In this paper it is argued that modern and postmodern positions on reality and knowledge should not create a theoretical division in family therapy and that rather ...
@ The Association for Family Therapy 1995. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 lJF, UK and 238 Main Street, Cambridge, MA, USA. Journal nfFarnih Therapy (1995) 17: 149-173 0 1634445
Searching for a better story: harnessing modern and postmodernpositions infamily therapy David Pocock* In this paper it is argued that modern and postmodern positions on reality and knowledge should not create a theoretical division in family therapy and that rather, by harnessing the two together, each may restrain the other. This combination creates the potential for drawing widely from the whole field of family therapy as well as challenging the separation of mainstream family therapy models from psychoanalysis. The concept of better story is used to replace both the polarized modern position of an objective discoverable truth and the polarized postmodern position of all stories having equal validity. I t is suggested that better stories, which evolve in the meeting of family and therapist, may include those which are more congruent, object-adequate, encompassing, holding, shared, emotional, conscious, just, provisional and hopeful.
Introduction
The irritating plappus In Lila: A n Inquiry into Morals, Pirsig (1991) invites us to consider the world of biological classification before the scientific discovery of the platypus. One of the great Victorian preoccupations was an intellectual conquest of the natural world by dividing things into groups. Taxonomists sorted out the classification between mammals and reptiles by placing those who suckled their young in the former and those who laid eggs in the latter. Imagine the excitement - and the irritation - when the platypus turned up. I t spoiled everything - it laid eggs and suckled its young. I t just wouldn’t fit in. Eventually the problem was solved by tacking on a tiny group just to give it and another discovery, the spiny anteater, a scientific pigeon-hole. But the elegance of the original division was lost and our present-day image of the platypus contains a rather vengeful sense of the animal as an ugly
* Principal Family Therapist, Child and Family Guidance Centre, Wyvern House, Theatre Square, Swindon SN1 l Q N , Wiltshire, UK.
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misfit. You would be hard pressed to find a playgroup named after one. What difference would it have made to the original classification if the platypus had already been known about? Would the dividing line have been placed elsewhere? It’s difficult to speculate about this. Classification is such a powerful organizer of thinking that when major decisions have been made it is disorientating to attempt to remake them. Rather like removing a large foundation stone from a building when it is nearly completed - the whole thing might collapse. And it is the way in which knowledge (classification of things as like this and unlike that) is laid down which often determines how we can think.
Self or system With the invention of family therapy came a gradual desire for separation from psychoanalysis which had, hitherto, dominated the therapeutic world. This manifested itself in an increasing emphasis on assumed differences from psychoanalysis - interpsychic versus intrapsychic, circular versus linear, communication versus subjective experience and so on. Not all models emphasized difference. The Handbook of Family Therapy (Gurman and Kniskern, 1981, 1991) lists Bowen Theory, Open Systems Group Analytic, Focal, Contextual, and others, all of which attempt to bridge the classification gap. But they have never achieved the popularity of the determinedly interpsychic models - Structural, Strategic and Milan Systemic. The classification separating self and system has been, I believe, a powerful organizer of what can be thought about where. Separate systems of thought support separate institutions which recursively perpetuate separate thinking. In London, the Institute of Family Therapy is within walking distance of the Institute of Psycho-Analysis but I don’t think many make the trip either way. Having made a classifying choice into self or system it is hard to avoid sliding towards one or the other. It’s not the fault of the platypus that it seems an unattractive misfit - it is the classification system that forces us to think of it so. It is a central argument in this paper that the application of postmodern ideas to family therapy can allow a rethinking of such old theoretical divisions. However, these ideas can also be used to encourage fresh division. Hoffman ( 1990), for example, describing what she sees as a historical juncture in the development of family therapy, suggested a new partition. She placed first-order approaches @ 1995 The Associationfor Family Therapy
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which see the family or system as available for objective description (in terms such as circularity, homeostasis, triangulation etc.) in ‘Family Therapy Part l’, while ‘Family Therapy Part 2’ is seen as containing second-order approaches which see no objective or outside position for the therapist observer but, instead, are concerned with evolution of new narratives through therapeutic conversation. Lowe (1991) elaborates Hoffman’s division by drawing on distinctions between modern and postmodern thinking which for a number of years have been central to debates in social and cultural theory. (See, for example, Sarup (1988) for a general introduction to these ideas.) Lowe roughly equates Family Therapy Part 1 with modernism and Family Therapy Part 2 with postmodernism. In this paper, I want to argue for an epistemology - or way of thinking about knowledge - that can embrace all of that loose collection of theoretical ideas that we have come to call family therapy as well as allowing us to draw on the loose collections of other therapeutic traditions, especially psychoanalysis. In the first section of the paper, in contrast to Hoffman, I resist division of family therapy into modern (Part 1) and postmodern (Part 2) by (a) some exploration of these two parts in which I suggest that they are probably untenable as discrete positions - that therapies characterized as modernist may not necessarily be pursuing absolute truth and that therapies characterized as postmodern may become absurd when testing of stories becomes possible, and (b) by drawing together some epistemological ideas into a better story position which I propose as a ‘platypus’ to harness modernism and postmodernism in family therapy. In the second section of the paper, I will briefly outline how such a position can allow the therapist a freer and much wider use of theory in the pragmatic search with family members for a better family story - one that may lead to resolution of their difficulties.
