Harlene Anderson: Selected Writings

BECOMING A POSTMODERN COLLABORATIVE THERAPIST:
A CLINICAL AND THEORETICAL JOURNEY
PART II

Harlene Anderson

Houston Galveston Institute
Taos Institute

Abstract

The development of practice and theory are a reflective process. Here, I share my journey toward a collaborative practice and a postmodern theory. My narrative of transformation begins with a glimpse into the traditions from which my journey began and pauses where I find myself at this time. Part I described the shift in practice that evolved out of my clinical experiences. Part II describes the shifts in theoretical biases along the way to my current philosophical stance.

The world around us is fast changing—shrinking, becoming enormously more complex and uncertain—and our cultures are touching each other in ways that they have not before, and in some instances becoming intertwined. Many familiar explanatory concepts no longer help account for and deal with the complexities of these changes and the impact they have on human beings and our everyday lives. What I learned from clients over the years led me to question and abandon some familiar concepts such as " universal truths, knowledge and knower as independent, language as representative, and the meaning is in the word. Such concepts risk placing human behavior into frameworks of understanding that seduce therapists into hierarchical expert-nonexpert dichotomies, into discourses of pathology and dysfunction, and into a world of knowing and certainty. My journey, which spans three decades, in reaching this place has been an exciting one and has opened options for my clients and me.

I begin my story in 1970 when I joined the family therapy program developed from the Multiple Impact Therapy (MIT) research project initiated in 1956 in the Psychiatry Department’s Child and Adolescent Division at the medical school in Galveston, Texas as a learner. We all live and work in knowledge or learning communities, some have expansive perimeters and permeable boundaries and some are like little black boxes. I unknowingly stepped into the former, a learning community with a rich tradition of challenge, innovation, and transformation. I did not know where this adventure, influenced by circumstance and curiosity, would take me. I shared my clinical journey in Part I, focusing on its MIT roots and the shifts in clinical work that my colleagues and I experienced over time. Here I share the theoretical journey, highlighting the influences that cybernetic, social, evolutionary, constructivist, hermeneutic, narrative, social constructionist and philosophical theories played in the development of the postmodern collaborative approach.,,

This approach represents more a philosophy of life than a theory of therapy, a way of thinking about and being with the people whom I meet in my work whether that arena is therapy, learning, research, or organizational consultation. Philosophy, since its origins in ancient Greece, focuses on questions about ordinary human life: self-identity, relationships, mind, and knowledge. Philosophy is not about finding scientific truths; rather it involves ongoing analysis, inquiry, and reflection. I believe that how I prefer to understand therapy, including its process and the client-therapist relationship, and how I prefer to be as a therapist and in all my life roles reflects a worldview that does not separate professional and personal. Inherent in my view is an appreciative belief in the good and the positive--that most human beings value, want, and strive toward healthy successful lives and relationships.

I trace the evolution of the approach in a historical context and hope to alleviate any misunderstandings that my colleagues or I simply woke up one day and decided to be postmodern and collaborative. And though the journey took a meandering path, I present the theoretical developments in a sequence, the influences sometimes overlapped, intertwined, or faded away. Colleagues who participated in this journey will each have their unique version and highlights of this story. The journey has been exciting; I hope I convey the enthusiasm and energy as well as the creative and rebellious nature of the people and the work. Much of this story could not have occurred without Harry Goolishian: his leadership, his intellectual curiosity, his humor, his rebelliousness, and his humanness, and his ability to inspire others. I dedicate this account to Harry Goolishian in honor of the tenth anniversary of his death.

Threads of a Tradition

The threads of the fabric called a postmodern collaborative approach can be traced to the original MIT: the client as the expert, the importance of multiple voices and realities, a nonpathologizing view of families, and therapists being public with their thoughts. Of course, at the time the MIT colleagues did not have today’s theoretical vocabularies to use to describe, explain, and understand their work. They drew from their unique clinical experiences, familiar developmental theory, and the early writings of Jackson, Bateson, and their colleagues in Palo Alto, California about communication, theory of schizophrenia, families and conjoint family therapy. They also took from the current work of others like Sullivan’s practice of including all hospital ward personnel as part of the therapeutic environment, Bell’s family group therapy and Bowen’s hospitalization of whole families. Going back and reading about the MIT project was like going into a dusty attic and seeing traditions. When you look at this work and realize the time in which it was produced, it was incredible. It was a therapy ahead of its time. I pause here to highlight some aspects of its theoretical footing, to show the threads that held through time, to honor it, and to share it with those not familiar with it.

MIT had several foundational assumptions (MacGregor, Richie, Serrano, Shuster, McDanald & Goolishian, 1964). One assumption focused on the therapist’s stance, including the importance of therapist attitude about the client’s potential and their relationship with the client.

therapists’ demonstrating confidence in the self-rehabilitative potential of the family more than into developing the patient’s faith in the doctor...the human encounters involved at the inception of therapy, including the feeling of commitment to a constructive endeavor, may be the most therapeutic of experiences situations (p. 8).

Another assumption focused on the importance of the client’s expertise on their life, the therapist’s learning the client’s perspective of their life dilemma, and the therapist’s continually checking-out to make sure they understood what the client said:

members of the family are invited to outline in their own words the nature of the immediate crisis and their views . . .the patient is invited to participate in this recapitulation and to make needed corrections; and the notion of reflections as a team member "responds to this summary by reflecting (p.6).

