ABSTRACT
According to Steve de Shazer, one of the lessons therapists can learn from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is: “Don’t think, but observe.” Steve’s remark brought me up short the first time I heard it. After years of learning more and more elaborate and compelling theories about why people did what they did, and how therapy could help them not do it anymore, I was being invited, it seemed, into a desolate land of flat and colorless description. Fragments of old hospital admission notes sprang to mind: “Patient was oriented X3, with evidence of slowed thinking and depressive affect.” What help, I wondered, could come from observations such as these?