Modernism or postmodernism Modernism Modernism was the radical project of eighteenth-century philosophers of the Enlightenment who, by placing great hopes in the development of objective science, universal morality and law and autonomous art, believed that there could be a progressive unfolding of all manner of truths about the world to the ultimate benefit of human beings. The term is also commonly used to describe the predominant social and 1995 The Associationf o r Family Therapy
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cultural development of Western industrial society in the last 100 years. Both usages* have an assumption in common - that knowledge is grounded in absolute truth; that what can be known is outside - and independent of - the knower. What characterizes modernism in science, art and literature is a search for deeper levels of meaning that transcend surface appearances. Marxism and psychoanalysis - two of the major modern projects of the twentieth century, for example both attempt to reveal underlying structures that can make clear surface phenomena of society and of the individual, respectively. Modernist assumptions that follow from this are that some people will accumulate objective knowledge about the world - they will come to know more than most about how things work at a deeper level and, therefore, how to put them right when they go wrong. A modern therapist, therefore, would be expected to do two things - (1) search for understanding or explanation that was not immediately available in the surface presentation of the difficulties at hand, and (2) know when he or she had arrived at the truth of the matter and, on that basis, be able to do something about it. I want, later, to develop the idea that (2) does not have to follow from (1). Until recently, all family therapy models were inevitably embedded in some modern assumptions. The first popular models concentrated on structure and process using concepts such as boundaries, hierarchy, triangulation, circularity and so on, which were based largely on ‘objective’ descriptions of family interaction rather than what family members said about themselves and each other. Frosh ( 1991a) charts family therapy’s later search for a ‘semantic’ element to complement this mechanistic concern with process and rules - a desire to put human meaning back on the agenda. For Frosh, this new concern with meaning needs to include the inner world of the experiencing individual. I would claim along with Frosh that, in moving from mechanical systems (Lilienfeld, 1987) to human stories there is a place for psychoanalysis, whose quintessentially modern task is the understanding of deep subjective experience including that which is
* Family therapy literature has yet to do full justice to the wider concerns of modernism - I am indebted to David Levy (personal communication)for this point and this paper, by limiting the discussion of modernism and postmodernism to questions of reality and knowledge, will, I am afraid, be no exception. See, though, Frosh (1991b) for a vivid portrayal of the creative possibilities of modernism as the fragile achievement of the construction of self in the face of potentially overwhelming forces of the modern world. @ 1995 The ’Association f o r Family Therapy
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unconscious (Frosh, 1991a, 1991b). But this raises a problem. Family therapy seems, generally, to be quite uncomfortable about the term ‘unconscious’ which, significantly, is one of the few concepts which unites the sometimes disparate schools of psychoanalysis (Kohon, 1986; Frosh, 1987). Bateson (1972), though, was confident about the importance of unconscious assumptions or premises. In his view, ‘commonly unconscious beliefs about the world determine how an individual will act within it and, in turn, these ways of perceiving and acting will determine the beliefs about its nature’. Interestingly, this modernist notion of unconscious assumptions has managed to slip past the ‘cultural immune system’ (Pirsig, 1991) of mainstream family therapy by the simple device of becoming known by the alias ‘premise’ and from then on has led a successful new life as a key idea in Milan Systemic family therapy (Campbell and Draper, 1985; Boscolo et al., 1987). The term ‘story’ as a metaphor for meaning systems of individuals and families had been used by some therapists for a considerable time before its recent identification with postmodern thinking. Ferreira (1963, 1965), for example, saw the main unconscious preoccupations of family members as condensed intofamily myths which are said to act in a homeostatic way and determine how roles are allocated within a family. Byng-Hall (1988) suggested that myths can exert a powerful unconscious influence on the life-scripts of family members and outlines how access can be gained to myths through the stories or legends still consciously current in the family. These are modernist-sounding concepts which attempt to explain surface phenomena by proposing an influential structure beneath the surface (cf. postmodernism which is exclusively concerned with surfaces), but that does not necessarily mean that therapists who work by exploring deeper issues believe that they can discover absolute truth or can objectively depict reality. Postmodern (or narrative) family therapists are critical about modern assumptions that family process may be objectively described, but there is particular unease about psychoanalysis in which there is generally assumed to be a steep hierarchy between therapist and patient in which the former discovers the truth and passes it, by way of interpretation, to the latter. However, consider this influential view of Winnicott’s (197 1): I think I interpret mainly to let the patient know the limits of my understanding. The principle is that it is the patient and only the patient who has the answers. @ 1995 The Association f o r Family Therapy
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O n closer study, psychoanalytic views on truth seem no more uniform or monolithic than those of family therapy (eg. Hanly, 1990; Hamilton, 1993; Morris, 1993). Freud, in much of his later work, but especially Constructions in Analysis ( 1937), questioned his earlier assumptions that a historical truth could be found and instead shows a remarkably postmodern-sounding interest in ‘narrative truth’ in which events ‘become experiences and take on traumatic meaning, not so much in the present moment of occurrence as upon recollection and reconstruction across some period of delay’ (Morris, 1993). Indeed many Post-Freudian analysts are much concerned with the importance of not-knowing (Bion, 1975) and of the need sometimes to wait for extended periods in a cognitive darkness sustained only by an act of faith in the process (Coltart, 1986). So who are the therapists who assume they have access to the truth? Well, all of us from time to time, I think. Some Roman emperors kept slaves to whisper occasionally in their ear ‘You are not a god’, in a sometimes vain attempt to prevent the absolute authority of their position from driving them mad. We need the critique that is postmodernism to do the same for our omnipotent and omniscient tendencies.
