for The Reflecting Team (Andersen, 1991), I said, “One could call this a book but one could also call it the description of a new flying machine.” Andersen’s idea was amazingly simple: he simply decided to switch the light and sound between the one-way room and the interviewing room, so that the family and therapist could listen in to what the team had to say, and vice versa. Even before I saw it in practice, I knew that its effect on the world of family therapy would be profound. In Foundations of Family Therapy, I had described a new technology of visibility—the one-way screen—that opened the therapy process to observing professionals. Now, nearly a half century after the mirror began to be used, this visibility was turned back upon professionals themselves.

When Andersen and a colleague, psychiatrist Magnus Hald, interviewed one of the Brattleboro families together with Bill Lax and a few of the staff, before our conference, I was amazed by how different their style felt. The interview had no structure apart from small groups commenting in turn, one after the other. There were no interventions, no lists of questions. No hierarchy, either; each group got to be the first horse on the merry-go-round. And the shock of no protection took my breath away. Suddenly it was clear to me what a conspiracy of silence our profession rests on. I found I began to shun not just clinical words but clinical thoughts, and psychological language, which came so easily during backstage exchanges between colleagues, now began to seem like a form of hate speech. But at the time, we had no inkling of the enormous influence this new format would have. Let me describe the interview that introduced it to us.

Bill Lax had been seeing a man, whom I will call Gabe, and his fiancée, Ruth, in couple therapy. A day before Andersen and Hald arrived, the man had collapsed suddenly at work, struck down by an intense anxiety. Lax went to see him in the hospital and found him barely able to speak, but he and his fiancée agreed to come in for a consultation with the Norwegians. We decided that our reflecting team would include Hald, Dario Lussardi, Judy Davidson (another staff member), and myself, while Lax and Andersen interviewed the couple. (Note: In describing interviews I took part in or watched, I will use first names.)

When the couple arrived, I remember being struck by Gabe’s brooding heaviness. He was a stocky man in his forties who looked physically powerful but sat with his head down, staring at the floor. Ruth, his fiancée, was a lively, dark-haired woman who had met Gabe the year before at a Parents Without Partners meeting. After introductions and an explanation about the reflecting team and the taping, Tom asked Bill about the history of his work with the couple. Bill described the issues they had been working on and shared his present concerns. He had no explanation for Gabe’s sudden collapse, nor did anyone else, and Gabe wasn’t speaking. Tom now turned to the couple. He spoke of his origins in the North of Norway and asked where their families came from. Ruth, speaking for Gabe, said his family had been in Vermont for generations and that her own grandparents had come from Italy.

This regard for place was a hallmark of Tom’s style. Before every workshop he would show videotaped clips of the mountains that surrounded his hometown of Tromsø, or play a tape he himself had made of wild bird cries from the nesting islands of the Arctic Circle. He believed that we should be forthcoming about our cultural and ecological context, and, like an anthropologist, held the idea that we only understand our own society by visiting another. He would periodically climb to the top of one of his favorite mountains so that he could come back to his home as a “small stranger.”

I noticed that by talking separately with Bill in front of the couple, Tom gave them a similarly reflexive experience. Then when he turned to the couple, he put Bill on the outside. It seemed that this alternation of being on the edge and being in the center was another hallmark of this new process. In this case, it was mostly Tom asking Ruth her impressions about Gabe’s situation while Gabe looked down and said nothing. All at once, Gabe burst out and said loudly, “I got no backbone!” He repeated this several times. Tom asked him what it meant. No further explanation was forthcoming, so he asked, “Who else in your family hasn’t got a backbone?” Gabe said, “None of them. My father got no backbone. My brothers and sisters got no backbone.” Ruth told Bill that on the day he broke down, he had run into his father, who worked in the same lumber business. It had apparently upset him, but Ruth had no idea why.

Now Gabe broke into heavy sobs. Tom sat quietly and said nothing for a long time. The sobbing finally diminished and Tom asked, “Who does have backbone?” Gabe replied, “My grandfather. He had backbone.” Tom asked, “Is your grandfather still alive?” Gabe said, “He died ten years ago.” Tom asked, “What do you remember about your grandfather?” Gabe seemed to go into a reverie. He said, “When I was a kid, we always used to go fishing. My grandfather had a bamboo pole with a safety pin on it and I had this fancy rig, and he always caught more fish than I did.” A long silence followed. Finally Tom asked, “If your grandfather were still alive, what would he tell you?” Gabe said, “He’d tell them to go to hell. All of them.”

At this point, we on the team changed places with the group in the room. I remember wondering what in the world a reflecting person was supposed to say, but I have also forgotten what we did say. I confess I was more interested in “what Tom did” than “what I did.” I was still thinking in terms of a Milan-style operation and assumed erroneously that the only difference would be that we would share our thoughts in front of the family rather than behind closed doors. In any case, we talked a bit, then went back behind the screen while Bill, Tom, and the couple took our place.

