ABSTRACT
Neutrality has proved to be the most controversial and perhaps misunderstood of the 'guidelines' referred to in the 'Hypothesizing-Circularity-Neutrality' paper published by the Milan team. Most professional workers would agree with the second strand of the concept of neutrality; that it represents a wish to maintain their integrity as professionals and not lose boundaries between their personal and professional selves. Neutrality is a strategic stance arrived at by the therapist in a self-monitoring process. In that process he is asking himself what strategic stance he needs to take, in order to create the kind of relationship between himself and the client which will bring about change. Neutrality was a decided, studied, deliberate and intentional behaviour on our part. The authors hypothesized that our stances at various points in the process of being more or less neutral would perturb the family system, and we attempted to evaluate their feedback to modify our 'neutral' stance.