Postmodernism The term postmodernism - sometimes used interchangeably with poststructuralism - generally refers to a philosophical movement which arose in the 1960s but whose origins can be traced back to the writings of Nietzsche (Sarup, 1988). The concerns of postmodernism are complex and not without ambiguity but I want, here, to use a relatively simple - though central - definition borrowed from Lowe (1991) who, in part, sees postmodernism as providing a radical critique of the modernist assumption that ‘knowledge is about something external to the knower and can present itself objectively to the knower’. I plan to use the term in this, somewhat restricted,* sense and to include within it the influences of constructivism and social constructionism. During the mid- 1980s serious challenges were made to the concept of objective reality when the constructivist ideas of Bateson, von
* See Lowe (1991) for a wide and balanced discussion of the potential for a relationship between postmodernism and family therapy. @ 1995 The Association for Family Therapy
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Glasersfeld, von Foerster, Maturana and Varela increasingly influenced family therapists (see, for example, Hoffman, 1985, 1988). Constructivist positions vary but they share an idea that organisms including people - have no direct access to an external reality. What we know is always what we have created through our own ideas or constructions of the world. Everything that is observed is dependent on the observer. Cybernetic epistemology, which underpinned much family therapy thinking, was differentiated into first- and secondorder cybernetics - the former referring to an objectively conceptualized system and the latter to an observer-dependent system (Howe and Foerster, 1974). More recently, the ideas of social constructionism (e.g. Berger and Luckman, 1966; Gergen, 1985) have been taken up by family therapists such as Anderson and Goolishian (1988) and Hoffman ( 1990). (See also McNamee and Gergen, 1992 for a recent collection of essays.) Social constructionism sees knowledge of the world as made up purely through social communication - reality is whatever we agree with other people. Meaning is, thus, created and altered only in a context of language and conversation. Hoffman (1990) identifies the concerns of social constructionism with those of the postmodernist movement and ‘narrative’ therapists have begun to allow the ideas of Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard to influence their practices (White and Epston, 1989; White, 1991; Parry, 1991; Madigan, 1992; Sluzki, 1992; Schnitzer, 1993; Hare-Mustin, 1994; Towns, 1994). White and Epston, for example, have made the search for new stories central to their work (White and Epston, 1989; Epston and White, 1992). They assist individuals to ‘re-author’ their personal histories by allowing a separation from the dominant problemsaturated stories by which they and others have made sense of their lives. They help in the rediscovery of subjugated knowledges unique, more benign, but hitherto suppressed stories which more fully encompass the experience of the individual. Following Foucault, knowledge is seen as inseparable from power (White and Epston, 1989; White, 1991; Flaskas and Humphreys, 1993) and this, for example in therapy, is not the power of the coercive therapist but a power transacted through quiet assumptions made by the therapist about the truth, which are passed subliminally to family members and which squeeze out any other possible truths. Narrative therapists are especially concerned with the wider social construction of attitudes and attributes, linking the individual not just to the family but to powerful cultural discourses which constantly define how people @ 1995 The Association f o r Family Therapr
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should behave and think. Language is treated with great caution because of its power to make up reality rather than simply to represent it. In a meeting between narrative therapist and family all views are valid. Each is a story and none is a more accurate description of the family dilemma than any other, since accuracy and the search for explanation itself implies a belief in an objective and transcendent view - which to a narrative perspective is an error of thinking. ‘A story is just a story’ (Parry, 1991). While much of this postmodern thinking seems useful, it also appears excessive when one explores the implications of postmodern assumptions about external reality.
