Who was von Foerster anyway
Who was von Foerster, anyway?
Source: Kybernetes; Volume: 34; Issue: 3/4; 2005
A BRIEF INTRODUCTION
An Intimate History of some Cultural Exchanges in Milano
This essay was written just some months before Gianfranco’s death, and it’s almost unkown in the field of family therapy. The usual way we were working with him, staying for a while in his office, after 6 PM, when the students were gone, discussing some topic… Just this time Monika Broeker invited Gianfranco to write something about Heinz, and he asked me and Dario to join him, doing it together. So we took a tape and started talking, for two or three encounters. Like in a rhizomatic production. That’s it. I like to think at this as last chapter in his life.
Who was von Foerster, anyway?
Gianfranco Cecchin*, Pietro Barbetta**, Dario Toffanetti***
* Co-Director, Centro Milanese di terapia della famiglia
** Trainer, Centro Milanese di terapia della famiglia
*** Trainer, Centro Episteme, Turin
Abstract
What is therapy? Which would be today Heinz von Foerster’s answer? In the following paper, Gianfranco, Pietro and Dario will try to unveil the mystery of an answer coming from a conversation among the three. The trick is that, unlike von Foerster, both the three of us are therapists. So probably our conversation will not be reliable. But usually therapists, in doing therapy, do not look for reliability. They try to be accountable, which is a different issue.
We think that Heinz von Foerster, like Gregory Bateson, was one of the most influential philosopher of therapy. In the paper we will analyse some very basic key words - like trivial machine, human becoming – and key concepts - like “broaden the field of possible” – in order to understand if there is an order, or a purpose in doing therapy. Probably therapy is a language game. If yes, the language game of therapy is a trick without a trickster. A map in a stranger land. Nevertheless, such a wrong map sometimes could help who is lost, provided that map and territory will never be the same thing.
Truth is the invention of a liar.
All scientific ideas are scientific in their reasoning. They are a miraculous attempt to make the world seem ordinary. We usually think in this way, firmly believing that these wonderful ideas exist out there in the real world, independently of us, the people who invent them.
According to von Foerster, the important thing is not to believe this. If you believe that these ideas are the truth, you are a liar.
A trivial machine is a machine that uses a scientific discourse. The illusion of science lies in its attempt to organise itself and the external world in an trivial, i.e. predictable way. In doing so, it offers the illusion that you can have (total) control over life’s events. Such control commits the cardinal sin of hubris, the one which the Greek gods found so extremely annoying. In other words, if you make a move in a game that has clear, fixed rules, you always get the same response; if you don’t get the same response, there must be something wrong with the game because it’s giving you the wrong answer.
Von Foerster replaces this idea with the concept of human becoming. Human beings are always in a state of becoming. Their stories are open-ended, always unfinished. Within this kind of continuous movement, the idea of organising the reality around us, of making it predictable, of trying to use what has happened before to know what will happen next, begins to make sense. Linear thought – and therefore the idea that I can influence the things of the world and how other human beings behave – also begins to make sense. This is what we in the West call “truth”.
According to von Foerster, this kind of discourse is untruthful because it claims that events are predictable, and, implicitly, that it has found the formula that enables them to be replicated (taking issue with Popper?). It also claims to have discovered the unalterable laws of existence, which means that the world can be organised the way it wants. This, says von Foerster, is a lie. Or, rather than a lie, an illusion. Perhaps the best way to put it would be: “Reality is the invention of a dreamer.” But that would still be too banal a description.
Someone suffering from an illusion (from the Latin in, on, and ludere, play) abides by the rules of the game, but the game is never individual. As Wittgenstein (1953) pointed out, it’s always social. The game of language is never individual, it’s always social. So we could say that “Reality is the illusion of a social group”. And it is the illusion of power that keeps the game under control.
We have read about an experiment conducted by sociologists on a group of university students. They announced that a students’ academic counselling service was going to be set up to help them decide about exams and courses. Then they opened up an office staffed by a person trained to answer questions in a random way. The students were told they could only ask “yes” or “no” questions, and the person who had to answer them – presumably a professional counsellor – looked at a display with red and green lights that lit up randomly. When the green light came on, the “counsellor” had to answer “yes”; if it was “red”, he or she had to answer no. It was absolutely forbidden to listen to what the students were actually saying. The experiment seemed to work pretty well. The students asked their questions, the “counsellor” randomly answered “yes” or “no”, and the students decided for themselves what that meant and asked more questions. In short, they seemed to enjoy this kind of counselling.