Further efforts on Tom’s part to get Gabe to talk only brought on more muteness mixed with anguished groans. Tom wondered aloud about stopping for the time being and asked whether Bill might want to meet Gabe alone. When Bill said “Yes,” Tom asked when Bill thought that might be. Gabe inserted a loud “Soon! Soon!” So a date for Bill to see Gabe the following day was made and the couple agreed to come in the following week. The next day, Gabe told Bill that his father was a lifelong bully who had abused and intimidated Gabe’s brothers and sisters and that Gabe was the only one who stood up for them. He was also in a struggle with his divorced wife for custody of his children. Bill continued working with Gabe over the next two years, and when last I heard, Gabe had split up with Ruth but had gotten his children back.

When Tom came back for a visit the following year, Gabe came in to see him. Despite his many family problems, he had not had another collapse. After that, every time Tom and his team came to Brattleboro, Tom always met with Gabe. It seemed that they had formed a deep attachment in that first interview. I was surprised to see how much Tom’s approach seemed to encourage a realistic friendship, a possibility that was banned by most psychotherapies. The idea made a strong impression on my assumptions about the nature of therapeutic boundaries, and I found that I began to work in a more familiar fashion with the people who consulted with me.

During that first visit, we had many interesting discussions. One subject we talked about was the beginning of the session. In our more strategic days, when meeting a family for the first time, we used to ask, “What is the problem in the family?” Tom said he now asked, “What is the history of the idea to come to therapy?” This formulation changed the nature of the inquiry. Instead of putting the problem front and center, the emphasis was on the conversation: how it came about and how it could continue. Tom had begun to invite Harry Goolishian and Harlene Anderson to Norway, and many of their ideas were percolating about the Arctic Circle. One thing was clear—that Tom was deeply devoted to Harry and much influenced by the idea of therapy as a conversation and the not-knowing point of view.

What most impressed me about Tom’s interviewing style was his attentive stillness and the way he held his body. He told us that when sitting next to Gabe and speaking with him, he had been careful to inhale and exhale in the same rhythm. Tom had worked for years with a body-work trainer named Aadel Hansen, and he had recently written a book about her work, so this was no surprise. Nevertheless, I was struck by the degree to which Tom’s bearing in the session showed what the English poet John Keats once called “negative capability.” Keats had defined this as “the ability to be in the midst of doubts and uncertainties without any irritable reaching after facts and reason.”

Another surprising practice was the way Tom spoke. We knew that a slow tempo and a long reaction time were characteristic of people of Northern Europe, and the further north you got, the longer the time would be between a question and its answer. Family therapy in Finland was especially famous for long pauses. But Tom’s deliberate pace seemed unusually marked, and his use of phrasings like “if, “perhaps” “maybe,” “could it be?” threw a veil of tentativeness over the proceedings. This tone was catching, and for a while we too began sounding like the bachelor uncles from Lake Woebegon.

Kneading Bread

The next day, Tom and Magnus did a reflecting consultation with a couple who were being seen by Bill and Mardie Ratheau, a staff therapist. We learned that when the family first came in a year before, the husband had been hospitalized for depression, the oldest daughter had dropped out of college, and the couple had separated. Since then, the couple had gotten back together and the daughter had gone back to school. The question now was whether to continue with therapy. Bill and the husband felt they should, while Mardie and the wife were less sure. On this occasion, Magnus was the interviewer and the reflecting team included Tom, Judy Davidson, and me. The couple, in their forties, was sitting behind the screen with us, while Magnus interviewed the two therapists.

I was fascinated by the layering that went on in this consultation. If it were a play, Act One would consist of Magnus speaking to the two therapists while the couple listened. In Act Two, the couple was interviewed by Magnus about what they had just heard, while the team and the co-therapists watched. In Act Three, the reflecting team went into the interviewing room while the therapists, the couple, and Magnus listened from behind the screen. In Act Four, Magnus, the couple, and the co-therapists commented while the team listened. Finally, in Act Five, Magnus took his leave and the couple and the therapists decided on another appointment. But this was no “well made play,” with a beginning, middle, and end. The event consisted of a succession of dialogues, with participants alternating between listening and talking. There was no set goal beyond a general feeling that the conversation had reached a temporary stopping place.

If ever there were a nonpurposive format, this was it. More than anything else, it reminded me of kneading yeast dough. When I was a young faculty wife on the campus of Bard College, a kind neighbor had taken my culinary education in hand and showed me how to make bread. First you put the water and yeast in a bowl. Then you added flour. After it became a firm enough ball, you folded it over and over upon itself, to introduce air into the mix. Eventually, my neighbor told me, the dough would “come alive.” I asked how I would know that. She said, “When it begins to resist you.” Sure enough, at a certain point I felt the dough pushing back. When I poked a hole in it with my finger, the hole would close back up. Years later, it occurred to me that it was not just the activity of folding that was important, it was also the warmth of the human hand.

This metaphor helped enormously when I had to explain the difference between reflecting work and more conventional interviews. There were no direct links between what a therapist said and the outcome of any given session, and one had to get used to the general idea of expecting no solutions. The meditations of the reflecting team were similarly divorced from cause and effect. Since interpretations, suggestions, and tasks were ruled out, the comments we made were indeed very different from those of a Milan-style team. It seemed that the only things one could contribute would be stories from one’s own experience or associations built on the conversations that had already taken place.