External reality as a conjdence trick For Maturana there is no external reality to bump into and against which ideas can be tested. Individuals are self-organized, informationally closed, but can be structurally coupled with other observers or observer communities. In his view, a reference to reality is simply an attempt to convince another to follow one’s viewpoint. The implication of this for family therapy is that all versions that different members of a family have of what troubles them are equally valid. ‘The notion of different punctuations of the same reality is not satisfactory to explain this because there is no way of claiming which is the valid reality which is differently punctuated’ (Maturana, 1991). Social constructionists and other narrative therapists have also given up on external reality, in favour of the intersubjective influences of language, culture and discourse. Within this framework ‘there are no “real” external entities, only communicating and languaging human individuals’ (Anderson and Goolishian, 1988). But is there no problem in abolishing external reality in this way? Is one explanation of a family member’s distress never better than any other? Narrative approaches tend to duck these kind of questions. They are mostly able to, since social phenomena are so complex that causes rarely seem worth pursuing. Collier (1987), arguing from the unfashionable perspective of realism, suggests that attacks on realism are always selective and that we are not tempted by non-realist accounts of things we can test in practice. The question of whether it is better to eat (a) what we call food than (b) what we call bricks is not one that is likely to detain even the most committed postmodern therapist for (very long. Our knowledge that this question can be @ 1995 The Association for Family Therapy
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tested and our imagined consequences of such a test does not tempt us to give each possibility equal weight. But Collier goes further and argues that although in the complexity of human and social reality it is often impossible to discover which interpretation is true, it cannot be claimed that none are true or all are true. (Later I will reshape Collier’s argument by proposing that some interpretations are not true but better than others.) But the hopes for a Family Therapy Part 2 seem to be founded on the confidence trick view of external reality -which may require us to swallow everything. Within it there is no role for theories of individual and family processes or for clinical experience or research. The only allowable knowledge is that knowledge itself is an infinitely relative never to be trusted - commodity. An epistemology which abolishes external reality as a constraint would be, I believe (as Speed (1991) suggests), a blind alley for family therapy. There have been a number of voices within family therapy warning against uncritical acceptance of this range of postmodern ideas (Golann, 1988; Birch, 1991; Minuchin, 1991; Goldner, 1991; Frosh, 1991a; Speed, 1984; Luepnitz, 1992) as well as some other attempts to integrate first- and second-order approaches (Atkinson and Heath, 1990; Simon, 1992). And Lowe (1991), I think sensibly, speaks of the need to engage with the ideas of the postmodern movement, rather than embracing or dismissing them wholesale.
Harnessing modern and postmodern positions There are some ideas about knowledge which defy easy classification into modern or postmodern positions. I t is these I wish to develop next.
External reality as a constraint The radical constructivism of Glasersfeld (1984) and the personal construct theory of Kelly (1955) are similar (Kenny and Gardner, 1988) in that they both propose a real world which cannot be known directly. Knowledge of the world is built up through a process of constructing ideas and beliefs about it. These constructions are only viable if they survive contact with the constraints that external reality imposes. Since reality can never be known directly, more knowledge can only be obtained when the existing constructs break down -when there is no longer a fit between what has been construed and the @ 1995 The Association for Family Therapy
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constraints. I remember vividly waking up in the pitch dark of a Youth Hostel dormitory with an urgent need to find the toilet. Under those stressful conditions I completely forgot the whereabouts of both the light switch and the door (fortunately, I was the only occupant). I recall a frantic ten minutes of trial and error bumping into the real world (mostly bunks and walls) until my constructions were of a sufficiently good fit to take me to freedom. There was, of course, no possibility of discovering absolute truth there might have been two or more doors which led to toilets for all I knew - but the more constraints I encountered, the more elaborate my internal story could become. I n a world of external constraints, stories can get better. Now imagine someone else in the same dormitory with the same predicament. If we spoke a common language we could share the ideas constructed out of our respective stumblings and socially construct a new story which we could also test - in a world o f external constraints social constructionism can also operate. Compare this with a metaphysical dormitory from which external reality has explicitly or implicitly been abolished and in which social constructionism operates without constraint. Here there are no walls or bunks or doors. The only things to bump into are other people and their stories. I t follows from this that those with claims to knowledge have to be treated with much suspicion. Under such conditions knowledge and power are, as narrative therapists claim, inseparable. Speed (1984, 1991), in similar epistemological territory to Glasersfeld and Kelly, proposes the term ‘co-constructivism’. She assumes that a structured reality exists which will be ‘constructed or mediated in the sense that different aspects are highlighted according to ideas that people individually or in groups have about it’. As with Glasersfeld and Kelly there is, in this position, a basis for choosing between sets of ideas, which is the degree to which the ideas are object-adequate (Elias, 1971) or, in other words, how well they fit with the particular piece of reality they attempt to describe. (See also Breunlin et al.’s (1992) use of the term ‘perspectivism’, Pinsof s (1994) description of ‘interactive constructivism’, and the affirmation of Kelly’s epistemology in Procter’s (1995) essay on the family construct system.) Unusually among family therapists interested in constructivist ideas, Speed’s position enables her to advocate a role for empirical research into family processes. I agree with her about this, though it is worth pointing out, as Glasersfeld (1984) does, that while scientists might be happy to view themselves as collectors of objective @ 1995 The Associationfor Family Therapy
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knowledge, their methodologies cannot warrant such positivist smugness. Indeed, the philosopher of science, Karl Popper, suggests that there is only scientific proof of what is not true: hypotheses can only be refuted, never proven. Good science is better seen as a collection of theoretical stories each waiting for new data to come along to force revision, replacement or confusion (although as Feyerabend (1991) indicates, scientists can be just as reluctant as the rest of us to let some inconvenient facts get in the way of a good story). But, of course, not every hypothesis or story can be tested. When constraints are few, or in areas of great complexity, it may be very difficult to test stories. Under such conditions, that which is considered true is much more likely to have been arrived at by attempts to establish a social consensus and, here, the ideas of social constructionism - and the postmodern critique in general - are of considerable help in understanding why some stories come to dominate. This diEerence between testable and untestable stories may help, for example, to account for the smaller number of social divisions over what is edible (foods) than what is worshipable (gods). Social constructionism can operate in a real but imperfectly knowable world and, indeed, must do so until some testing against the constraints of that world is possible.