Team members were aware that their way of being with families might be different from previous experiences with other professionals saying, "Most families are unaccustomed to this to this novel interchange" (p. 6).

The team’s assumption concerning problem formation and resolution was not unlike that developed by other family therapy theories. Symptom development was conceptualized as collusions across generational boundaries that limited communication and forced members into repetitive roles during stress that were incompatible with natural family growth and transitions. The symptom was characterized by the problem requirements of the developmental period in which the collusion occurred. The team’s role was to "temporarily interrupt the arresting forces in the family by participating in family communications as a healthy model of interpersonal interaction which showed particular respect for the family’s problems and defenses" (MacGregor, et al., p. 10). From their experiences, the team found that interruptions in family members’ interactions and the subsequent change occurred in a brief sequence of therapy and was sustained, as the family relied on their newly discovered inner resources, knowing more where to turn in its own community: "[T]he growth potential of family members. . .would yield further improvement during extended periods of living, without therapeutic supervision" (MacGregor, p. 10). Interestingly, the team did not think that they empowered the family but instead helped them find and use their inherent potentials.

The team’s practice evolved as they reflected on it and learned from its anomalies, a process characterized by curiosity, flexibility, and change: "Sometimes their [the team’s] method fails; at other times it prepares the way for different forms of therapy. And, the "method" itself is constantly undergoing change. Flexibility of pattern is a principal characteristic. The basic notion allows for all manner of variation" (MacGregor, p. x). As I mentioned in Part I MIT evolved into an everyday family therapy practice, with teams meeting with families and mostly using the MIT format for consultations stuck clinical situations, and teaching.

Theoretically, MIT and the family therapy practice that evolved from it continued on the backdrop of the two dominant, fundamental, and intertwined principles that first organized family therapists’ thinking: a negative-feedback, homeostatic cybernetics systems theory and an order-imposing, hierarchically layered social systems theory. The principles mechanistically described and explained a human system as an assemblage of parts whose process is determined by its structure. Both principles brought to family therapy that which distinguished it from most psychotherapy theories: a contextual systems paradigm. People live and experience the events of their lives in interactional systems. Problems, in this view, become social phenomena whose development, persistence, and elimination take place within this interactional arena rather than characteristics or properties of individuals.

The Palo Alto colleagues turned first to cybernetics theory for a language to describe family interaction. Families, as cybernetic-like energy and feedback systems, were considered a kind of servomechanism with a governor that protected the norm and prevented change. The symptom made sense only within, and as an expression of, the total family context. It no longer represented an individual disturbance, but a signal that a family was having difficulty meeting the demands of stress, change, or natural transition points--difficulty, that is, in moving toward greater complexity. The meaning of the symptom was related to the family system's structure and functioned to maintain the present system's homeostasis: its status, structure, and organization, its stability, continuity, and relationship definition. This cybernetic metaphor was basic to understanding both healthy and pathological family organization.

Interestingly, although the MIT team studied and was strongly influenced by the Palo Alto group and their introduction of cybernetics (first-order cybernetics), the team early on expressed disagreement with the notion of homeostasis. They found it "does not embrace the aspects of growth that have to do with the emergence form the family matrix; nor does it adequately cover the therapeutic mobilization of self-rehabilitative processes" (McGregor et al, 1964, p. 9). Yet, it would be years later when the Galveston group (Dell, 1982) and others like Hoffman, Maruyama, and Speer, strongly challenged the principal and contradiction of homeostasis. If families, like other living systems, were unable to avoid growth and change, then this was contradictory to the cybernetic notion of homeostasis, a contradiction that had been veiled in the belief that the slow movement or stuckness often seen in families was the pathology.

My Entrance

When I began studying with the Galveston group they were interested in communication and language, inspired by the Palo Alto colleagues Watzlawick, Beaven, and Jackson's Pragmatics of Human Communication. Pragmatics was the colleagues’ first effort to pull together the Palo Alto developments and fully articulate their interactional view: Communication influences human interaction and all behavior is communication. The effects of communication and behavior are a communicative reaction to a particular situation rather than evidence of the disease of an individual mind. That is, communication becomes the social organization and symptom development becomes the way a family member indulges in the self-sacrifice required to maintain family stability without undergoing organizational change. Earlier, Jackson (1965), drawing on Bateson's ideas about learning theory and communication theory, asserted that every utterance has a content (report) and a relationship (command) aspect; the former conveys information about facts, opinions, feelings, experiences, and so forth., and the latter defines the nature of the relationship between the communicants." For Bateson, this relational and communicative context is essential to the meanings that we give words and actions. Perhaps this idea was an early seed of the collaborative approach’s supposition that relationship and conversation going hand-in-hand.