But there did seem to be a few rules. I had noticed that in Act One, when Magnus spoke with the therapists alone, only issues pertaining to the therapeutic relationship were addressed. Magnus wanted to know what perceptions people had about therapy: who wanted it; who thought they were stuck; what stopping therapy would mean; who would be glad, who disappointed; what issues remained to be resolved; to whom did they matter; which persons was each of the therapists most aligned with; how would the therapists feel if they stopped now? None of these questions were aimed at the couple’s situation. In other words, the consultant was less interested in the story of the problem than in the story of the therapists.

Magnus’s carefulness addressed the outer position of the consultant. After all, it was the therapists, not the family, who had asked for the session, and it was not the consultant’s role to walk in and take over. This was a radically different point of view than any I had encountered before. One had to prevent oneself from becoming a supervisor to the therapist or discussing family dynamics. It was hard for traditionally trained people to understand this shift, and when I first demonstrated it, people actually walked out of workshops because I was failing to “do” or “show” family therapy.

The action in Act One was a telling example of what I mean. Magnus asked the therapists why they wanted the meeting. They said they felt stuck, although the family didn’t seem to feel this way. Were the problems getting worse? Mardie said that the leaving of the adolescent daughters had inspired the wife to go off and “do her own thing,” and now it seemed that the husband was speaking one language and the wife and daughters another. Magnus asked who most understood the wife’s language and Mardie said she did; Bill said he understood the husband’s language.

On the question of stopping therapy, there were also differences. Mardie said she wouldn’t mind taking a break, but Bill, who seemed to be speaking for the husband, said, “There’s still a question of who wants to continue and who wants to stop.” It was clear to me, as I listened, that the split between the couple was reflected in a split between the therapists. However, Magnus made no effort to point out this obvious dilemma or base an interpretation on it, but let it float there on its own. I realized that when you had a reflecting team, you could leave such matters to the team. As I will explain later, Michael White found the reflecting process useful because it acted to “decenter” the therapist from the problem-solving position.

In Act Two, the wife agreed with Mardie’s comments about the different languages. The husband said he wanted help in resolving their relationship, but the wife said they had to rebuild the foundation of the marriage first. She told Magnus it was particularly interesting for her to watch Bill and Mardie being interviewed. She also said that their twenty-three-year-old daughter, who had recently spent a year on top of a mountain, had announced that she was gay. She wanted her parents to accept her fully and not push her to go to counseling or to college. The wife seemed comfortable with this, but the husband said it was hard for him to agree to the request. At this moment, Magnus suggested we break for the reflecting team. Here was another example of the consultant deflecting conflict at the family level rather than taking it on.

In Act Three, when it was the team’s turn to reflect, I said that I found it easy to identify with the family, having had three daughters myself. Judy commented on the respect and caring the therapists showed for the couple and the respect and caring the couple showed each other and their children. Clearly, we were playing it safe. But Tom was next to speak, and I admit I was all ears to find out what he would say.

Painted Language

Here I want to highlight a key element of Tom’s work: his use of what Austrian psychologist Gisela Schwartz has called “picture language” and I call “painted language.” This is the realm of sensory metaphors and parables. An example is the fantasy Tom builds up of a man who walks up a mountain to pick a bouquet of flowers. There are many pejorative orientations that would have fit this family: a psychiatric orientation, with the emphasis on the father’s depression; a cultural orientation, with the wife running off on a New Age quest; a feminist orientation, casting the father as an out-of-date patriarch. Instead of these pejorative understandings, the bouquet of flowers story showed the way everyone was connected to the situation without invoking a vocabulary of blame.

The story also addressed something I call the “presenting edge.” By this I mean the edge of feeling that seems to be calling attention to itself and which usually sets up a reverberation in the therapist too. Bateson used to say that the other end of the probe the researcher sticks into the human material sticks into the researcher himself. I believe that some sense of this two-way probe must be acknowledged in an interview, otherwise nothing will go forward. In my mind, this is what Tom did by finding an analogy for the father’s sense of fear and his longing for connectedness.

TOM:	I wonder if I should share a metaphor—the metaphor grasped me and took me away and then I came back—[it] was a bouquet of flowers, the flowers were in a big bouquet, many flowers, beautiful colors, beautiful smells—and each flower represented an experience or a meeting or a friend, in going away and coming back to say “I’m still liked”—even going to the mountain and coming back with a grasp of the wind on top of the mountain. So I saw a lot of flowers in a big bouquet. And I saw at present the father holding the bouquet, saying, “Please come,” and I thought he said that he had the job at present, and the women went and came back with flowers—I thought that must be a very ambivalent feeling, saying, “Please go and come back with flowers,” but would they really come back? And I thought that there’s always a risk that when people go, they learn a new language, a new dialect—the person having the job to hold the bouquet is back there, and the other people come with a new language, a new dialect, and the person is staying there with his language, which every person understands, but he has a problem understanding the new language, the new dialect. So I wondered what would happen if another person took hold of the flowers for a time saying, “Go away and find new flowers for the bouquet and maybe you’ll learn a new language, which we shall learn.” Would that be possible? Who could hold the bouquet? And if he should have the task to hold the bouquet, would it be possible to learn the language and the dialect from those going away. This seems so crucial, to be able to deal with all the tasks of going away and coming back with new flowers, to understand the language and the dialects—that was my metaphor. It took me away and I was away for a long time. And I thought what was the tendency of the metaphor to move the person smelling it and watching it, or is it to make new ideas, or what? That was my thinking.
JUDY:	Yes, I was wondering if the father trusted that if he stopped holding the bouquet, there would be anyone else to hold it—and it seems so important for him.
LYNN:	Or if he holds the flowers—those are flowers that are already picked and could fade, and then he’ll be left with a bunch of faded flowers, while these other people are going off and finding new flowers. Will they come back and bring him these new flowers?