The better story position For simplicity’s sake, I will summarize the ideas of Glasersfeld, Kelly, Speed and others as the better story position. Stories may be socially constructed but also tested against the constraints of a real, though ultimately unknowable, world. There are often grounds for placing more confidence in some stories than in others and empirical research is one way of achieving this. Harnessing modern and postmodern positions together in family therapy can create a mutual restraint on the excesses of each. The better story position has features of both these movements. I n short, I see it as a platypus, making the division of family therapy into modernism and postmodernism more difficult and, perhaps, absurd. Postmodernism can restrain us from modern follies - believing in objective knowledge and attempting to capture absolute truth. But modernism can restrain us from postmodern follies - concerning ourselves only with surface appearances and abolishing external reality as a constraint on our stories. The better story position allows an overarching view of theory @ 1995 The Association f o r Family Thzrapr
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which is both simple and modest - that all theories are stories. They represent best efforts, from different standpoints, at making sense of a real but never certain world. Within this position, the postmodern critique has the potential to restrain modern theory from hardening into ideology, religion (Werry, 1989), personality cult (Birch, 1991) or pseudo-science (Goldberg and David, 1991; Newmark and Beels, 1994). It can creatively unite ideas rather than support divisions. The theoretical ideas behind cognitive behaviour therapy can be joined with those of psychoanalysis, Milan systemic family therapy, structural family therapy, and so on. There are linkage points between these, as many integrative models indicate (e.g. Breunlin et al., 1992; Pinsof, 1994), but their lack of coincidence and apparent contradictions at numerous points are a considerable help in reminding us that none of them are true. All that need hold them apart is the loyalty of their proponents and the rivalries of the institutions that support them. One of the best illustrations of the therapeutic richness available through sustaining a number of theoretical models simultaneously is found in the work of Goldner et al. ( 1990). They describe a ‘layering of perspectives’ - in this case psychodynamic, social learning, sociopolitical and systemic - to work with male violence in couple relationships. Significantly, they found that moves ‘from a constructivist stance to a feminist stance, or from a systemic to a psychodynamic perspective, do not appear to require the paradigm shgts that the history of these ideas in f a m i b therapy have led us to expect’ (my emphasis).
Better stories in family therapy If one gives up a belief in objective truth - in a pure modern position, that the explanation for the family’s difficulty can be found - but also takes the view that not all stories are equally valid, then what makes one family story better than another? Empirical research may point us in some helpful directions - for example, the work of Main et al. ( 1985) suggests that parents’ awareness of their attachment difficulties as children may be protective in preventing the replication of such difficulties in the next generation. Much more commonly, though, we may have to rely on what the philosopher William James (1943) describes as pragmatic truth. This is a kind of testing in which ideas are judged not through scientific method but by their perceived usefulness in dealing with the world of experience - in negotiating constraints which are blocking beneficial change. Without absolute truth as a guide, a therapist can only reflect back on which changes to 0 1995 The Association f o r Family
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the family story he or she perceives as having eventually proved useful the best evidence of this being feedback from family members themselves. This, I suggest is the basis for clinical experience - the accumulated but personal sense that some kinds of developments in the stories of family members may lead to ways of living together which they prefer. From this imprecise and subjective method, I suggest that among the better stories which evolve in the meeting between therapist and family may be those which are more congruent, object-adequate, encompassing, holding, just, shared, emotional, conscious, provisional and hopeful. These are better seen as qualities rather than categories, since they are not discrete, fixed, complete or without contradiction. They are stories about family stories - ones which reflect my theoretical interests. But before elaborating them it should be strongly emphasized that the better story position is quite neutral about theory and does not, for example, privilege psychoanalytic ideas nor prescribe the qualities mentioned above. Ideas from a particular model are favoured only if they are clinically more useful at that moment in therapy to that therapist with that family - not because that model has inherent overall advantages. In brief, it is a liberal epistemology allowing theoretical ideas to live alongside each other and, therefore, should allow other therapists to develop different notions about what kinds of story changes they consider to have been helpful. So why then bother with complex layers of theory - why not use a more simple (say behavioural) model? Perhaps this will one day be answered through outcome research comparing model effectiveness, but until that (unlikely) time a good argument for pluralism is that of Pinsof (1983) who makes the reasonable assumption that each therapeutic model will have its own domain of expertise (or objectadequacy) and that a number of such models linked together should ‘maximise their assets and minimise their deficits’. In other words, pluralism gives the therapist more positions from which to help family members search for new meaning. Refusing to separate self from system and modernism from postmodernism may allow therapeutic curiosity a very wide range indeed. In working with a complex presenting problem such as anorexia, for example, it may prove helpful to have the theoretical tools to think through the early internalized object relationships in and between family members (unconscious stories) as well as the more conscious stories supporting current relationship dynamics as well as the influence of the Western
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cultural discourse which makes the acceptability of women contingent on thinness.
