ABSTRACT
In chapter seven, I showed how the therapist can start from a position that is general enough not to be identified with her own cultural assumptions and yet give some direction to the enquiry and the therapeutic process. The therapist must try to know what she does not know, and this is why she cannot start with a view from nowhere (Nagel, 1986). Indeed, this would be an illusion. I gave some idea of what the “system” that the therapist may want to keep in mind might look like, as well as ethnographic questions and subquestions that can be generated so that the therapist can move towards “thick description”. Thick description involves language in the broadest sense, including its expressive use, the experience of participation in the language loop, and, of course, digital and analogic modes of communication (Bateson, 1973). On the basis of these processes, the therapist may, like the ethnographer, be able to access information that is new and, because it may be different from what she expected, needs explaining. But not all this information is also new to the client, because, just like the therapist herself, clients act, think, feel, and exist against the background of previous patterns of interaction and meaning. Information, then, may refer to what Bourdieu (1990) has called doxic 79experience—that is to say, knowledge that individual persons take for granted and may not be wholly conscious, but is nevertheless imbued with cultural patterns and meaning (see chapter five). This kind of material is a challenge to the therapist because she cannot ask direct questions about it. Nevertheless, her efforts must be directed towards accessing and tuning into these kinds of meanings, and if she is able to do this, she can use it to generate new questions. This requires some clarification, and I shall do this by way of an example.