At first sight this looks like a conversation which, at least on the counsellor’s part, eliminates meaning, but what it really does is point to the influence of context on how questions are asked and answered. The students found meaning in the “yes” and “no” answers, while the “counsellor” gave human beings “yes” or “no” answers depending on whether the green light or the red light came on, attributing no meaning whatever to the “yes” or “no”. But the students who went there for this kind of counselling did attribute meaning to the answers they received. This experiment seems to be telling us that the illusion of knowing which direction we are going in – even when this seems totally misguided from an outside observer’s point of view – helps us to decide what to do.
Another story, this time during the First World War, concerns some Austrian troops who had lost their bearings on the Asiago plateau during a snow storm. They didn’t know the way home and the snow was heavy, so it was dangerous to make a move. Then one of the solders pulled out a map, saying “I’ve found a map that will get us out of here, a map of this area, the Asiago plateau.” They began walking and eventually ended up in the right place. The commandant asked them how they had managed to find their way and they said they had had a map. But it was a false map, a map of the Pyrenees. It only worked because the soldiers believed it was a true map.
We could be romantic and call all this “trust”. More cynically, we could call it “power of suggestion”. But, in our work as family therapists, it is better to think romantically. On the other hand, we must always have plans. In a way, as Foucault says (1971), science is a search for what is right or not, for what is true. We must always have a map, even if it isn’t – and never can be – the right one.
This is very like what Umberto Eco says about literature – that it is concerned with the trust principle, not the truth principle. When we read a novel we trust its author to be telling us the truth, not in the sense that we would entrust the author with our lives, but in the sense that we believe that we are being told the truth. We enter into the author’s way of thinking, the narrative, the story, constructing a possible world alongside the one in the novel. We construct a story, a virtual text, alongside the written text.
How can we professional therapists use these ideas in our work? Well, a family comes to you, you talk, and from the questions you ask they construct a set of possibilities, or fantasies. These are maps of unknown territory that are valid for as long as people talk about them. The important thing is to talk about them. Perhaps this is a definition of dialogue, something that lasts for as long as whatever people are talking about, and then disappears. In this perspective, therapy is a matter of telling stories, stories that have twists and turns, and last for as long as people talk about them. Therapy is evanescent: now you see, now you don’t.
If, as a therapist, you become embroiled in a model that claims to have some direct relationship with the “truth”, the model becomes reality, and reality pins you down. The model is useful only until it becomes reality.
What is the purpoe of therapy?
How does this square with the outcome of therapy? If therapy really is an evanescent conversation that lasts as long as a session, what happens after the session?
We have to acknowledge that if therapy goes well, it is because the people involved construct a map, a project, that makes them feel good. Quite often this project cannot be described, in the sense that the people involved in it aren’t in a position to describe it.
Let’s look at a case that Gianfranco was once in charge of. After a few sessions, he was reluctant to ask the couple, “How come you’re feeling better?”, but then he realised that this was because his question was really asking them to explain their map.
The husband didn’t want to have children; his wife was Polish. Gianfranco elicited a whole range of fantasies on the theme that a man couldn’t have children by a woman like her, who came from Poland. The husband, who probably felt provoked, said: “What kind of an idea is that? What has Poland got to do with it?” However, this fantasy about biology and “race” may have had an effect. Indeed, many other fantasies could have been woven around the idea that “he didn’t want to have children by her”.
During the next session, the two of them said they felt a bit better, and the husband even said he was willing to have children by her. They had completely forgotten what had been said during the previous session. They didn’t even talk about it. So Gianfranco made no further reference to why the couple felt better. He didn’t want to insist on the old biological fantasies because he realised that they had been valid only for as long as the couple talked about them.
As in daily life, people in therapy forget things. If you ask them “Why did this or that event happen?” they will often reply “I don’t know”. Do therapists know? They have their ideas, certainly, whether they state them openly or not. Therapists play with their own and their clients’ ideas without believing that their own are any more or less valid than their clients’. Their aim is to facilitate discourse, perhaps of a kind that is totally opposed to the “dominant” discourse of the family (Foucault, 1966). Most importantly, they pretend to be unconcerned by the effect their ideas may have on the outcome of the discourse.