A more congruent story The notion of fit is an important one in constructivism (Glasersfeld, 1984). Individuals seem to need to make sense of their lives and of the world around them, and family members appear to require some correspondence of ideas in order to live together (Patterson and Garwick, 1994).Each family’s anthology ofstories may be thought of as part of the coherence of that particular family system through which its individual members can manage a ‘congruent interdependence’ (Dell, 1982) in relationships, both within the family and with the outside world. Individuals in families will tend to subscribe to some common beliefs at both conscious and unconscious levels. A highly congruent better fitting set of ideas might produce a story which benefits everyone. For example, the idea that a child is angry because his parents have separated might fit better and be generally more helpful for all the members than an earlier story that his behaviour arose from innate badness. But, conversely, some stories that seem to fit well for the family may, ultimately, be unhelpful to some members. In a family in which the sexual abuse of a child comes to be seen as the child’s fault there may be a good fit for all members, including the victim. I n such a case, more parameters than individual fit and congruence of fit between members seem necessary for defining one story as better than another. An incongruence of story versions about vital issues and events seems to underpin all chronic family conflict. Couples unable to evolve congruent stories may eventually abandon their relationship while some may spend most of their lifetime in attempts to impose their truth on each other. In a family where the parents argued repeatedly over issues of control of the children, the father’s affair of two years before was seen by him as casual and meaningless. There was no fit with the mother’s perception of deep betrayal. In such cases, a therapeutic holding of the couple or family may allow a neutral but empathic exploration of incongruent stories in the search for some meaning that can be shared.
A more object-adequate story Therapists whose epistemology does not require them to dismiss empirical research are well positioned to present ideas to family @ 1995 The Association f o r Family Therapy
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members which may assist them in better understanding that aspect of the external world with which they are grappling. A parent who is unwilling to believe in a daughter’s disclosure of sexual abuse, and whose reluctance to do so is at least partly underpinned by the recently revived discourse that child sexual abuse is rare (see the work of Sjoegren reported in Jervis, 1994), may be helped to reassess this view through the therapist directly sharing findings from the growing body of research into prevalence (e.g. Anderson et al., 1993). Such therapists will also feel entitled to draw on stories derived both from their own clinical experience and from the rich resources of clinical literature, to furnish potentially useful ideas. For example, stepfamily members in which an eldest son is in regular conflict with his stepfather may find considerable relief in the idea that such conflicts seem to be a frequent aspect of the process of adjustment in stepfamilies. This relief may form a first step in their engagement in the search for a better story to explain this behaviour - one in which the therapist may draw on ideas derived from many theoretical stories such as loyalty, attachment, mourning, scripts, unconscious identification, displacement of aggression, triangulation, gender premises and so on. A more encompassing story A good fit in the family story may have been achieved and maintained by selective inattention to certain events and experiences. Families who leave ‘unstoried’ traumatically organizing events (Bentovim and Kinston, 1991; Bentovim and Davenport, 1992) seem particularly at risk of running into difficulties. A child who followed her mother everywhere was seen as ‘unreasonable’ and ‘taking more than her share’ in the family and this was said to have ‘gone on for years’. The story had not taken into account the relevance of the death of her brother, followed immediately by the child being taken away by distant relatives for a week to give the parents a break. With help from the therapist in holding the distressed memories of the family members around this time, the parents were able to pinpoint the start of the symptoms of clinginess from the time of her return to her family. This allowed the emergence of a more sensitive response to the child. A more holding story Winnicott (1965) describes the experience of the parent holding the baby as part physical, part emotional and part cognitive. He sees the @ 1995 The Association for Family Therapy
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good-enough parent as sufficiently tuned into the baby’s needs to be able to reflect back to the infant something of its own emotional state making more manageable the distress of that particular moment hunger, loneliness and associated anxiety or rage - which may otherwise threaten to overwhelm. Another way of putting this is to say that, eventually, the physical holding gives way to a story that holds. Here, it is assumed that the infant uses the ideas about itself reflected back by the parent to organize gradually its own experience of self and others. This early holding by the parents may be the foundation for the experiences throughout life of being understood and validated, of being made safe and of feeling complete; the basis for secure relating to others. Good-enough holding in families allows support and room for growth for all its members. Following this view, symptoms in children, for example, may be seen as starting with a piece of behaviour, or aspect of the child’s personality, that cannot be tolerated - or held - elsewhere in the family; usually because it threatens to trigger some unbearable experience for the parent and thereby putting the parent in touch with intensely painful feelings. For example, children with chronic tempers seem often to have a parent or parents who found rows or the