At this point, I fell into the familiar problem-solving mode and mentioned the differences that had emerged in regard to therapy. Instead of picking up on this subject, Tom noted that the parents spoke different languages and observed that, while the daughters seemed to share the mother’s language, the father didn’t. He said: “So perhaps each should tell more about the way they’ve created their language and how they use their language.” Still holding to my idea, I asked, “Should they continue in therapy?” Tom said he believed the couple had a strong feeling about what to do and didn’t need our advice. I finally got his point and shut up.

Act Four was the scene in which the couple, the co-therapists, and Magnus commented on the reflections, while the team went back behind the mirror. Magnus asked if there was anything that the couple particularly liked. The wife said she liked Tom’s metaphor, and felt that if the language problem could be dealt with, this would go far to improve their communication. She added, “That was so true about my husband hanging onto the bouquet.” Magnus asked her to expand, and she explained that their marriage originally had a “Christian” basis. Her husband’s role was to be the head of the house and her role consisted of “a healthy submissiveness.” She felt he had a hard time adjusting to her when he got sick and she had to become more assertive.

Tearing up, the wife then said that when her husband went away to the hospital, she had to hold the bouquet, even though she didn’t do it very well. The metaphor had made it clear to her how much the family meant to her husband. She was now crying openly and saying how touched she was at the thought that he wanted them—his wife and daughters—to come back. She hoped he would want them back even if they didn’t conform to the way he wanted them to be, saying, “If we hold the bouquet too tight, they won’t find out what they like, they’ll only know what we like.”

Before the husband could respond, Magnus turned to the co-therapists. Bill picked up on Tom’s flower metaphor, but changed it to perennials that bloom, then come back the next year. Mardie hoped that the husband might eventually join the wonderful conversations his wife and daughters were now having. The couple began again to argue, but Magnus stopped them, saying how special this experience had been for him. Remarking that it was not his job to give advice, he thought he should withdraw. The wife thanked him “because you brought the four of us back together again with new ideas.” Magnus then left the room. I must include one last appreciation of Magnus’ work. Even in leaving, he left the major question hanging in the air: should therapy continue or not? I asked myself how the simple layering of reflections could possibly have any influence on issues like that. I had to live with that doubt until reassured by my own experience that this novel approach could succeed.

This interview was an important marker for me because this was the first time I had seen Magnus interview or Tom reflect. It interested me to see how their different contributions to the work hinged together. Tom’s image of the bouquet had the effect of hitting all the little facets at once. One feature of painted language was that it so often created a place for feelings. In this interview, the wife teared up at Tom’s description of her husband holding so desperately to the bouquet. Tom himself would sometimes tear up, moved by the story he was hearing. I believe that the images he used allowed him to reach beneath the surface and touch people as he himself was touched.

The Artful Schemer

An objection can be made that a reflecting process can’t be used in situations of crisis. In reply, I will briefly describe another interview that Tom did at Brattleboro. Bill was about to do an intake with a sad and difficult family situation. The family consisted of an airline pilot, whose divorced wife had just died of cancer, and his three adolescent children, who were now living with his ex-wife’s mother. His new fiancee was there too, along with the grandmother, who referred to the fiancée as “the artful schemer.” They had come to therapy because the thirteen-year-old son was having problems in school. Tom joined Bill in this first session, and I was behind the screen with a number of other staff.

While the father explained to the therapists what was going on, the grandmother sat on one side of the room, darting hate looks at the fiancée, who sat next to the father on the other side. The fiancée was a determinedlooking, mature woman with dyed blonde hair and heavy gold jewelry. She stared straight ahead, ignoring the grandmother. The father, also mature but equally resplendent in an airline captain’s uniform, looked as if he wanted to disappear. The son told Tom that he had gone back to their house that morning to find that his father’s fiancée had just recovered the living room furniture and had his cats declawed as well. In a voice that cracked with indignation and nearly weeping, he said, “When I came in this morning, my cats were bouncing off the sofa like cotton balls.”

Things heated up very fast. The grandmother was yelling at the fiancée, the fiancée was shrieking back, and the father was trying vainly to placate both of them. I confess that in my heart I was saying, “Good. Let’s see what Tom can do with this one.” To my surprise, Tom sat there as peaceful as a Buddha, letting everything break over his head. Finally he turned to Bill, and observed, “Perhaps we can’t have a conversation right now. I am wondering if we should ask the family to go home. Maybe the father could call you later and tell you which persons would be able to talk together most easily, and you could make another date.” Bill agreed with Tom, and the family members, who had suddenly become silent, filed out.

