Where did that come from? Countertransference and the Oedipal triangle in family therapy

Family systems therapists are uncomfortable using psychoanalytic terms. This reluctance restricts discussion of therapeutic process. How does one describe, for example, the therapist’s subjective experiences of the patient or family? Psychoanalysts call this countertransference yet there is no equivalent word commonly used in systemic practice. Therapists who avoid the word may also avoid the experience and thereby risk losing sight of fundamental clinical events

Glancing Back at The Camel’s Hump: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of Saudi Family Therapists’ Dual Epistemologies

Since family therapy was brought only recently to Saudi Arabia, studies exploring the field in this context are few. This dissertation will be the first to focus on the self of the Saudi Arabian family therapist (SAFT). In particular, it will be the first to pay close attention to SAFTs’ ways of dealing with the differing and, perhaps, incompatible epistemologies of Saudi culture and religion on one side, and systemic thinking and family therapy on the other. This study seeks to shed a phenomenological light on what informs SAFTs and what influences their work. Using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), I interviewed seven SAFTs, identifying the challenges they encounter as they undertake their practice, and clarifying how these therapists are adapting Western knowledge vis-à-vis the Saudi culture. An old saying in Arabic conveys the self-reflective challenge of examining epistemological assumptions. We say “a camel can’t look at its own hump.” This dissertation is an attempt to at least steal a glance at it

Shila Khan and Máire Stedman in conversation with Inga-Britt Krause

Inga-Britt Krause has challenged thinking and practice around issues of race, ethnicity and culture in systemic psychotherapy and has persistently, passionately supported their development. We were delighted to meet with her to share ideas, experiences and hopes

Resonance, a step towards a fluency for complexity: The science, language, and epistemology of Gregory Bateson

This thesis confronts the urgency with which new language and vocabulary is required to move beyond linear assumptions in mainstream science and humanities, as well as global policy making. I examine Gregory Bateson’s body of work in history and philosophy of science, psychiatry and psychotherapy, anthropology, biology and ecology designed to communicate the necessarily interdisciplinary consideration for a nonlinear and recursive investigation of the self, other, and environment. Such intellectual forays cannot be dismissed as non-scientific. I offer definitions and contextualizations of key terms derived from cybernetics, new materialisms, and posthumanism (such as emergence, process, paradox, metaphor, fractality) to speak about the ramifying intricacies and pathologies in processes of knowing at various different scales. I conclude with a theory of resonance that may offer the epistemological groundwork with which to construct a metaphor of precarious intervention and to model a critical relationship between epistemology and ethics

Psychotherapy as making

Historically, research and practice of psychotherapy have been conducted within conceptual frameworks defined in terms of theoretical models. These models are in turn guided by meta-theories about the purpose of psychotherapy and its place in society. An image of psychotherapy that underpins much contemporary practice is the idea that therapy operates as an intervention that involves the implementation and application of a pre-existing theoretical model or set of empirically validated procedures. The present paper introduces the idea that it may be valuable to regard psychotherapy not as an intervention but instead as a process of making, in the sense of offering a cultural space for the co-construction of meaningful and satisfying ways of living that draw on shared cultural resources. We offer an overview of what a therapy of making might look like, followed by an account of theoretical perspectives, both within the psychotherapy literature and derived from wider philosophical and social science sources, that we have found valuable in terms of making sense of this way of thinking about practice. Our conclusion is that we need something in addition to theory-specific and protocol-driven therapies, in order to be able to incorporate the unexpected, the not-before-met perspective, event or practice of living, and to be open towards the radically new, the given, and the unknown