Cybernetics Continued and Beyond:

In the 1970s in the teaching seminars at the medical school we immersed ourselves in the developments within family therapy, early on inspired by Bateson’s Steps to Ecology of the Mind. Then Watzlawick, Weakland & Fisch’s Change introduced the second-order cybernetics systems notions of positive feedback and observer-dependent systems to family therapists. Positive feedback challenged the idea that one part of a system could control another part without itself changing and observer-dependent systems challenged the idea of objective reality and subject-object. Pathology, including defective structure, was no longer a necessary condition for the development of problem behavior nor were symptoms thought to serve a function. Distinctions that we call reality, like pathology, were no longer thought to be out there but observer punctuation. A major implication of second-order cybernetics for understanding human problems and the therapist's role was Bateson’s suggestion that therapists were dealing with family beliefs not pathology and that proposing pathology is an epistemological error.

Along the way we admired Auerswald’s ecological perspective on human systems and later read Selvini Palazzoli’s Self-starvation, the Milan group’s Paradox and Counterparadox and Hoffman’s Foundations and of course, numerous family therapy journal articles. Sprinkled throughout this period was an interest with the group relations and organizational theory and practice advanced by the Tavistock Institute known as the A. K. Rice movement. We experimented with the ideas in our practice and collegial relationships, invited in A.K. Rice consultants, and participated in experiential group training events. These experiments gave us an early awareness of gender issues and the importance of each person’s voice. We would later challenge some feminist family therapists’ versions of gender issues as participating in what is trying to be changed: oppressing voices.

We always wanted to meet and talk with the authors first hand, inviting them or going to see them, introducing our colleagues to them by including them in national and international conferences. Bateson consulted with the MIT project; early on Weakland, Watzlawick, Hoffman and others came to do seminars; later we invited Boscolo, Cecchin, Keeney, Laing, Penn, and von Foerster among others; and some traveled to MRI and various seminars. We have had sustained relationships over time with conversational partners and kindred spirits Lynn Hoffman and Tom And ersen. Lynn always—and still does--asked questions and made comments about our work and had a knack for words that pushed us to think deeper and to clarify and amplify our thoughts. It was from Lynn that I learned to think carefully about the words that I choose to articulate a meaning that I want to convey; for instance, choosing "collaborative" instead of "cooperative" or "public" isntead of "transparent." Tom was--and is—endlessly challenging and innovative, and we felt like he was a kindred soul "out there" with us in what could be an exciting but lonely place when you are questioning others beloved traditions. From Tom, I learned to value humility. We found large conferences seldom provided the space for the kinds of intimate conversations that we liked to have with others. So, we, inspired by a conversation between Lynn and Harry, created forums where participants from around the world self-organized, talking in small conversational clusters about topics of interest to them. It was at the first of these in 1988 that Harry publicly articulated our leaving behind second-order cybernetics and constructivism and the new sense that language made to us: Our lives—e.g. events, experiences, relationships, and theories—are simply expressions of our socially constructed language and narratives; and agency is the transformation of our language and narratives into action. We also presented and tested out our ideas at numerous workshops and found, as I still do, that these were an important context for shaping and clarifying our evolving ideas.

Influences from Science and Philosophy

Parallel to the influence of second-order cybernetics on our practice and theory were similar ones from science and philosophy such as those of Bohm, Derrida, Einstein, Gadamer, Kuhn, Habermas, Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Prigogene, Rorty, and Wittgenstein who challenged realism: objective reality, observer-independent knowledge, subject-object dualism, and language as representational. These developments caught us on fire. In the latter 1970s faculty and students began an informal study group in the evenings hosted in homes to delve into these, and for us, new developments. The seminars were the beginning of a teaching tradition at the Institute--theoretical seminar--where faculty and students learn and struggle with new subjects together rather than faculty teaching students.

In particular, we intuitively felt a fit with the works of physicist Ilya Prigogene and biologist Humburto Maturana. Prigogene’s theory of "far-from-equilibrium" systems and "order through fluctuation" called "dissipative structures" proposed that to maintain stability systems must constantly change. He also proposed, as did some other scientists and philosophers, that reality, and therefore change, is multidimensional and does not result or arise from a pyramid-like foundation. Instead, reality evolves in a non-hierarchical, web-like nature with the web of descriptions becoming more and more complex. Maturana’s "autopoiesis" theory suggested that systems are self-organizing and self-recursive: "the product of an autopoietic organization is always the system itself" (Dell & Goolishian, 1981, p. 442). Wanting to meet the sources and gain a better understanding of their work, we invited Maturana to spend a week with us; George Pulliam, Harry, and I drove to the University of Texas in Austin to spend a day with one of Prigogene’s associates. We began to write about these new vocabularies, how they fit with our clinical experiences, and consequently, provided alternative ways to understand human systems and our work with them (See Anderson, Goolishian, Pulliam & Winderman, 1986; Dell, 1982,1985; Dell & Goolishian, 1979, 1981a,b).

Social Systems Metaphor

Harry challenged the relevance of the hierarchically layered social systems view to family therapy describing it as an "onion theory" (Goolishian, 1985). Like the layers of an onion, from its core outwards, the individual is encircled by the family, the family by the larger system, the larger system by the community, and so forth. Each layer is subordinate to and controlled by the surrounding layer in the service of its own requirements--for maintenance and order. In this view, social systems are objectively defined and are independent of the people involved and of the observers. This onion-like, cybernetic-like social theory contextualizes behavior, naming what should be fixed—the social structure and organization—and thus supports the notion of psychopathology. In this framework, a problem is caused by the system superordinate to the deviant one. And, when relationships are considered nested and based on role and structure, the duality of the individual and the individual in relationship (i.e., with the family) is maintained. Interestingly, early MRI theory denounced the family role concept in favor of family rules because role is individual in origin and orientation and suggests a reliance on a priori theoretical and cultural definitions that exist independently of behavioral data, and therefore, no allowance is made for the relationship. This implies that the therapist is an independent external observer, a knower or expert hierarchically superior to the system. Therapy informed by this view risks bumping the container of the pathology up a level, for instance, from individual to family or family to social agency. Either punctuation, however, still denotes pathology and places it within a system.

