My thanks to Context in which this
article first appeared: Pocock, D. (1995) Postmodern chic: postmodern critique. Context,
24: 46-48. Child and Family Consultation Service, Marlborough House,
Princess Margaret Hospital, Okus Road, Swindon, Wiltshire, UK. Some while ago, when my parents moved house for the first time
in 35 years, they promised each other "a good clear
out". All that accumulated junk would simply have to go. I'd
heard that kind of talk before so when I helped them move I asked
for evidence of this new ruthlessness. They sheepishly showed me
two carrier bags and a shoe box. "But why do you need to
keep two of these meat grinders" I asked. "You
buy all your mince in Gateways" "Because" my
mother replied, with unassailable conviction, "you never
know when they might come in handy." I briefly tried to
calculate the odds of successfully persuading them that even one
cast-iron meat grinder would be unlikely to wear out - in the
event of them needing to use it again (global collapse of
supermarkets, surprise inheritance of large quantities of
unground meat) - but thought better of it. It would be less
tiring just to move all the stuff. I was reminded of this in a passing remark by Chris Dare at
last year's AFT Conference. He suggested there were two kinds of
family therapists - those who change their ideas regularly and
chuck all their old stuff away, and those (including him) who
hoard everything in the hope that it may come in handy. I
wouldn't like to help him move house but I was pleased that he'd
said this, since it fitted with some concerns of my own about
what family therapy is doing with postmodernism. Typologies are always a bit suspect - no-one ever quite fits -
so, in place of the Dare (not too serious) duality, I suggest
that when faced with the challenge of new ideas there may be a
broad continuum of responses between - at one end - rejecting the
ideas out of hand and - at the other end - accepting them
uncritically. If the new ideas are radically opposed to the old
then therapists at the uncritical end tend to go in for knowledge
dumping - letting go of the established thinking to make way for
the new. Now, if we assume Hegel's notion of the historical
development of ideas in which thesis is first countered by
antithesis and then gradually melded into synthesis, then these
radical leaps out of the old ideas and into the new may be
necessary steps in developing any field of thinking. But my
perception is that family therapy, in its relatively short
history, has concentrated on radical leaping and left itself
little time for synthesis. But I want to go further than this and argue that radicalism
as a premise of family therapy development has sometimes been a
higher priority than utility. When New York glitterati flocked to
rub shoulders with the Black Panthers (a militant
African-American Muslim group) at Leonard Bernstein's bizarre
fund-raising drinks party in 1970, one quiet observer, Tom Wolfe,
(1971) later invented a defining phrase - "radical
chic" - to describe the undiluted pleasure of hanging out
with radicalism. The temptation to cloak oneself uncritically
with postmodern thinking may lead to family therapy's latest
version of this: postmodern chic. I'm not pointing any fingers
though - it's the unreasoning power of fashion that I want to
challenge. According to Broderick and Schrader (1991), in the founding
decade of the 1950s, family therapy was started simultaneously,
but quite independently, by a number of psychodynamically
oriented individual therapists (mostly psychiatrists in the USA)
who had grown frustrated by the limitations of one-to-one work.
This group includes John Bell, Nathan Ackerman, Lyman Wynne,
Theodore Lidz, Murray Bowen, Carl Whitaker and Ivan
Boszormenyi-Nagy. The net result was a rich expansion of
psychodynamic theorising to account for both internal
representations of early relationships and the
connections to current relationships. But where are these ideas
now? Most, I believe, were lost to the main stream of family
therapy in the leap from psychodynamic theories to the
communication theories initiated by the Palo Alto Group (Bateson,
Jackson, Haley and Weakland) and the subsequent cultural
domination by Structural, Strategic and early Milan models1.
These latter models explicitly defined themselves as entirely
different from psychodynamic thinking and, unsurprisingly, this
leap was not followed by any period of popular synthesis despite
the view of a minority (e.g. Nichols, 1987) that combining
theories of self and system would, self-evidently, be
complementary. Instead of a synthesis of communication and subjective
experience, a second antithetical leap has and is taking place -
from first order to second order cybernetics or, as Hoffman
(1990) and Lowe (1991) suggest, from modernism to postmodernism.
