Towards a New Coherence for
Systemic Family Therapy
David Pocock, family therapist,
psychoanalytic psychotherapist,
and trainer in independent practice
[email protected]
My position

Dialogical therapy

Rober, Bertrando, others

Stern: ‘moments of
meeting’

Shotter: knowing of the
third kind

Understanding and feeling
understood

All necessary, but not
sufficient
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.jpg
j
Philosophy of knowing
and being
Theory
Practise
j
Structuralism
Cross-generational
coalition
Active restructuring
j
Constructionism
Cross-generational
coalition
Offer alternative
viewpoint (positioning)
Philosophy of knowing
and being
Theory
Practise
Later Wittgenstein
Theory of language
games
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
Wife nags
Husband
withdraws
Husband
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 cocreate an event.
E.g. ideas, bodies, genes, molecules,
social structures, material
constraints, relationships, nonconscious 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: [email protected]