expression of anger to be unmanageable when they were children perhaps it led to violence. This may lead to a lack of safe containment of the symptomatic child: the parents might under- or over-react to its aggressive and challenging behaviour. If the story in the family is not full enough to recognize that aspect of the child then there may be some circumstances in which the child may need consciously to suppress that aspect of themselves, or there may be deeper repression into the unconscious and that part may become both lost to conscious awareness (Fairbairn, 1952) and deleted or ‘developmentally closed’ from the relationship (Street and Treacher, 1987; Street, 1994). For example, a child whose mother was frequently admitted to hospital with a chronic heart condition seemed to have learned to eliminate her own neediness (since she came to believe that her needs might kill her mother) and became excessively compliant. She was apparently quite content to be cared for by an indifferent elder sister but was troubled throughout childhood by a dream in which during a calm ocean-going voyage she stabbed her sister to death. A more holding story would be one in which important needs, wishes, feelings and beliefs of family members become more acknowledged by each other.
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A more shared story Families often enter therapy with the story that best manages their anxiety and guilt. I n one family the initial prevailing view of a daughter’s victimization at school was that it was linked only to unsympathetic teachers and unsuitable friends. Only when the father was unable to attend could an alternative view emerge among the other family members - that the father was a bully within the family who could not be challenged for fear of his blustering (though nonviolent) rages. The increasing awareness that others in the family felt the same way later led the mother to confront her husband effectively about his behaviour. The family story might be thought of as the most comfortable one in any given set of circumstances. Stories seem not to be fixed, but dynamic depending on who is involved in the discourse. Each individual and each sub-system within the family will have their own unshared stories and a major task for the therapist is the containment (Bion, 1962) of anxiety in order that the resource of unshared views may be tapped in the mutual search for a better story.
A more emotional story As Byng-Hall (1982) indicates, the emotional life of the family is interwoven with every aspect of its functioning. Important beliefs are closely linked to strong feelings (Dallos, 1991). The therapist’s willingness to tolerate and contain strong and sometimes conflicting emotions within him- or herself may be crucial in allowing recollection of a hitherto hidden experience which might then be available for incorporation into a richer story. In one family, a seven-year-old girl gave up all spontaneity when her father entered hospital for reasons which were never explained to her. Only when her great anxiety around this issue was acknowledged and held by therapist and parents together could she bear to remember that she believed that she had ‘worn Daddy out7.Further holding work was needed with the parents for them to be able to manage the profound emotionally laden issues around the father’s suicide attempt before they could help their daughter further with her story. A more conscious story Sometimes one finds a parent who is distressed by his or her own apparently irrational hatred of a particular child, or an adult @ 1995 The Association for Family Therajy
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relationship in which one partner begins to find intolerable an aspect of the other partner which they previously found attractive. In such cases the resource for a new story may be thought of as not consciously withheld but more or less repressed to the unconscious. A child may process traumatic events or unmanageable aspects of relationships into a primitive and self-blaming story which becomes relatively lost to conscious thought and, therefore, to the possibilities of reappraisal. The child-story may still be used in adult life to make sense of the present and predict the future. One woman, whose father died when she was four years old, eventually recovered a story that he had died as a consequence of her needing him so much. The recovered story helped her to reassess why she had always retreated from relationships with men when they became important to her. The psychoanalytic concept of transference (e.g. Scharff and Scharff, 1987) may be thought of, partly, as the use of old stories to manage new but reminiscent situations, while countertransference (e.g. Taffel, 1993) may be viewed as the experience of being caught up in the role requirements of someone else’s unconscious story. The ideas of projective identification (e.g. Ogden, 1979; Zinner and Shapiro, 1972; Pocock, 1992) may also be of considerable use in the search for unconscious stories. I n one family, a mother with a very deprived early history seriously physically abused her son who stole money after the birth of a younger sibling. She recalled in therapy how she had stolen from other girls at boarding school since they seemed to be given much more than her. This unpunished act seems to have been so shameful to her that she had lost touch with it until her son’s behaviour began to stir it up. Her attack on him seemed to displace - and re-enact interpersonally - an unconscious story that had viewed her own neediness as appallingly greedy. However, in some cases, family therapy may be too brief, too unsafe, or too unfocused for the exploration of unconscious stories. Working psychodynamically with an individual adult or child may, I believe, be the only way to retrieve some influential but lost stories or of finding words for that which has never been thought about or expressed (Coltart, 1986). The therapist may also need to help family members to become more aware of partly unconscious cultural discourses which powerfully assist in the definition of roles and behaviour, especially in relation to gender. (See, especially, Hare-Mustin, 1994).