Pietro recalls a case in which there seemed to be an undiscoverable secret. At first it seemed that there was no way beyond the stalemate. The father was a doctor who had read Selvini Palazzoli’s Family Games - which is a textbook in Pietro’s school - so many times that he knew it off by heart. He kept on repeating that his family was involved in a psychotic game, and Pietro, who couldn’t remember the detail of the book, was making heavy weather of the situation. In agreement with the team, he decided not to compete with the doctor over who knew the family therapy literature better, and simply kept the conversation going, not only with the doctor but also with the other members of the family who, like Pietro himself, were unfamiliar with Selvini Palazzoli’s ideas.
At a certain point, after six or seven sessions, the family said it felt better and there was talk of concluding the therapy, but the father said: “I want another session. Everything’s better now, everything’s fine, but I want another session.” We asked, “Why do you want another session?” and he answered, “Because I want to know what you said to each other behind the mirror, what strategies you used to make us feel better.” The problem was that no-one in the team knew how to answer the question.
In this case, the therapist was the map of the Pyrenees. You can use any map to get out of the hole you’re in. The father was saying: “I feel better, I came here to have conversations with you. Now you must tell me what you invented, what you did.” Gianfranco’s opinion was that it would help this kind of father to be invited behind the mirror to talk to the team, so he would realise that everything the therapists had to say might be totally meaningless to him.
But there is a major obstacle here. As therapists we start from the constructionist idea that the principles we use should always be totally non-authoritarian, and yet the outcomes we get from therapy are bound up with the persona of the therapist. How can the two ideas be reconciled?
On the one hand, if the therapist is the map – any kind of map, and therefore a somewhat magical being – and if it is the client who decides what the therapist’s actions mean, who is responsible for what in terms of outcome? On the other, if we choose to be totally non-authoritarian, how can we judge outcomes? Aren’t the outcomes we are dealing with here more closely related to the force of the therapist’s personality than to technique? We all use technique, to a greater or lesser degree. A technique is always a technique, irrespective of whether it is you, or me, or someone else who uses it. Whereas here the client seems to think that we are magicians. We are reminded again of von Foerster as child, playing at being a magician with adults. It is interesting to see how clear the origins his thinking become when his ideas are applied to psychotherapy. There was a time when this would have seemed impossible to us, and yet, there are many previous examples of this in family therapy. For example, Milton Erikson was a “magician” – he never passed on his techniques directly, apart from those relating to hypnotic suggestion – and his “magic” was an integral part of his way of doing psychotherapy. In the case we described earlier, the father probably didn’t want to believe that no “magic” was involved. He needed magic to make sense of the outcome. We think it’s important that therapists don’t believe in it either.
Power wears down people who think they have it
The danger of all human relationships is that they can fall into the trap of becoming power relationships. And yet, people come to us and give us, if not power, then a power. When this happens, we do all we can to demolish the power, maintain a balance, avoid entering into the power game. Gianfranco has written on several occasions about “power and meaning”. He says that metaphors of power, war and strategy were often used in family therapy. Now he proposes an approach in which people don’t necessarily enter into relationships through power. His new idea is that human beings enter into relationships in order to give their lives meaning. How does this free us from power? How is the image different? Perhaps it is different because the meaning it gives to life is much more complex than power.
The notion that everything is organised around power is only one of the many meanings that can be given to life. This whole debate stems from the now famous difference of opinion between Bateson and Haley. Haley said that human beings come together for reasons of power, and Bateson replied, “I don’t believe in the metaphor of power because it’s a metaphor that corrupts.” Power is a powerful idea. This has to be acknowledged.
The hegemony of power is, first and foremost, cultural. You want to be a therapist because you want to help people. If you can find a formula that stops people from behaving in certain way – for example, self-destructively – and helps them to behave more positively, then you’ve been successful. This is the mission of all therapists, but it does seem worryingly like the description of “truth” we gave a little earlier.
Watzlawick says that therapists intervene in people’s lives to achieve a result. Sometimes the intervention is successful, and this success convinces people that the method used in their particular case was the right one, the true one. But we think this idea conceals a form of non-ecological authoritarianism.
Like it or not, Bateson’s systemic concept says that the force of a system lies within the system itself, so his concept teaches us that power corrupts. You don’t necessarily have to agree with this idea – it is, as von Foerster would say, just one of the many ways of explaining what one observes – but it is Bateson’s concept. There are no recipes for all occasions. If you think the idea of power is always wrong, you turn the systemic concept into a sort of moral sermon. And, in effect, the morality that therapists use is very superficial. For us, hearing a person say “I feel good” is better than hearing a person say “I feel bad”, and in this sense we think that the metaphor of power increases the possibility that things will go badly. We say “badly” to avoid talking about “corruption”.