Both terms are complex and somewhat slippery but one important
difference is modernism's assumption of an objective discoverable
truth compared with postmodernism's assumption that reality is
only that which we agree with other people. At this point, anyone wishing to dismiss this latter
assumption outright might do well to consider Doris Lessing's
(1994) description of white Southern Rhodesian (pre-Zimbabwe)
discourse in which it was simply the truth that blacks
had smaller brains than whites or the mid-19th Century
upper-middle class English truth that women had delicate
minds that should not be exposed to anything more demanding than
light music and a little poetry. But before we are tempted to leap fully into postmodernism I
want briefly to give two reasons for hesitating. First it is, I
believe, important to understand what we are in danger of losing
this time around. We are required not only to give up the notion
of absolute truth (which for most, I suspect, will be no great
loss) but we must also let go of any attempt to understand
individual and family process. This is the logical consequence of
an epistemology based purely on social constructionism. If there
is no external reality then the only basis for one explanation to
be favoured over another is social acceptability. There is no
place for explanatory theory in such a scheme unless such
"theories" are used cynically as a confidence trick to
persuade the unwary to follow our expert viewpoint. Postmodern writing tends to characterise modernism as a
failing project - science and technology have not delivered
utopia, Marxism is collapsing, people are queuing up to kick
Freud, and substantially the world seems not to have become the
rational, moral and altogether better place that Enlightenment
philosophers had promised. But what we have forgotten is the
initial radical nature of modernism - its rational search for
explanation - which, I believe, can still save us from something
much worse. In the 13th Century, for example, the latest European
thinking on peacock's flesh was that it never rotted. In
pre-modern times there was, for the great majority, no question
of challenging such an idea. Knowledge came pretty directly from
God via his representative (this one came through St. Thomas
Aquinas) or from other sources of authority. Ideas were received
wisdom. It may have been 300 years or more before anyone hung up
a dead peacock to test the theory for themselves. (Admittedly,
not everyone would have access to dead exotic birds.) Independent
thinking could get you killed but, just as importantly, the
culture did not support it. Modernism - rationally testing the
world - seems to me a big improvement on this state of affairs
(except for members of religious and other ruling elites). The second reason for not leaping is that the idea of a
postmodern therapy is just silly because, as Lowe (1991) hints,
it is inescapably paradoxical. Postmodernism spells the end of
truths, essences or grand narratives but what is social
constructionism if not a new grand narrative? Since social
constructionism is itself an analysis of the nature of truth it
is inevitably embedded in modernism2. Its messages are
that essentially, there are no essences, or the
truth is that truth is always something we make up. As
Leupnitz (1992) indicates the project of Foucault (who together
with Derrida and Lyotard has been among the most influential of
the postmodern writers) is entirely negative. This is not to say
that his work is not useful but that Foucault himself puts
forward no programme or system of his own which improves on
modernism. Indeed, Leupnitz (1992) suggests that Foucault would
see all therapy as inevitably oppressive and might even cringe at
the sight of a problem being externalised3. So is postmodernism of no use to family therapy? On the
contrary, I think that its influence as a critique of
modernism rather than as a suspect replacement for it could be
enormously useful to those we are in business to help. Using
postmodernism as a critique should spell the end of the expert
therapist but not the end of the knowledgeable therapist4.
I have suggested (Pocock, 1995) that modern and postmodern
positions can be harnessed together to exercise a mutual
restraint on the potential excesses of each and to yield a theory
of knowledge (epistemology) called the "better story
position". This assumes that there is a real external world
imposing constraints and that we can sometimes test our stories
against these constraints and improve on them. The position also
accepts that testing is not always possible because of the
complexity of our world and that, under such conditions, social
constructionism may be the only way of arriving at a workable
reality. The assumption is made that while stories can get better
(more reliable) we can never take the final step into a position
of certainty or truth. We remain story-bound. The job of
postmodernism as a critique is, then, to make us more modest and
anxious about our knowledge. All we have in dealing with the external world is our language
but, because it has to operate in a Darwinian environment, the
ideas it carries had better be good enough or we may be in
trouble. Language does not float freely without constraint. In
the grossly ill-termed "Great Leap Forward" of late
1950s China, Mao Zedong's vain and omnipotent fantasy of China's
steel production being increased to levels near that of the West
led to a massive re-deployment of peasant workers into
small-scale steel works. Food production would not, in Mao's
imagination, suffer because of the increased efficiency of the
new collective farms. In her book, Wild Swans, Jung
Chang (1991) vividly describes the mood. "It was a time when telling fantasies to oneself as well
as others, and believing them was practised to an incredible
degree. Peasants moved crops from several plots of land to one
plot to show Party officials that they had produced a miracle
harvest. Similar "Potemkin Fields" were shown off to
gullible - or self-blinded - agricultural scientists, reporters,
visitors from other regions, and foreigners. Although these crops
generally died within a few days because of untimely
transportation and harmful density, the visitors did not know
that, or did not want to know. A large part of the population was
swept into this confused, crazy world. "Self-deception while
deceiving others" (zi-qi-qi-ren) gripped the
nation. Those who failed to match other people's fantastic claims
began to doubt and blame themselves." It is now estimated that up to 30 million people died in the
subsequent famine - one of the largest man-made disaster ever and
an appalling testament to the dangers of ignoring the constraints
of reality. One problem, though, with modernism is that it is a
truth-seeking culture. Since truth is a single entity, modernism
tends to be intolerant of multiple viewpoints - it wants one idea
to win. I think it is for this reason that models or schools have
been such a strong feature of family therapy development. (This
seems to parallel the early development of psychoanalysis, except
psychoanalytic disagreements have usually been much fiercer.)
