Towards a New Coherence for

Systemic Family Therapy

David Pocock, family therapist,

psychoanalytic psychotherapist,

and trainer in independent practice

dpocock53@gmail.com

Dialogical therapy

Rober, Bertrando, others

Stern: ‘moments of

meeting’

Shotter: knowing of the

third kind

Understanding and feeling

understood

All necessary, but not

sufficient

My position

The „Guru

effect‟

The tendency for

people to "judge

profound what

they have failed

to grasp.” Dan

Sperber, 2010

The straw man of realism

Realism instrumentalism

phil_philosophy-101.jpgphil_philosophy-101.jpg

jPhilosophy of knowingand being

Theory

Practise

jStructuralism

Cross-generational coalition

Active restructuring

jConstructionism

Cross-generational coalition

Offer alternativeviewpoint (positioning)

Philosophy of knowingand being

Theory

Practise

Later Wittgenstein

Theory of languagegames

Joint action /performance

Gergen

„Essentially when we say that a

certain description is „accurate‟ or

„true‟ we are not judging it

according to how well it depicts

the world.‟

1st key point

Critical realism ends the

historic opposition of

constructionism and realism

Constructionism

„Realities‟ are socially made

It radically critiques the notion that our

ideas can adequately represent the

world, especially objectively

It is a newer version of idealism

It supports both–and

Realism

The world is just as it is, whether

known or not

Our ideas about the world can in some

circumstances adequately represent it

A rational basis for choosing between

sets of ideas

Supports either / or

Moderate constructionism +

moderate realism = critical

realism

The „holy trinity‟

Ontological realism

Epistemological relativism

Judgmental rationality

Two dimensions

Intransitive – the world just as it is

beyond our ideas of it

Transitive – our knowledge of the

world, socially constructed,

historically situated, and fallible

What is

reality?

The three domains: a practical

demonstration!

The empirical

The actual

The real

Against positivism

Critical realism rejects the positivist

account of invariant causality

Science experiments are only possible

with closed systems

Human systems are open systems with

many interacting variables or

tendencies

2nd key point

Real mechanisms may or may

not produce an event

depending on how they interact

in open systems

They have potential power and

are, therefore, tendencies

Emergence

Circular positivism

Husband withdraws

Wife nagsHusband withdraws

Wife nags

YouTube testimony of a black teenage black

self-harming (slide removed to reduce size of file)

Bhaskar asks …

“What must the world be like in order

that science produces reliable

knowledge?”

“It must, necessarily, be a changing,

ordered, stratified, and open system of

interacting causal tendencies”

…. and the status of our ideas

about the world?

Ideas are socially constructed,

usually based on prior socially

authorised knowledge, historically

situated and therefore fallible

Explanation and prediction

Unlike the positivist account (including

circular positivism of event-based systems)

explanation does not lead to prediction in

open systems

Change is often invisible because of presence

of other activating or restraining mechanisms

Absence is a powerful generative mechanism

So what has potential causal

power? 3rd key point

Anything that can be activated to co-

create an event.

E.g. ideas, bodies, genes, molecules,

social structures, material

constraints, relationships, non-

conscious motivations, shared

meanings or absence of any of these

Holistic explanation

The world is a

„multi-level

stream of

interconnected

happenings‟

Elder-Vass

Implications for systemic

therapy

A rich range of resources

Translation of causality to

understanding and feeling understood

Ideas can only be offered up into the

work / play of the therapy relationships

Because … in open systems we cannot

predict where change will come from

Towards coherence

If we accept that ideas about the world are

themselves part of the total world of causal

tendencies – then several splits are closed in

our field:

unconscious vs conscious motivation

structuralism vs post-structuralism

first vs second order cybernetics

qualitative vs quantitative research

Our choice …

We are all realists about something

… all that remains is to decide what

kind of realists we will be!

… or alternatively!

Further reading

Pocock, D. (2013) A philosophy of

practice for systemic psychotherapy: the

case for critical realism. Journal of Family

Therapy. doi: 10.1111/1467-6427.12027

Or email me at: dpocock53@gmail.com