Returning to his disagreement with Haley, one of Bateson’s problems was that most of the people doing research with him at that time did have this idea of power. Today we could say, paraphrasing a famous Italian politician, that power wears you down, but only if you see things exclusively in terms of power. On the other hand, power isn’t an individual attitude, it is a genuine social construct. Someone comes along and gives you power. The temptation to use power for its own sake is rather strong in therapy, too. So when someone gives us power, we do our utmost to demolish it. We don’t want to wear ourselves out, we don’t want to be corrupted. It’s a kind of exercise to avoid burn-out.
Now let’s see in what other ways we can read a relationship which therapists obsessed by power see exclusively in terms of power. A father says to his daughter: “Ask mummy where she went last night.” He doesn’t ask directly. As first sight, this looks like “corruption of a minor” and we might think that corruption is endemic in that particular family because its members are using each other: “I want something from mummy so I’m asking you to go and ask her.” If we accept Kant’s categorical imperative that we should see the other as an end and never as a means, we can only condemn this kind of family corruption. And yet, we also have to ask if it really is possible to apply the Kantian imperative to everyday life.
Let’s do another take on this father. Let’s see him instead as a father who is having problems talking to his wife and therefore needs his daughter’s help. This is a different interpretation: the episode is the same but it has quite another meaning. Why should it necessarily be seen as corruption? On the other hand, we could amalgamate the two stories if we are prepared to accept that “corruption” isn’t necessarily a bad word. If we do, we get a father who is having problems talking to his wife and is forced to corrupt his daughter to keep going.
But therapy is this pendulum-swing between meanings. Instead of using the word “corruption”, we could say that the father has to ask his daughter for help. By doing so, we create a context in which the father begins to change the direction of his conversation with his daughter: “Look, I’ve got problems with your mother, I just can’t speak to her. Will you help me? Will you speak to her? I can’t, I feel awkward.” And the daughter can always say: “That’s your business. You should work out your problems with your wife for yourself. Maybe you should try therapy.” If his daughter answers like this, there is no longer any question of corruption.
The von Foerster imperative
Von Foerster (1982), like Kant, proposes an ethical imperative – “Broaden the field of the possible” – but his imperative has the practical advantage that, if you describe the same phenomenon in different ways, you create possible words, i.e. meaning is constructed in multiple ways, resulting in the famous polyphony that Bachtin speaks of (1981).
Thus, I can describe the phenomenon of the father who says to his daughter “Go and ask mummy where she went last night” as an instance of corruption, as a perverse triangle, as a father asking his daughter for help, as a carnival joke, or in any number of other ways. Thinking rationally, one invents different hypotheses. In America the situation might be seen more as a perverse triangle because Haley is very influential there, whereas in Vienna, where Freud has been influential, it could be seen as more Oedipal. Different cultures will find different ways of describing the situation. In some it may be described as pathogenic and therefore to be avoided; in others it may be seen as a mechanism of mutual help and solidarity. This means accepting the von Foerster imperative of increasing your options, i.e. this is what I see, but what might it mean in different circumstances, different situations, different cultures?
The three of us once proposed “Constructivism/constructionism and morality” as a conference theme because we had the impression that morality is always lurking out of sight at therapy’s back door because therapists are embarrassed about letting it in at the front door. We are terrified of being considered moralists, but isn’t this terror itself a moral stance? We are even reluctant to discuss morality. We dance a minuet around the issue: clinically and theoretically, we are always baffled by it. This is due to the now widespread idea that we should avoid advising people, i.e. avoid moralising. Our prejudice is that we insist that people think for themselves. In the meantime we give them lots of options, some of them “moral”, others not.
Let’s go back to our example of the “corrupting” father, and consider typical circular questions like “Do you think it would be harmful to your daughter if she asked her mother a question like that?” which could also be a moralistic question; or “Do you think your daughter is happy about you asking her to ask her mother. Do you think it makes her feel more important?” which in some ways is Oedipal; or “Do you think the girl feels more important because you give her this job to do?” The options we give might also sound immoral. For example, we might say that, deep down, this father loves his daughter and says all these things in order to be close to her. Or that he doesn’t care what the mother does: it may be just a way of talking to his daughter, of persuading her to tell him her secrets; or (since he’s very shy) that he simply doesn’t know what to talk to his daughter about, so he talks about her mother, seeing that she likes her very much.