The father called Bill the next day, suggesting that he come in alone with his three children, and they had a successful meeting later that week. The reason I wanted to include this anecdote is because it so well illustrated Anderson and Goolishian’s ideas about therapy as a conversation during which problems would not be “solved” but “dis-solved.” As a result, the well-made play of conventional therapy went out the window. No assessments, no interpretations, no interventions. You didn’t ignore threats to life or limb, but an added rationale for taking care of them was so that the conversation could be continued.

Poetic Activism

Since I first watched Tom Andersen work so many years ago, an emphasis on bodily feelings has come to the fore in the family therapy field. John Shotter (1993b, p. 15) has described communication as an in-the-moment, almost visceral activity, saying that people “see and act through their use of words, just as much as through their use of their eyes and limbs.” He ties his position to the work of Russian philologists Mikhail Bahktin (1981) and Lev Vygotsky (1978), since these two were among the first to call attention to the “tool-kit” nature of language and the idea of “images as prosthetics.”

Kenneth Gergen (1999, p. 49) describes this use of language as follows: “If we long for change, we must also confront the challenge of generating new meanings, of becoming poetic activists.” Scholar-therapists James and Melissa Griffith, in their book The Body Speaks (1994), agree, stating that the suffering that brings people into therapy can often be tied to “unspeakable dilemmas” that cannot be expressed, and describing the aim of therapy as helping people find a way to communicate the “not-yet-said.” It is clear that a therapy that rests on this philosophy cannot use words in the sense of imparting information, but must treat them as quasi-physical events. U.K. family therapist and poet KieranVivian-Byrne suggests what I mean in lines like, “As actual as waiting to be body-searched,” and “There’s something in a handshake.”

German psychologist Klaus Deissler (2000) describes just such an instance: the significance of an actual handshake with a man who was consulting him. This man, who needed unemployment insurance while looking for another job, complained that his workplace was “too noisy” and he wanted the opinion of a professional to back him up. Deissler felt the man was not telling him the whole truth. In addition, his handshake was so strong that he crushed Deissler’s hand. The next time they met, Deissler made his own handshake even stronger. The man was surprised and impressed, and said, “You have a firm handshake!” After that, Deissler said, his suspicions disappeared along with his client’s evasiveness, and their work in therapy prospered.

Deissler applies the term “social poetics” to such moves. In another instance, Deissler found that a woman’s grief after her mother died was mixed with anger at her husband and brother. They had abused her when she was small, and her mother had covered up for them. She told Deissler how much she would have liked to stand up at the funeral and expose them, showing all the mourners her middle finger. Rather than do “griefwork” with this woman, Deissler listened to that angry finger, and the woman’s grief mutated into a more useful kind of action.

Following along the same path, researchers Arlene Katz and John Shotter (1996) have written about “social poetics” in medical interviews. They describe watching for “arresting moments,” by which they mean the sense of surprised clarity that indicates to them that something important is going on. Katz was supervising a medical intern who was conducting an interview with a young woman from Haiti. While the patient was complaining about chest congestion, an almost incidental line, “It’s not like it is back home,” alerted Katz to suggest that the intern inquire further about how the woman’s condition would have been treated had she fallen ill in her own country. Back home, she said, her mother would have massaged her and her whole family would have gathered round. This conversation created a closer connection between the intern and her patient and deepened the context of the complaint, which now included a social as well as a medical explanation.

The trouble with these examples of “social poetics” is that it is hard to distinguish them from the strategies therapists already use: Let us bomb you with a paradox, confuse you with a task, cue you with a suggestion. Such anecdotes are wonderful tributes to therapist brilliance, but they do not usually well up from the connections, the currents among the players. Instead, they are consciously hatched in the therapist’s mind and used instrumentally. I don’t want to declare this form of influence not useful. Many strategic tasks and interventions are behavioral metaphors that give permission and invite change at the same time. It is just that they do not grow out of the “joint action,” as social theorist John Shotter (1993b) puts it, between the persons in the room. An example of this difference can be found in Chapter 13, in which a therapist consults his inner voices and finds the image of a white mother wolf. When he shares this picture with his client, also a mother, they come up with new understandings that bring their relationship to another place.

This is a good time to bring in the voice of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1964). This unusual writer makes the statement that poetry belongs to a different universe than that of cause and effect:

To say that the poetic image is independent of causality is to make a rather serious statement. But the causes cited by psychologists and psychoanalysts can never really explain the wholly unexpected nature of the new image, any more than they can explain the attraction it holds for a mind that is foreign to the process of its creation. The poet does not confer the past of his image upon me, and yet his image immediately takes root in me. The communicability of an unusual image is a fact of great ontological significance. (p. xvii)

In other words, there is a kind of interpersonal transmission that is instant, like a chemical signal. This effect comes from analogies that are jointly achieved rather than taken from a storehouse of prior knowledge. Researcher Harold Raush has remarked that there is a difference between a skill and a modality that might lead to an opening. In the sections below, I will describe the contributions of Tom Andersen and Peggy Penn, who honor this modality by attending to the conversations that people have with one another on the body level, and the voices that these bodies use.