Model competition is rather like the competition between
companies seeking to establish an industry standard for their
product. Some family therapy models now seem no more attractive
than the Betamax video recorders which these days feature only in
car boot sales (a state of affairs that has, I believe, little to
do with the potential usefulness of such models). However, if we remain interested in knowledge - but give up on
truth - something very interesting is possible. We can break open
the models (they are, after all, only package deals of relatively
discrete parts - theory, techniques and ethics),
de-institutionalise the theoretical ideas and use them, not as
truths, but as stories. It is possible to be interested in, say,
Minuchin's ideas of rigid triads without believing them to be
true and without getting anyone to change seats. The MRI notion
of the attempted solution maintaining the problem can be accepted
as a potentially useful story without ever zapping another family
with a paradoxical intervention and Melanie Klein's theory of
projective identification can be used to fuel curiosity without
delivering an interpretation. The point is that this hoarding of theoretical stories (ready
for the moment in which they may come in handy) is unrestricted.
All serious theories of individual, family and societal processes
- whatever their origin - can have a place since none is true. We
can rediscover that which we have thrown away, mislaid or
subjugated in the historical development of family therapy and we
can import stories from related fields. When we can accept that
theories are no more (and no less) than potentially useful ways
of seeing, we can allow family members to access, through us, a
rich plurality of ideas. When Minuchin (1989) speaks of hearing
the voices of peers and teachers in his mind when
interviewing a family, when Goldner et al (1990) speak
of layering theories and when Hoffman (1990) speaks of lenses
(rather than historical partition) they set out a path, not
towards a vacuous, knowledge-free zone signposted
"Postmodern Family Therapy", but towards an exciting
breadth of uncertain knowledge. But how do we know which of these ideas are likely to be of
use to family members? I think that association is the
precursor to curiosity. When we perceive something vaguely
familiar in a family, the associated theoretical stories tend to
pop into our minds. Such stories may lead us to re-direct our
listening, to ask new questions or to share ideas with the family
from a position of uncertainty (e.g. Andersen, 1987). And, if we
are not experts, how do we know which ideas have been of use to
the family? Reimers and Treacher (1995) seem to have already
discovered the answer to this. We have to ask family members.
What feels right or better can only be determined by them. 1. Borrowing Foucault's term, psychodynamic ideas may hold the
current status in family therapy as subjugated knowledges. 2. See also Frosh (1995) who doubts that a language-centred
therapy can be anything other than modernist. 3. When I came to re-read this article I realised that it
might be viewed as a veiled attack on the work of Michael White.
While strongly influenced by postmodernism as a critique, White
has, I believe, a clear view of the aetiology of problems
(recruitment of the subject into saturated stories), well defined
technique, and strong humanistic committment - all modernist
features. 4. See Larner (1995) on simultaneously managing knowing and
not-knowing. Andersen, T. (1987) The reflecting team: dialogue and
meta-dialogue in clinical work. Family Process, 26:
415-428. Broderick, C. B. and Schrader, S. S. (1991) The history of
professional marriage and family therapy. In A. Gurman and D.
Kniskern (eds) The Handbook of Family Therapy, Volume II. New
York: Brunner/Mazel. Chang, J. (1991) Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China.
London: Harper Collins. Frosh, S. (1995) Postmodernism versus psychotherapy. Journal
of Family Therapy, 17: 175-190. Goldner, V., Penn, P., Sheinberg, M. and Walker, G. (1990)
Love and violence: gender paradoxes in volatile attachments. Family
Process, 29: 343-364. Hoffman, L. (1990) Constructing realities: an art of lenses.
Family Process, 29: 1-12. Larner, G. (1995) The real as illusion: deconstructing power
in family therapy. Journal of Family Therapy, 17:
191-217. Lessing, D. (1994) Under My Skin: Volume One of My
Autobiography to 1949. London: Harper Collins. Leupnitz, D. A. (1992) Nothing in common but their first
names: the case of Foucault and White. Journal of Family
Therapy, 14: 281-284. Lowe, R. (1991) Postmodern themes and therapeutic practices:
notes towards the definition of "Family Therapy: Part
2". Dulwich Centre Newsletter, 3: 41-52. Minuchin, S. (1989) My voices: an historical perspective. Journal
of Family Therapy, 11: 69-80. Nichols, M. P. (1987) The Self in the System: Expanding
the Limits of Family Therapy. New York: Brunner/Mazel. Pocock, D. (1995) Searching for a better story: harnessing
modern and postmodern positions in family therapy. Journal of
Family Therapy, 17: 149-173. Reimers, S. and Treacher, A. (1995) Introducing
User-Friendly Family Therapy. London: Routledge. Wolfe, T. (1971) Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak
Catchers. New York: Bantam.
POSTMODERN CHIC: POSTMODERN CRITIQUE
David Pocock, Principal Family Therapist
A good clear out
Reasons for not leaping
Postmodernism as critique
Giving up on truth
Footnotes
References