In our practices, dating back to the original MIT, we included members of the clients’ larger family, social, and professional system in therapy (Anderson & Goolishian, 1981). We did not think about this practice theoretically, however, until we began to realize how pejorative and blaming family therapy had become regarding families and their fellow professionals. Harry used to say "everyone is in love with family therapy except families." The realization that family therapy often simply bumped the level of blame led to questioning the onion theory and to developing an alternative way of understanding broader familial and professional contexts and their relationships to therapy. Others (e.g. Auerswald, Hoffman & Long, Imber-Coopersmith, Keeney, and Selvini-Palazzoli and colleagues) explored these contexts, referring to them as the ecological system, the larger system, the meaningful system, and the relevant system. Along the way as our unique therapy approach continued to evolve, we studied and experimented with developments by family therapists such as Minuchin, Erickson, and Haley. We remained, however, mostly influenced by the MRI associates, especially the notions of reality and language that appeared throughout their work. As Susan McDaniel (personal communication, August 2, 2001) remembers from her 1977-78 psychology doctoral internship and 1979-80 postgraduate fellowship,

When I first came to Galveston you and Harry were very fired up about strategic ideas and paradox, and reacting against psychodynamic thought. The piece that continued was the intense interest in language. . .On my return the theorizing seemed less reactive to the other schools [family therapy] or psychodynamic work and was beginning to have more of its own integrity. The common threads: respect for people’s strengths and the pathology of paternalizing interventions. There are common threads throughout the years, as if you tried on others’ thoughts and eventually boiled it down more to the essence of what you think.

I discussed in Part I how "trying on" the MRI associates’ notion of speaking the client’s language rather than teaching the client the therapist’s language unpredictably began to transform our work, subsequently leading to new theoretical interests and a new family therapy paradigm.

Constructivism: Reality is Invented

Our continued interest in the developments at MRI naturally took us to constructivism. Closely connected to second-order cybernetics, constructivism is a theory of knowledge that challenges the notions of a tangible, external reality that can be known, discovered, or described and of a knowledge that is representative or reflective of reality. From this perspective, reality represents a human functional adaptation: humans, as experiencing subjects and observers construct and interpret reality, inventing the world they live in. The mind "brings forth" (Maturana, 1978). Therapy informed by constructivism and second-order cybernectics, however, still focused on problems and pathology.; the only difference was that they were not thought to result from what Hoffman called "faulty lenses."

Evolutionary Systems: Process Determines Structure

Lynn Hoffman (1981) referred to the new paradigm arising in family therapy from these intertwined second-order cybernetic and constructivist metaphors and those transported in from biology and physics by us and a few others as the "evolutionary paradigm." The paradigm represented a continued movement away from the concept of homeostasis and causation (both linear and circular). Systems were viewed as evolutionary, non-equilibrium, non-lineal, self-organizing, and self-recursive networks that are in a constant state of discontinuous change. From this perspective systems are always in the process of change; their change is random, unpredictable, discontinuous, and always leads to higher levels of complexity: "This view of evolutionary systems emphasizes process over structure and flexibility and change over stability" (Dell and Goolishian, 1981, p. 442). As Harry and Paul Dell radically suggested, applying these concepts to human systems implied that neither therapy nor the therapist could unilaterally amplify one fluctuation over another or determine the direction of change (Dell & Goolishian, 1979, Dell, 1982). In surrendering this hierarchy and dualism, the therapist does not control the system; instead they are an active part of a mutual evolutionary process. That is, a therapist cannot intervene to determine the outcome or the "ongoingness" (Dell & Goolishian, 1981, p. 444) of the system’s evolution. And furthermore, as Bateson (1975) cautioned, the word "change" is an epistemological confusion--a system does not change. Change and system are observer punctuations; the observer is part of each. This was the beginning of separating ourselves from the pragmatists in family therapy who thought that they could change others and strove to do so.

This conception of a mutual evolutionary process combined with later developments in our conceptualization of language eventually enabled us to move entirely from the mechanic-like cybernetic, onion-like social system, and pyramid-like reality metaphors to conceptualizing human systems as linguistic systems--fluid, evolving communicating systems that exist in language. These views allowed an understanding of therapy as a shift away from thinking of a system as a collective, contained entity that acts, feels, thinks, and believes toward a system as people who coalesced around a particular relevance. When the relevance for coalescing dis-solves the system dissolves. We referred to these systems as problem-determined systems (Anderson, Goolishian & Winderman, 1986) and problem-organizing, problem- dis-solving systems (Goolishian & Anderson, 1987, Anderson & Goolishian, 1988).