The Double Helix

Penn and Andersen have influenced each other over time in the manner of a double helix. Both of them employ language in the interest of relationship, and base their current work on Bahktin’s (1981) concept of “dialogism.” As Bahktin says,

The exact sciences are a monological form of knowledge: the intellect contemplates a thing and speaks of it. . . . But the subject as such cannot be perceived or studied as if it were a thing, since it cannot remain a subject if it is voiceless; consequently, there is no knowlege of the subject but dialogical. (quoted in Todorov, 1984, p. 42)

Bahktin clarifies his point further by comparing Tolstoy with Dostoyevsky. Tolstoy’s universe is monological because “there is no second voice alongside that of the author” (Todorov, p. 62). Dostoevsky’s novels, by contrast, are dialogical. Bahktin says that they contain “a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights, each with its own world.” (Todorov, p. 104). Penn and Andersen try to gain access to the worlds of consciousness that people bring to them through bodily sensing and listening, through playing back images, and through asking people to draw or write about the experiences they wish to share.

In describing her approach, Penn (2001b) sees “acts of metaphor” as a powerful subterranean language. For example, Penn said to a couple where one of them had an illness, “You are like two tall trees that have endured many storms without breaking.” Or, to a suffering man, she said, “There is a part of you that has a lion’s voice. How can we invite it to speak for you?” Again, when a woman talked about having terrible stomach pains, Penn asked her for another way to describe it, and the woman said, “It’s like a fight going on inside my stomach.” A member of the reflecting team suggested that Penn ask whether that fight were going on outside her stomach as well, and if so, with whom, and about what. This question uncovered an important context that until then had remained concealed.

Andersen uses underground communication in the same way. During one workshop I attended, he showed a taped interview with an older couple who had fallen in love and married late in life. Although the husband was a Buddhist and the wife was a born-again Christian, they showed a remarkable tolerance for their religious differences. However, they fought about other things. As they described their disputes, many explanations suggested themselves: a struggle for control, a clash of loyalties, individual stubbornness. Andersen, who was on the reflecting team, surprised us by not even mentioning the fighting. All he said was that the couple reminded him of “two beautiful, smiling suns.” Then Andersen added, as if he were speaking a mantra: “As I watched these two smiling suns, I kept thinking: Let come the sun, let go the sun; let come the sun, let go the sun.” He repeated this phrase several times. Leaving aside the hypnotic effect, I decided that Andersen might be trying to portray the difficult situation of a solar system with two suns. The implication was that it would be best if they didn’t try to occupy the same space at the same time. However, Andersen never spelled anything like this out. We learned later that the couple was very pleased with the interview and referred to Andersen as “that nice man who talked about the suns.”

A more somber example of a “dialogical metaphor” comes from an article by Penn (2001a). She and Andersen have been doing reflecting consultations with each other in the U.S. and abroad, and on one such occasion they were asked by Swedish psychologist Judit Wagner to do a consultation in a prison where Wagner worked. Penn told me that they spoke with a man who was in jail because he had assaulted his wife. As she began to engage him in conversation, the man said he was glad to speak in English because it was a “softer” language than Swedish, and this would help him to talk about his son. The boy’s mother would not allow him to visit or write his father and the man’s feelings of isolation and despair were intense.

Penn then asked him if he thought words were stronger than bars. When he agreed, she suggested that he might write a diary for his son to read sometime in the future. Andersen added, “as a way to send a touch.” Then Andersen asked the man, “Would it be possible for you to ask your son to pick an autumn leaf and send it to you? The most beautiful one he can find the next time they are outside in nature?” The inmate agreed to do this. By using words in this way, Andersen and Penn were going directly to where the feelings live. The images of the diary and the leaf set up resonances in my own mind between the father and his son, between inside the prison and nature, and between present and future time. The prisoner was touched too. Wagner told Penn that he asked about her for over a year, and kept wishing Wagner to give her his regards.

It is too simplistic, of course, to suggest that “a metaphor a day keeps the doctor away.” Penn believes that therapy is about moving from monologues that are dominated by accusations against oneself and others to dialogues that include more varied and hopeful voices. In describing chronic illness (2001a), Penn says that it is “a form of incremental trauma characterized by an insidious silence.” To interrupt this silence, which she believes is upheld by the pejorative culture of illness, she has pioneered an approach that alternates between writing and speaking. This recursion, she says, creates a therapeutic narrative which she and Frankfurt have called the “participant text.” Her goal is to break the silence: “Once the family’s voices are reconstituted through writing, the emotions that have been displaced by the illness are restored to their conversation” (2001a, p. 33).

To illustrate her point, Penn tells the story of the work she did with a family where the dilemma was expressed as how the parents could best help their son. They either overwhelmed him with support or withdrew it entirely, and this was confusing to him. Penn described the family’s plight in terms of the father’s wish to rescue everybody when it was really he who wanted to be rescued. She said the father should write a letter to his own deceased father, who had been an alcoholic, and the son should write to his not-yet-born, out-of-wedlock son. The father read out his letter, in which he said he realized how much he longed to be fathered. He wept, and his wife and son, moved by his vulnerability, wept too. The parents were equally moved by the son’s letter, in which he vowed to stand by his own son. In this emotional crucible, Penn said, the family’s idea of the father-son relationship changed to include ideas of tenderness as well as disappointment.