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A morejust story
A more important question is how some beliefs become dominant and enter the family story while other beliefs covering similar issues do not. Cultural discourses will clearly be important, allowing some individuals in families relatively more influence than others in the establishment of the family story. Linked to this, the power to influence the story at the level of the family seems, to me, to be inversely proportional to the relative fear of conflict between the individuals concerned - those members with most to lose through conflict do worst in influencing the story. Children, because of their dependent position, will accept definitions of themselves provided by parents fairly readily. It seems intolerable for children to remain permanently and consciously angry with a parent they are dependent upon and by and large they will adapt to the stronger reality of the parent (Stierlin, 1959) even if this includes accepting damaging definitions of themselves as, for example, in scapegoating (Pillari, 1991). Between parents, the unjust discourse of patriarchy may allow a father considerably more influence than the mother in defining the family reality over a wide range of issues. At the family level she may have come to depend on him financially and therefore be more fearful of conflict because of the implicit threat of separation (Caddick, 1988; Gore11 Barnes, 1990). A more just family story would be one which supported a more reasonable balance of the needs of all its members while still taking account of the relative difference of neediness of some more dependent members (Boszormenyi-Nagy and Krasner, 1986). The therapist may need to allow a safe enough space within the therapy for injustice in family relationships to be explored, as well as its potential link to the injustice of extra-family influences such as poverty, racism, poor housing etc. (Kingston, 1987; Shaw et al., 1994).
A more prouisional and hopeful story Some stories, such as those which support depression, seem both fixed and hopeless and lack any awareness of personal strengths. A deep belief in one’s uselessness or unloveability or irredeemable guilt may act as a prison from which there is no simple release. Implicit in the concept of better story is that such truths are never final but ultimately provisional and open to revision. This view of stories should give hope to the therapist in helping the family search for new @ 1995 The Association for Family Therapy
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meaning, and courage in entering painful areas so that deeply held beliefs may be reassessed. Lack of certainty may be a first step to hope. However, there is a danger of technique-driven, quick-fixes which play with people’s truth and I would include inauthentic positive connotation and superficial reframing among these. Carpenter (1992) also highlights the possibilities of family members feeling accused of making things up when the story metaphor is used too literally. I think family members come to feel that their contribution to the story can be revised when they feel safe enough to take the risk of loosening their grip on it, and when they genuinely sense a capacity for not knowing in the therapist (Bion, 1975). One of the most powerful implicit messages from a reflecting team (Andersen, 1987), for example, is that the ideas generated are only possibilities, or even probabilities, but never certainties -what feels right or better can only be a matter for the family.
Conclusion The growing interest in a postmodern family therapy seems, at least, partly motivated by a wish to eliminate the hierarchy between therapist and family, to avoid expertness and the exercise of therapeutic influence through power and control (Hoffman, 1985, 1990). But it seems to me that family members, who ask to see therapists, are likely to be looking for someone with specialist knowledge in the hope that he or she might know something that the family does not. Families are so complex we can ill afford to dismiss any theoretical ideas available to us. We should hoard as many stories - or knowledge and experience as they are traditionally called - as we can, but use them to serve the therapeutic process rather than attempting to control it. All the thinking and communication of the therapist should be subordinate to helping stimulate potentially useful ideas. Whether and how these are taken into the family story will ultimately be unpredictable and mysterious. If we can take seriously our limitations in this process we can avoid taking over. Winnicott (1958) used to demonstrate that if a shiny object such as a spatula was left within reach of a baby then, given time for hesitation, the infant might invest it with interest or meaning. I t might come to be sucked, banged, fed to mother or thrown away - it would be unlikely to be used as a medical spatula. Attempts to force or hurry the baby would always render it @ I995 The Association f.r Family Therapy
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an alien object. We would do well to present our therapeutic ideas with at least as much respect. Postmodernism is a useful critique of modernist endeavour. It should make those with claims to knowledge nervous. I t should restrain us from anything more than a perpetual state of uncertainty (Mason, 1993) and should help us to refuse to be seduced by the notions of objective truth. But it should not require us to dump what we have agreed to call knowledge wholesale or to abandon the attempt to understand the complex phenomena of families and family therapy. Its simple messages to us are that no theories can be true, no approaches correct, and that it is permissible to break through some of the conceptual boundaries with which we surround ourselves. In the dormitory of life there is no light switch. We may find it useful to swap stories with those from related fields, some of whom have been stumbling around for a lot longer than ourselves.
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