The developments and curiosities in our theory and practice to date along with Bateson’s various emphases on epistemology sparked an interest in the nature of knowledge and the ways in which we know. We co-organized the pivotal Epistemology, Psychotherapy and Psychopathology conference in September 1982 to explore the nature of the theories emerging outside the psychotherapy disciplines that we believed held such a challenge, relevance, and a promise for transforming understandings of humans and psychotherapy and that went beyond the traditions of family therapy.

Language and the Coordination of Behavior

According to Maturana (1978), the observer is a languaging entity who operates in language with other observers. "[T]his entity generates the self and its circumstances as linguistic distinctions of its participation in a linguistic domain. In this way, meaning arises as a relationship of linguistic distinctions. And meaning becomes part of our domain of conversation of adaptation" (p. 211). These generated domains "become part of our domain of existence and constitute part of the environment in which we conserve identity and adaptation" (p. 234).

Also for Maturana, all living systems are autonomous--autopoietic systems. They behave according to their structure, not according to their interactions with their environment. They are structurally determined. A characteristic of such systems is that they structurally couple, referring to the relationship between a system and the medium in which it exits—more specifically, referring to the process of existing. In this view lineal causality or instructive interaction is not possible: One person cannot unilaterally determine another’s response, perception, interpretation, or behavior. Information does not objectively exist; it is observer punctuation. Each person or system uniquely interprets what appears to be information. Information, like an observer, cannot influence a system in a predetermined way. This view of lineal causality and instructive interaction fits with Bateson’s notion that "change" is an epistemological error and our experience that a therapist cannot be a causal agent or an agent of change. Maturana’s notion of instructive interaction would help us make sense of a difference that we were slowly beginning to experience in our clinical work. Through learning and speaking the client’s languages "interventions" emerged within the conversations of mutual inquiry and were therefore tailored to the particular client and their situation. So, what we had been thinking of as interventions were no longer such, but simply a product of the conversation (See Part I). And, we soon to begin to think that families would do what they needed to do if the therapist would just stay out of their way. The family would tap their own resources and wisdom as proposed by the early MIT team’s notion of self-rehabilitative potential.

Hermeneutics and Other Philosophies

Our interest in language continued and in the 1980s we moved from the realm of science to philosophy, reading in cultural anthropology along the way. With effort we read philosophers like Rorty and Wittgenstein and contemporary hermeneutic thinkers like Gadamer, Habermas, and Heidegger among others. In one way or another all challenged the notion of language and knowledge as representational. All challenged the individual or knower as autonomous and separate from that which he or she observes, describes, and explains and that the mind can act as an inner mental representation of reality or knowledge. All challenged that reality or knowledge is fixed, a priori, empirical fact independent of the observer. All challenged that knowledge is conveyed in language or that language can correctly represent knowledge.

Hermeneuticists concerned themselves with understanding and interpretation: understanding the meaning of a text or discourse, including human emotion and behavior, as a process influenced by the beliefs, assumptions, and intentions of the interpreter. In this view "understanding is always interpretive, there is no uniquely privileged standpoint for understanding" (Hoy 1986, p. 399). One, therefore, can never reach a true understanding of an event or a person. Each account is only one version of the truth. Each is influenced by what the interpreter brings to the encounter.

The hermeneutic process of understanding is a two-way joint activity, a dialogue--being open to the other and trying to understand them. Hermeneutics "assumes that problems in understanding are problems of a temporary failure to understand a person's or group's intentions, a failure which can be overcome by continuing the dialogic, interpretive process" (Warneke 1987, p. 120). A person can never fully understand another person or arrive at a speaker's intention and meaning. This is impossible because the act of understanding is a generative process, producing something different from that which one is trying to understand. For us, the implications of hermeneutics extended beyond the individual to between people or to people in relationship, moving toward, as Gergen (1985, 1994) suggests a relational theory of meaning.

Hence, came our ideas about the unsaid and the not-yet-said in therapy. We placed emphasis on trying to understand the other person and learning about their views, but experienced that in the participatory process of articulating a view that views altered, new ones emerged, and some dissolved away—for us and our clients. And, about this time we began to think that this process occurred in a metaphorical space between us. Along with these new ways of thinking about our clients and our work together came a lesson in uncertainty and a trust that the process would lead to yet-known possibilities. Expertise as we had learned to think about it and use it—content, narrative, or outcome expertise--was no longer needed. The therapist is simply an expert in a process. Thus, the hierarchy and dualism of therapy systems and relationships begin to collapse into more egalitarian ones, and ones that bear more resemblance to everyday ordinary life. In the end our clients were, as our MIT forefathers knew and as we began to say, the heroes and heroines of their own lives.

In reading philosophy it made sense for me to think of my approach not as representing or informed by a theory, but as a philosophy of life. This notion was reinforced by Wittgenstein’s later works and his bringing attention to how we participate in language with each other--to how we understand, relate, and respond with each other—how we go on with each other. How client and therapist go on with each other, we said, is mutually determined.

Social Constructionism

Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality, around since the mid 1960s, suggested a relationship between individual perspective and social process, and accordingly, the social nature of knowledge and a multiplicity of possible interpretations. It would not be, however, until we started reading Gergen’s (1982, 1985) version of social constructionism as well as others in the same ballpark like Brunner, Geertz, Goodman, Harre, Polkinghorne, Sarbin, Shotter, and Taylor that social construction caught our attention. Harry met Gergen at an American Psychological Association meeting in the early 1980s and returned even more inspired by Gergen’s ideas.

