ABSTRACT

This chapter wants to argue that not only does anthropology have much to offer systemic psychotherapists, but systemic psychotherapy can also assist anthropologists and ethnographers with how to enquire and how to think about the relationships between themselves and their interlocutors. Many of the most influential family therapists who were pioneers in the discipline of systemic psychotherapy were themselves trained psychoanalysts and made use of this prior training and experience in their work with families, without ever directly writing about this. In the therapy room, families could be helped to experience something which was different from the usual pattern, might encourage a change, and new pattern might give rise to new communications and different ways of relating at home. One way of defining systemic psychotherapy is to describe it as an approach, which looks for or examines relationships and relationships between relationships as these occur both in the therapy room as well as in the lives of clients and therapists.