If Your Hand Could Speak?

Andersen has been doing new work that gives an imaginary voice to bodily actions. Recently, I saw a tape of a second consultation with a South American family where the father had misbehaved in several ways in the presence of his five year old son. The wife urged that the family come to therapy, which the father hesitantly agreed to do. Unwilling to see the family around a problem that so negatively connoted the father, and wanting to decrease the tension between the father and the son, Andersen kept the focus on the son’s noisy behavior. This meeting was attended by father, mother and son, along with the psychologist who was working with them. A year later, Andersen met with the family a second time. The mother said that the boy had changed a lot in the previous year. He was on Ritalin and was able to go to school, and relations in the family had improved.

However, in this second meeting, the boy’s behavior still seemed out of control. He was running, crawling, hitting. Andersen asked the father, “If his crawling behavior could speak, what would it say?” The father said, “That he wants attention.” Tom said, “No, what would his body say?” The father looked confused, but finally said, “Give me your attention.” The mother said that the boy would try to get the father’s attention at home, when he did his school work, but that the father got impatient too easily and often beat the boy. Tom asked, “How would you beat him?” The father said that he beat him with his right hand, but said he did not know if the hand was closed or open.

Then Tom turned to the boy, asking him if his father beat him with a closed or an open hand. The boy said, “He hits me with the closed hand and pushes me with the open one.” Tom asked, “What hurts you the most, the closed hand or the open one?” The boy said, “The closed one.” Tom then asked the father, “If your hand, when it is moving to hit your son, stopped its moving and could speak, what would the words be?”The father was silent. After Tom helped him in the search for words, he said, “That my son should stop doing what he is doing.” Tom said again, “If it could speak, what would it say?” Again, silence. The mother then broke in to explain that the father often found it hard to find words. She said, “I would talk to our son calmly.” She said, “My husband speaks to his head; I speak to the heart.”

The boy was now asked to leave the room. At this point, the mother shared the fact that she too was often hit by the father. She said she had only become aware of this during the past year, after the noisiness of the son had decreased. She recalled a recent incident when he pushed her so hard that she “flew through the air.” Tom asked what that was like for her. She said that it made her realize what a thin line there was between life and death. Tom asked how that made her feel. She said, “That I wouldn’t like to grow old with someone who treated me like that.”

Tom then asked the father, “Was that hard to hear?” The father said, “No, it’s true.” Tom said, “One part of you seems to be violent. Is there another part that wishes something different?’’The father said, “Yes, but I can’t control myself. “ Tom asked, “ a voice and could speak?” The father said, “It would say, you only have one family and it should be protected.” Tom now asked the father where in his body the voice that was activated in the violent moments should go. The father answered “In my head.” Tom asked, “If this voice could move, where would it go?” The father said, “I wish it could stay in my head.” Tom asked, “If that voice that says, ‘Think of your family,’ could find a new place in your body, where would you like it to be?”The father said, “In my heart.”

The father now asked Tom, “Are we going in the right way?” Tom said, “Yes, a right way. There are many right ways. I noticed that your son could accept me much more easily than last year; I heard your wife speak of the difficulties she discovered in the family during the past year; and I heard a lot about the changes with the boy.” Then the father got eager and said, “Since last year, he is happy in school, and able to go wherever he wants to go. Before he was never happy.” Tom said to him, “And the talk you and I had in the last few minutes, where you were able to be open without defending yourself, that is a big step.”

The therapists reported later that the father had stopped beating the boy and that he continued to improve. The father had told the psychologist that he still remembered Tom’s voice. Tom’s last comment to our group as we were watching the tape was that people must be given the chance to be moved by the conversation. He added, “Voices must have homes. You must always ask where in the body they might choose to live. The therapist must not side with one voice against another, or encourage one voice to control another. They must be given the chance to live side by side, as in every work of peace.”

The Maroons

Here I want to say that the most lasting effect of Penn and Andersen’s work, at least in its influence on me, has been the literal posture they assume during an interview. I was once talking with a statuesque family therapist from the island of Jamaica who told me that her ancestors were slaves called “Maroons” who had run away into the mountains to escape their white owners. Sharing a memorable phrase, she said that her people always knew when someone was a Maroon “by the way they carried their soul.” And she took a pose, quite unconsciously, which reminded me of the way both Penn and Andersen hold themselves when they are in a therapeutic conversation.

To show what I mean, here is a story from a piece by Peggy Penn and Marilyn Frankfurt called “A Circle of Voices” (1999). In it, Penn describes one of Andersen’s occasional visits to the Ackerman Institute, during which he and Penn interviewed Chris and John, two married gay men who each had AIDS and with whom Penn and Frankfurt had been working. Penn explained in her part of the article that when the couple found out that they had HIV, nine years before, they had decided to marry. Now John wanted to separate, although Chris felt they could change enough to stay together. Penn asked them if Andersen might join the interview and they agreed. Andersen’s first question to them was: “How would you like this meeting to be used?” Penn wrote:

I saw Tom lean in toward the men and keep that position almost for the entire interview, either supporting his chin on his hand or folding his arms and leaning toward them in strong concentration. I was touched by this message from his body; it was as though their suffering was being written on him and he accepted it patiently.