Social constructionism is a form of inquiry concerned with explicating the processes by which people come to describe, explain, and account for the world (including themselves) in which they live. What intrigued us about social constructionism was its move away from constructivism’s idea of the individual constructing mind and the autonomous individual. Although both reject the notion that the mind reflects reality and advance that knowledge is a construction, social constructionism emphasizes the interactional and communal context as the meaning maker. Mind is relational and the development of meaning is discursive in nature, or what Shotter (1993b) refers to as "conversational realities." Social constructionism moves beyond the social contextualization of behavior and simple relativity. Context is thought of as a multi-relational and linguistic domain in which behavior, feelings, emotions, understandings, and so forth are communal constructions. These occur within a plurality of ever-changing, complex web of relationships and social processes, and within local and broad linguistic domains and discourses.

Knowledge likewise, including self-knowledge or self-narrative, is a communal construction, a product of social exchange. From this perspective ideas, truths, or self-identities for instance, are products authored in a community of persons and relationships. The meanings that we attribute to the things, the events, and the people in our lives, and to our selves, are arrived at through the language used by persons--through social dialogue, interchange, and interaction between people. The emphasis is on the "contextual basis of meaning, and its continuing negotiation across time" (Gergen 1994, p. 66) rather than on locating the origins of meaning. We felt liberated by this move away from the notion of individual authorship to multi- or plural-authorship, and the possibilities associated with it. And, it fit with our clinical experiences of how stories are told and retold and how new stories emerge from these tellings and retellings.

Through Gergen we met Shotter, inviting both of them, along with Tom Andersen and Rachael Hare Mustin, to join us in our Narrative and Psychotherapy Conference in Houston in May 1991. Shotter is influenced by the likes of Bakhtin, Billig, Vogotsky and Voloshinov and through his writings he introduced us to their ideas.and he helped us have a deeper understanding of Wittgenstein. Shotter refers to his version of social construction as a rhetorical-responsive one. Shotter is particularly occupied with the self-other relationship and the ways in which people spontaneously coordinate their everyday activities with each other. He is concerned with what it is like to be a particular person living within a network of relations with others, a person positioned or situated in relation to others in different ways at different times. He calls this self-other dimension of interaction "joint action," saying "all actions by human beings involved with others in a social group in this fashion are dialogically or responsively linked in some way, both to previous, already executed actions and to anticipated, next possible actions" (Shotter, 1984, p. 52-53).

From this period on we became increasingly critical of how the culture of psychology and psychotherapy created deficiency based language, language that labels and classifies a person or group of persons like a family rather than telling us about them. Diagnoses, for instance, operate as cultural and professional codes that function to gather, analyze, and order the waiting-to-be-discovered data. As similarities and patterns are found, people and problems are fitted into a deficit-based system of categories that are sustained through language and discourse. This creates an illusion of generalizable psychological knowledge. The language and vocabularies of psychotherapy become impersonalized and disregard the uniqueness of each individual and each situation (Gergen, Hoffman, and Anderson, 1995).

Up until 1988 Harry and I were mixing the metaphors of second-order cybernetics, constructivism, hermeneutics, social constructionism, and narrative theories. This changed dramatically during a conference organized by Tom Andersen in Sulitjelma, Norway in 1988. Tom brought together epistemologists and clinicians to explore second-order cybernetics and constructivist theories and their practical applications. The details of the story are too many for these pages, but it became clear to us from that experience that our current views of language and conversation did not fit with these metaphors. That conference represented our informal parting with second-order cybernectics and constructivism, which was more formally addressed at the first Galveston Symposium, mentioned earlier (Anderson & Goolishian, 1989).

From Families and Individual to Persons-in-Relationships

All along we slowly abandoned the dichotomy of individual and family, (re)discovering the individual. We were discovering, however, a different individual than that of traditional psychological theories. We found that social constructionism and other postmodern theories bring the individual and the relationship to the forefront. And, importantly, their emphasis on relationships entails rethinking the notion of individual and self(whether the subject of inquiry is a single self or collective selves) to the self- or individual-in-relationship.

Expanding the notion of the individual(s) in relationship to include relationship to oneself or one's selves, to others, and to one's historical, cultural, political, and environmental world transcends individual and relationship dichotomies inherent in such layered social-systems frameworks as individual-family, family-therapist, individual-collective behavior, or biological-mental. It moves beyond defining the relationship focus as two or more intimately related people with a shared history who form a social system, beyond family relationships, and beyond privileging one level of a system over another. It challenges the restrictive definition of family therapy and its narrow concept of relationship by redefining the domain and focus. That is, it challenges the familiar what and means of inquiry--what is examined and described and the means of examination and description. The focus is neither the interior of the individual nor the family, but the person(s)-in-relationship. This shift in domain and focus challenges the very notion of family therapy itself and systems theories as the explanatory models. We moved away from family therapy, as it had been conceptualized (Anderson & Goolishian, 1988; Anderson, 1994, 1997).