In short, the idea is to develop imagination in various directions (be they moral, immoral or amoral), to encourage imaginative story-telling with the ultimate aim of generating some sort of resonance between the people themselves and all the things we say. A resonance that says: “This is the right choice. The one that’s true today, this week, in the period the client is living through at the moment.”
“True today” means evanescent. It means it worked as dialogue when the father was taking to his daughter, the mother, the therapist, the outside world. It worked at that moment, for a moment.
The therapist has constructed new knowledge, and the meaning of this new knowledge is related to the possibility of controlling reality. This is Foucault’s knowledge/power.
According to MacIntyre (1984), the Kantian imperative “Treat everyone as an end, not as a means” is totally impracticable because it is impossible to enter into relationships with other human beings that are not manipulative.
Indeed, one might conclude that Kant’s idea has given rise to a kind of moral rigidity that has been a feature of some forms of modern totalitarianism. In the light of post-modern thinking, the outcome of Kant’s philosophy certainly seems disconcerting, but where do we go from there? Well, if it is true that we can’t help manipulating other human beings, at least the other person should be put in the position of knowing and accepting this. If I treat another person as a means without first asking his or her permission, my action is immoral. But maybe my action is equally immoral if I treat him or her as an end without asking permission first. This brings to mind the story of the boy scout who forces an old lady to cross the road with him because he knows he has to do one good deed a day. Good feelings and the moral good are being abused here, quite apart from the more classic abuse that comes of bad feelings. It’s just that abuse of good feelings is more disarming; we don’t always recognise it for what it is, or know how to deal with it.
A wife might say: “This husband is OK because he’s useful to me. He makes money and gives me children, and I want to be useful to him, too. I want to be really affectionate and do everything for him, but he’s also useful to me. There are advantages in having him as a husband.” And her husband might say: “This woman is useful to me, too, because she’s a good mother. I benefit from her because she takes care of me at home, and she’s a good-looking woman, too.” Both of them consciously say “I’m using the other person, but in a positive way. We manipulate each other, but in a positive way.” As therapists we might criticise this, but our point of view would be external, authoritarian. From an internal point of view, if the two feel this is a mutual exchange, their attitude is right. Only when there is no reciprocity does it become a problem, a form of abuse. We might even be scandalised by what they say. However, our opinion is that one source of madness is the mad idea that we should always treat everyone as an end and not as a means. MacIntyre even claims that the entrepreneur and the therapist are two key moral figures of modern times because they have found a way out of this moral dilemma. As Hannah Arendt says, theirs is a vita activa.
So what is a therapist?
If a therapist asks “What use is your husband/wife to you?”, people are a bit surprised because they are used to thinking that a man and a woman marry for love. But if we say “Forget about what you do for love, tell me what use s/he is to you”, it’s interesting to see them realising that, deep down, they do consider their partner a means. In Ancient Greek the word “service” has the same root as “therapy”. According to Foucault, “therapy” meant “service” in three different ways in late Antiquity: a servant who serves a master; a person who helps another person; and service in the medical sense. In the modern age, “therapy” is seen as being at the service of a system that needs unblocking, a system stuck in a form of psychosis or madness. A system which the therapist tries to unblock using dialogue. Thus, the therapist is at the service of a system that seems to have stopped evolving, i.e. is no longer inside life.
Von Foerster’s idea of order from noise is related to the question of how systems evolve. If the therapeutic system is co-evolutional, it follows that the noise from which order is constructed is expressed in the form of dialogue. However, many kinds of order can be constructed, and the one that eventually is constructed can never be predicted or calculated in advance. Dialogue doesn’t say in advance what the solution is. So let’s say that systems, and human beings with them, are continuously evolving. As John Shotter has said (2002), they are positioned midway between order and chaos, but as soon as they stop evolving they become rigidly organised. By contrast, an evolving system operates at different levels of order, constantly shifting from one to the other as it goes on changing. It is never stuck in a fixed order so it is always in a state of becoming.
Von Foerster says that unhealthy human systems are blocked systems, and yet the idea of blockage is embedded in all language that uses the verb “to be”. To describe people we call them human beings, not human becomings. Our language games block the system because our “essentialist” vision of things takes a photograph, and the photograph blocks the system, freezes it as it is. The image of a film, a movie, is much more useful. As a series of photographs, the film epitomises our idea of what systems are. Now and again the film seizes up, and that’s when we see blocked, seized-up families.
