ABSTRACT
CB
What questions have persisted for you around family therapy across time? Do you think there are some questions you keep coming back to?
DCI’m sure that my questions are much more relational than they were when I started, because my training was as a clinical psychologist specialising in child psychotherapy when the child had already been identified as having the problem. By the time they came to me, I had to struggle to raise the family profile and would always be asking questions that looked at a context of relationships around a problem. One of my top ten articles is the one by Anderson, Goolishian, and Winderman (1986) about the problem being determined by the way it is constructed by the professionals. I’ve also been influenced by some of Karl Tomm’s (1987a, b, 1988) early papers about interventive interviewing, and a lot of my questions are meant to push people into a different way of thinking, so if they say it’s black, I’d ask about the white, and if the kid is wonderful, well, what about the times they’re not wonderful, and so on. I do a lot of looking for opposites, and that has really come together for me in terms of the thinking about positioning theory, in that people take positions in relation to the positions 48not taken, which is something that’s really important in the way I work with people. I think the more solution-focused people have influenced me to take the hypotheses that the families generate themselves more seriously and to get into their own narrative about problems. As a child psychotherapist, I held on to ideas about containment and support, and I think it is important for therapists to be present and available for people to give them the confidence that we can work this through together. I think sometimes we get a little bit too fond of our own theories and think change comes about because of some of our complicated ideas, when it’s just about being a trustworthy supportive person. I try to see feedback loops, and whenever I’m talking to anybody I am thinking, what’s the feedback that they have been getting that leads them to say this, and what might other people say about this point you’ve just made. Those kind of questions are really interesting to me.
CBCan you say a bit more about how you craft a question, because you have a very fine ability to ask questions in different contexts?
DCOne of the mantras that runs through my head is the diagram Bateson put in Mind and Nature (1980) about finding meaning, acting on the meaning, and the action leads to another level of meaning, which leads to further action. I think that’s such a wonderful template to have in mind because it always makes it possible to ask a question to move through the diagram, so, if people say this is what we think is going on, I would ask what that suggests we should do, what’s the activity based on that understanding? That would lead me into the next question. If people are in the activity side of Bateson’s ladder and they’ve decided to set up a community service, I’d say that’s fine, but let’s step back and be reflective and look at what it means. Now we’ve moved on to another understanding in relation to what are we going to do next, or tomorrow, or whatever time frame is appropriate. I think I’ve developed sensors for not letting people slide away from that ladder, and sliding away from the ladder is acting before you understand the meaning or settling for a meaning without really analysing the action and consequences of it, so I think it’s important that there’s somebody who is trying to keep people to the task. There are lots of interesting theories that come from Bateson and other people about group dynamics and the tendency for groups to fall off task and become more primitive and competitive, so a lot of my work 49has been based on helping people stay task focused and not to get into the rivalries and the competitiveness that they do otherwise.
CBI suppose systemic therapy is sometimes critiqued for having too much flexibility. What is your view is about that?
DCTo go back to the Bateson schema, family therapists are probably happier on the activity side of the ladder and maybe not as interested in the meaning analytic side. That’s probably a fair criticism, but somebody has to, for example, act on a new idea that has just come out of the field of anthropology, or try a new technique and see whether it helps. Family therapists tend to like to be creative and exploratory, and there are others in the field who are happier slowing it down and analysing; they may be more research orientated and want to look at what’s going on and make some hypothesis about it. I don’t think the criticism is negative as long as we’re aware that we’re on the Bateson diagram and that we’ve taken a position somewhere.