In our clinical work, this new conceptualization of the individual fit with our earlier experiences of trying to talk the family’s language. We found that we could not learn a family’s language because families did not have a language. Family members, however, did have a language and we could learn and talk within the language of each member. And, the differences in these languages

Narrative, Self and Identity: Linguistic and Social Constructs

Since narrative is such a crucial dimension of hermeneutics, social construction, and other philosophies, it was only natural that it surfaced as another major interest. Narrative is more than a storytelling metaphor. It is a form of discourse, the discursive way in which we organize, account for, give meaning, understand, and provide structure and coherence to the circumstances, events, and experiences in our lives for ourselves and for others. From this narrative view, our descriptions, our vocabularies, and our stories constitute our understanding of human nature and behavior. Our stories form, inform, and reform our sources of knowledge and views of reality. Narratives are created, experienced, and shared by individuals in conversation and action with one another and with one's self. They are the "stories [that] serve as communal resources that people use in ongoing relationships" (Gergen 1994, p. 189). I use narrative as a metaphor for a process, not as a template or map for understanding, interpreting, or predicting human behavior.

Language is the vehicle of the narrating process: We use it to construct, to organize, and to attribute meaning to our stories. Meaning and action cannot be separated. The limits of our language constrain what can be expressed and how it can be expressed--our stories, and thus, our futures. Stories are not accomplished facts but are stories in the process of being made, of evolving. Narrative becomes the way we imagine alternatives and create possibilities, and the way we actualize these options. Narrative is the source of transformation.

Our ideas about narrative, self, and identity are influenced by numbers of authors such as Beneviste, Bruner, Gadamer, Gergen, Harre, Rorty, and Shotter. From a linguistic and social construction perspective, self (and other) is a created concept, a created narrative, linguistically constructed and existing in dialogue and in relationship. In this view, the self is a dialogical-narrative self and identity is a dialogical-narrative identity.

The self in this view exists in language and is therefore always engaged in conversational becoming, constructed and reconstructed, and shifting identities through continuous interactions, through relationships (Anderson and Goolishian 1988a; Goolishian and Anderson 1994). We are always forming and performing I. We are always as many potential selves as are embedded within and created by our conversations. In this view identity and continuity or what we think of as selfhood becomes maintaining coherence and continuity in the stories we tell about ourselves. Inherent in this view a narrative never represents a single voice; the narrator is an multi-authored polyphony self.

In this view since self, or I, does not exist outside of language and discourse, there is no inner core or fixed tangible self. Critics often fear that this view loses the individual, including individual rights and responsibility. To the contrary, the individual and individual responsibility have a place of primary importance. The difference is in how the individual and responsibility are conceived. As individuals absorbed in others, as non-solitary selves, we are confronted more, not less, with issues of responsibility. Critics also fear that socially constructed multiple self’s result in a fragmented self. Hermans et al. (1992) response to this concern is that "the multiplicity of the self does not result in fragmentation, because it is the same I that is moving back and forth [my emphasis] between several positions" (p. 28-29.

Confronting these notions of self further solidified our move away from thinking in terms of causes, behaviors, and objects to focusing on the person, agency, and action. This linguistic and dialogical path, this relational path, took us beyond the view of narrative therapy as storytelling and story making and the self as the narrator. It took us beyond the risk of the therapist being the expert who chooses, directs, and edits--subtly or not--the story to be told, how it is told, and what emerges from it.

Persons, Agency, Action and Therapists

Self-agency refers to one’s perception of competency or ability to perform or take action. It refers to having possible choices and to participating in the creation or expansion of choices. Self-narratives can permit or hinder self-agency. That is, our self-narratives create identities that permit or hinder us from doing what we need or want to do (Anderson & Goolishian, 1988a, Goolishian, 1989; Goolishian & Anderson, 1994). In therapy we meet people whose "problems" can be thought of as emanating from social narratives and self-definitions or -stories that do not yield choices or that blind a person to choices.

In this narrative view, self is no longer the subject of the verb change; a client is no longer a subject that a therapist changes. The purpose of therapy becomes to help people tell and participate in their telling of their first-person narratives. The therapist’s role is not to be an editor or expert on these narratives and choices, but to participate in a dialogical process, remaining open to the unexpected newness that emerges. In this process, self-identities transform to ones that allow for self-agency, for varied ways of being in and acting in the world, and for multiple possibilities regarding the life circumstances we sometimes think of as problems.

The intent with which and the way a therapist participates in the narrating process distinguish a postmodernist collaborative narrative perspective from other narrative informed therapies. In this participation, striving for a relational means of joint construction of the "new" narrative, a therapist must have an awareness of and take care in the way they use language and the language choices they make. The therapist must not be indifferent to their participation in the conversation; they must have an awareness of and be responsible for their contributions to the conversation and the meanings that they participate in constructing and inventing. The therapist does not choose or direct the narrative account that they think should emerge, does not privilege one account over another, and does not determine which account is the truest or most useful. Again, the therapist is not a narrative expert or editor. For instance, new language may be introduced in an attempt to understand the client. That is, a therapist’s saying back to a client exactly what they have said does not confirm understanding. Understanding often requires offering what a client has said in comparable terms, giving the client a chance to clarify, correct, or confirm the therapist’s understanding. The intent of these therapist’s utterances would not be to rewrite the client’s narrative. Interestingly though, in this process of client telling and therapist learning something that Rorty talks about begins to happen spontaneously: The familiar begins to be talked about in unfamiliar terms, giving new meaning to the familiar. The intent of any therapist language (verbal and nonverbal) is to facilitate generativity: Possibilities for new meanings, new narratives, new self-identities, new agency, and new actions for client and therapist. At the time of his death, Harry’s interest lay in the notions of narrative, self, and self-identity (Goolishian & Anderson, 1994).                    