Penn explained that in this type of consultation, the conversation is open-ended and there is no set plan except to take in what the family says and does, their silence as well as their words. As the two men spoke of how their bodies were doing and how they felt, Andersen seemed very moved. A sense of loss and mourning permeated the room and Penn noted that her eyes occasionally filled with tears.

Then Andersen asked a question: “Is it possible that your relationship could last forever?” After a moment of silence, Chris said he wanted their ashes to be mixed together and placed under the roots of an azalea bush, so that their families would have a single place to go. Andersen asked, “If the azalea bush could sing a song, what would it sing?” Chris chose Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” and Beethoven’s “Pastoral Symphony,” but John wanted a memorial party with wine, food, and sex. Maybe he would prefer a sturdy oak. John added that his current wish was for something more than just to stay alive. Penn commented to him that she was touched by his wish, and commented in her article that this thought had stayed with her for a long time.

At the end of the meeting the two men asked Andersen, “What are your thoughts?” He said, “I can’t find words; certainly there would be sad words, and words of beauty.” Chris worried that they had hit him with a lot of problems. Andersen replied, “I don’t feel hit; I am touched. Hit is a small word; touched is a much longer word. I know I will always remember this meeting.” Peggy wrote: “It was raining outside but when we left our room, it felt bright, not from the video lights but from all four of us being able to move together.” As the couple had given Andersen permission to show the tape, Penn suggested that they each write something about the experience, so that when the tape was shown, they would have the last word.

I have included this story, although somewhat amputated, because it summarizes the feeling tone of what I had experienced as a new kind of work when I first saw Andersen in Brattleboro. The attentive listening, which occurred as much on the body level as on the verbal level, was absolutely different from anything I had yet experienced. In the above case, I also saw that the question Andersen asked not only reflected back feelings, it embraced a future. Frankfurt, who contributed the second part of this article, says,

Such communicative events are performative because they make things happen. For this couple, given John’s need to create an independent space for himself within the relationship, their differing visions of themselves after death are affirmed in the dialogue, (p. 177)

The Arctic Circle

Before I end this chapter, I want to describe the beginning of Andersen’s northern network (see Chapter 14). In 1986, Andersen invited myself and Peggy Penn to a seminar in a tiny fishing village called Gryllefjord near the Arctic Circle. This event was the start of a training program for groups from the north of Norway who were interested in practicing systemic work in their own settings. At the end of this first meeting, Tom presented to Peggy and me a one-of-a kind object that he had made by finding chunks of weathered wood, gluing them together, then hollowing the block into the shape of a large bowl. Before we left, he also organized a small fleet of fishing boats to take us on a five-hour trip at midnight to a remarkable wooden structure sitting on stilts in the sea off a deserted beach. Called Crow House, it had been built by an industrialist seeking solitude. There we had a late-night supper of barrels of North Sea shrimp, piles of homemade bread with fresh butter, and casks of beer.

As you can imagine, these trips were memorable. I remember one that took place in the village of Solveig, at the end of a long, mountainous peninsula called the Westerollen. When Andersen took Penn and myself to our lodgings and opened the door onto a barren room furnished with a cot and a chair, we gazed around silently until he remarked, “It’s not very fashionable.” We broke into peals of laughter, and another venue was arranged. The next year, the speakers and participants stayed in local fishermen’s houses with showers that did not always work. But despite occasional hardships, these events, like the Milan team meetings before them, kept the field of family therapy unrolling like a carpet before our feet. I have already described the impact of the Greek kitchen conference at Sulitjelma, and there were others that were just as powerful.

A few years ago, when Andersen invited me to give a workshop at one of his more recent meetings in the North, I found that the reflecting process had turned into what I was now calling a “rolling conversation” (see Chapter 13). Small groups would reflect in front of the larger group in a kind of daisy chain, or simply converse in parallel. I found myself attempting to organize a reflecting consultation with one of the participants, but the effort curled off into space like smoke. I thought again of Bateson’s endless stories. Only after you had gone home did you suddenly see his point, and even then you wondered. Here, to end this chapter, is an example.

Long ago, at a seminar at South Beach Psychiatric Hospital on Staten Island, where Bateson was giving a talk, I asked him how he would describe a “single bind.” He stared off, with his cigarette ash as usual getting longer, and began to tell me about a tank where he used to keep two octopi, a big one and a small one. The small one had got hold of a shrimp, and the big one slowly propelled itself to the other side of the tank where the small one was clutching its prize. The big octopus settled its large bulk gently over the head of the small one and stayed there for a minute. There was no sign of a struggle, but when it sailed up and back to its corner, you could see that the shrimp was firmly ensconced in one of tentacles. At the time, I was mystified, but many months later I realized that my question had been answered. Faced with a choice between being engulfed and giving up the shrimp, the small octopus had recognized a “single bind” and acted accordingly. Stories are a form of poetic activism too.