This book is a major attempt, and a successful one, at putting psychotherapeutic practices on a solid epistemological basis, going beyond a naive pragmatism. This effort could not have been more timely, given the current tendency for therapy to be a set of procedures dictated more by the market in which psychotherapy takes place, than by any sound theoretical approach. The whole process goes, of course, disguised as one driven by a pragmatic "hands on" approach, which blindly perpetuates the ideology of the free market, the equivalent in the professional domain of the "realpolitik" now reigning undisputed since "history" has supposedly ended and humankind is marching coherently toward the ideal of an unexamined life, finally freed from childish utopias of a world with fewer inequalities.
In their endeavor to go "beyond the immediate and the practical", Efran, Lukens and Lukens follow the call of Gregory Bateson to look for a sounder epistemological basis for the social sciences, one more fitted to deal with the world of words, symbols and meanings that make for their everyday materials of design, than to the material world that a Newtonian epistemology was so successful in accounting for. In their search for basic epistemological concepts, the authors discard the traditional paradigm of objectivity of a positivistic traditional view of science, and choose instead a paradigm of autonomy to account for our operation as living systems whose lives take place in a world of meaning - in conversation.
The authors´ view of the fundamental role of language in human affairs is amply based on the theories on the organization of living systems, and the epistemology that follows it, of the Chilean biologist and neurophilosopher Humberto Maturana. This is a relevant choice that deserves special attention. One of its consequences is that the authors choose an embodied view of language. Thus, they are again building on a tradition cultivated by both Gregory Bateson and the cybernetics movement - a tradition of employing language that goes beyond a Cartesian dualism, which bridges nature and culture, the biological and the social. Paradoxically, Cartesian dualism is now resurfacing in some of the criticisms of cybernetics which focus on its early choice of engineering and biological metaphors in order to disqualify its impact in social sciences, especially since its second order turn.
Another consequence of the choice of the authors for Maturana´s theories as a meta-stance for psychotherapy is their implicit refusal to follow the fashion in a therapeutic field that, too frequently, processes theories with a speed modeled on TV zapping, and too often creates, maintains or perpetuates polarities without enough theoretical in-depth discussion. As an expression of that fashion, an intellectual avant-garde of the therapeutic field - mainly based in the family therapy arena - long ago abandoned the work of Gregory Bateson as part of its prehistory, and rejected the work of Humberto Maturana and second order cybernetics as an infantile illness. Having dismissed Bateson´s work, this intellectual avant-garde demonizes Maturana´s work as a mechanical, biological, individually based expression of modernism. Subsequently, they embrace new gurus of a post-modern social constructionism and narrative therapy, who will most probably experience a similar fate. Efran, Lukens and Lukens´ work demonstrates that a more thorough job could be done with theories before discarding them. They go beyond the superficial love affair that at some point saw an attractive language for psychotherapy in Maturana´s epistemology, but left it as a vague point of reference without ever clearly building the intermediate links between his theory of the organization of the living world and the world of meaning in everyday life that matters in psychotherapeutic endeavors.
The authors, seeing psychotherapy as a specialized form of dialogue inquiring into frameworks of meaning, critically review some of the milestones in the development of the field, demolishing all the assumptions about therapy as science and showing the uncertainty pervading every aspect of a practice which has focused alternatively on concepts going from the biochemical to the intrapsychic, from behaviors to cognitions, from the individual to the family and from interpersonal emotions to the sociology of communication. They argue that all these conceptions have been more self-fulfilling than self-correcting, and all of them have been dissociated from a practice that the authors locate in language as a form of action.
They also present, very clearly argued and linked to examples of both psychotherapeutic practice and everyday life, the main tenets of Maturana´s cosmovision. Their review covers the concepts of autopoiesis as the organization of living systems, structure determinism, the informational closure of living systems, and also objectivity and its traps, while introducing the concepts of objectivity between parenthesis´(which they prefer to call "in quotation marks"), life as a purposeless drift, structural coupling, and language as communal action which creates domains of distinctions. The authors build on these concepts to show how self-reference plays a role in the construction of problems, how language creates an observing self that recursively modifies experience, and what is the role of consensus in living together, if we assume that consensus does not confer objectivity. Particularly compelling is the authors´ presentation of how client-therapy interactions create new outcomes - which are often unexpected - and how free will, choice and self-control are also created in language, together with purpose and meaning.
The psychotherapy that the authors practice becomes more visible in their discussion of how we become the stories we tell each other and ourselves, in order to organize our lives in permanent structural drift. Their practice, illustrated through many vignettes, creatively challenges the tendency for explanations to become confused with the phenomena they are supposed to explain, thus making room for alternative stories to unfold. As a part of this reflective stance, they show how to "get free of the semantic cycle of false causes", "how to move beyond concepts like cause, purpose and blame", and how to avoid dormitive principles that frequently lock problems in place - preventing the emergence of alternative views. The core notion of negotiation of boundaries and events by the members of a community is at the center of the authors´ therapeutic practice. Thus, they give instances of how they embody this central concept in their management of time, fees, scheduling and other traditionally controversial matters for the psychotherapist, and they introduce the analogy of the therapist as a "court jester" who implements techniques to foster reflection in a challenging but friendly way.
In a field that has made the "emotional" its specialty without subtly reflecting on "it", the authors´ view of wants and desires as more related to bodyhood than to systems of logic is particularly refreshing. Of course, this perspective is grounded, again, on Maturana´s view of emotions as dispositions for actions always intertwined with language in human conversations. Thus, they consistently reframe therapy as the attempt at getting free of the pain involved in emotional contradictions and of designing better living arrangements.
If rational choices were to govern the direction of psychotherapeutic theory and practice, and well-argued positions were to guide practitioner´s preferences, "Language, Structure and Change" would undoubtedly occupy a relevant position in putting a rather shaky field on a more solid epistemological footing. Whether this deserved destiny will be met remains uncertain though, because the ecological evolution of ideas is the embodiment of complex communal processes (as this book shows so well) and unfortunately, the times are not fruitful for reflection in the therapeutic field, wherever the sacred cow of the market dictates the dogmas to be followed.
Notes
1. New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990. $25.95 USA. ISBN 0-393-70103-4 – Hardbound. 231 Pages – References and Index included.
2. Marcelo Pakman, MD. Director of Psychiatric Services of Behavioral Health Network, Springfield, Massachusetts. Vice- President of the American Society for Cybernetics.
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