A Postmodern Umbrella

As we continued to move further away from our inherited traditions regarding human systems and therapy, and as we collected the bits and pieces of new ways of describing, understanding, and explaining our clinical experiences discussed above, we eventually found ourselves under a postmodern umbrella. Postmodern, broadly speaking refers an ideological critique of traditional views of knowledge that developed among scholars within several disciplines such as architecture, art, literature, poetry, and social sciences. Postmodern invites an ongoing skeptical attitude and critical reflection of foundational knowledge and privileging discourses, including their certainty and power and it alternatively suggests a move to local knowledge and a multiplicity of truths. Specifically, it represents a challenge to meta-narratives, universal truths, objective reality, language as representational, and the scientific criteria of knowledge as objective and fixed. The postmodern critique includes a self-critique of postmodernism itself. Uncertainty, unpredictability, and the unknown, therefore, characterize postmodernism.

From a postmodernism perspective knowledge is socially constructed; knowledge and the knower are interdependent; and all knowledge and knowing are embedded within context, culture, language, experience, and understanding. We can only know the world through our experiences; we cannot have direct knowledge of it. We continually interpret our experiences and interpret our interpretations. And, as such, knowledge fluid, continually evolving, broadening, and changing. Dispensing with the notion of absolute truth and taking a position of plurality does not imply nihilism or solipsism. Rather, from a postmodern perspective everything is open to challenge including postmodernism itself.

Postmodernism provided an umbrella under we could cluster the premises of our post-cybernetics era. A consistent thread runs through the various versions of postmodernism that I find appealing: the notion that language and knowledge are relational and generative. Transformation (e.g.. new knowledge, expertise, identities, and futures), therefore, is inherent in the inventive and creative aspects of language. This transformative view of language invites a view of human beings as resilient; it invites an appreciative approach.

This conceptualization of knowledge and language inform my preference for collaborative relationships and dialogical conversations and involves a particular kind of attitude or position that I call a philosophical stance (Anderson, 1997). Philosophical stance refers to a way of being: a way of thinking about, experiencing, being in relationship with, talking with, acting with, and responding with the people we met in therapy. Intertwined characteristics of therapy informed by this stance include: client and therapist become conversational partners who engage in collaborative relationships and dialogical conversations; the client is the expert on his or her life; the therapist’s expertise is in creating a space for and facilitating collaborative relationships and dialogical conversations; the therapist is a not-knower who learns from the client; the therapist is public, making his or her thoughts visible; these kinds of relationships and conversations involve uncertainty; and client and therapist are shaped and reshaped—transformed—as they go about their work together. I reiterate, this philosophical stance is an attitude and position about a way of being in the world and it must be a natural and spontaneous fit for the therapist. It is not a technique nor does it yield techniques. In sincerely adopting this stance, the therapist is present as a human being, client-therapist relationships become less hierarchical and dualistic and therapy becomes more like everyday ordinary life. Most importantly, unexpected and endless possibilities are imagined for client and therapist.

Current Interests and Directions

In recent years I have been increasingly interested in experimenting with postmodern ideas in the areas of learning, research, and organizational consultation (Anderson, 2000, Anderson & Burney, 1997; Anderson & Swim, 1994). I have expanded my long-time interest in the voices of therapy clients to the voices of learners, coresearchers, and people in organizations. What can we learn from them that will help all of us be more successful in our various endeavors? How can the other(s) and we mutually determine, design, and implement joint tasks. How can we in our profession cross and blur disciplinary boundaries to learn with others and from the richness they can offer for expanding our language and options? Inspired by my colleagues at Grupo Campos Eliseos in Mexico City I have gained an interest in the relevance and use of art, literature, and museums in all my practices. All in the vein of my ever present question in one form or another: How can therapists, teachers, and consultants create the kinds of relationships and conversations with their clients that allow all parties to access their creativities and develop possibilities where none seemed to exist before?

I am often asked, "Where are you going from here?" and "What’s after postmodern?" I respond, "I don’t know." Postmodernism is still in its infancy in regards to our broader intellectual and psychotherapy cultures. Unlimited challenges and possibilities, and opportunities yet to be tapped to deepen and broaden the postmodern perspective and its applications abound.

To highlight and summarize the theoretical and philosophical developments along the way to a postmodern collaborative approach has been a daunting task. There are always risks that putting words on paper might reify them. Undoubtedly, I would tell this story differently at another point in time and context. This has been a trip down memory lane. I could not include all the pauses and people along the way. I hope that my account invites smiling memories for those who have been on paths of this journey. And, I hope it gives those new to this journey a panorama snapshot of the development of a still evolving postmodern collaborative approach.

 

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If you have questions or would like to talk with me, email: harleneanderson@earthlink.net