This can also be described in theatrical terms. A script is divided into acts. During the performance, act follows act until the play is finished. When therapists see a family, they see it at a certain point during the performance, let’s say in Act Two. The problem is that when a family comes to therapy, its members are stuck – in Act Two, for example. They go on stage and repeat Act One, always in the same way or perhaps even worse than before. Couples always repeat the same things, the script is always the same. They need an outsider who can give them options and therefore increase their possibilities – someone who can inject a bit of de-lirium into their lives (Pakman, 2003).
This is the notion of therapist as co-author, someone who works with the couple or family to rewrite a script for the future. On the other hand, each human system writes its own story, it isn’t acted upon by others. A therapist isn’t someone who gives orders to families about what kind of script they should have. The aim is to facilitate the creation of the new possibilities that von Foerster speaks of, and this is done by asking questions – circular, self-reflexive questions that strengthen and stimulate the imagination.
In our opinion, the art we have learned lies first in avoiding the use of the verb “to be” in the present indicative as much as possible – not just “he’s schizophrenic”, “he’s an abuser”, “she’s anorexic”, but also “you’re stupid”, you’re wicked”. Secondly, it lies in avoiding the use of causal, linear concepts, unlike in most conversations in the West, which are about who caused what, who made a son “schizophrenic”, a daughter “anorexic” or “lesbian”, etc.
Being and becoming
How can structural determinism be reconciled with extending the range of possibilities? We think that the “cause” of all causal thinking is the verb “to be”. In Hebrew the present indicative of the verb “to be” is not used in the third person singular. This is what Aristotle called the “first immovable mover”. The concept of causation – with all its derivations – is attributed to something non-human, something too powerful to be attributed to human beings.
For the people of Antiquity, only gods could be “causes”: by contrast, our modern concepts of education and upbringing have been shaped by the belief that human behaviour and character can be changed, made “good”.
The ancients knew better than we moderns that two ideas are in operation here: the idea of temporal flux which means that everything is constantly changing, and the idea of static being, which means that each existence is unique.
We moderns have problems in using these terms because they seem opposites, and opposites have to be reconciled. Von Foerster says that we should see different things from different points of views, and that the differences don’t necessarily have to be reconciled. We moderns don’t even need the verb “to be”. Separating the verb “to be” from the notion of the “first immovable mover” fosters the illusion that we can become God-like. When the word “is” is spoken, everything stops, you become omnipotent, because “is” is the truth. In the modern age, we know where the truth lies: the truth lies in being, not becoming.
Returning to Kant’s categorical imperative, we might ask: What is it, if not an attempt to establish ontologically certain truth through reasoning? Isn’t always treating others as ends, not means, an attempt to establish a moral truth? But aren’t true morals also absolute morals? Morals that are true irrespective of the fact that we live our lives relatively, in relation to others?
If we accept that therapists have the right to be curious, it would be more useful to ask different questions, like:
Who are the people who interact with this human being?
How many of them are there (mother, father, employer, daughter)?
Who listens to him?
Who sees him?
Who can hear his voice, appreciate what he does?
Does what he does mean anything to the other human being?
How does he use human dialogue?
How does he use and let himself be used by others?
We think the last question is liberating because sometimes people lose patience and say “Everyone uses me!”. People often suffer because they feel used, without ever realising that they use others, too. This is a lack of knowledge: they think they are everyone’s victims, whereas often it is they who are abusing everyone else.
Perhaps we’re a little cynical, but isn’t it liberating to think that families and human systems in general evolve through the use their members make of each other? Analysing the question from this point of view, you see that grandparents are honoured because they are wise and give advice, or because they’ve got money, or because they’re useful to the grandchildren and parents, and so on for three generations. This is an example of two people, or a group of people, using each other reciprocally. If we agree with Wittgenstein that meaning is established in use, isn’t making use of each other an instance of the social construction of shared meaning?
This is mediation between conflict and dialogue. Conflict and dialogue can’t do everything on their own, you need both.
We also wonder to what extent the therapist’s stance is related to the old idea of neutrality. The constructionist therapist has to try not to adopt a stance, no matter how difficult this can sometimes be, because adopting a stance would mean no longer trying to connect up how one person uses another, and vice versa. Rather, interest should focus on observing how someone is being used and what the consequence of this are, so as to understand why some people like being used in a certain way, while others prefer to be used in some other way. The point is that, in one way or another, everyone is in a position to use someone else.
We think the example of the mother and her new-born child epitomises what we are trying to say. In our view, this is a fantastic kind of reciprocal use. The child is born and starts screaming, as if to say, “You must feed me, mummy, you’re here to serve me.” The mother feeds the new-born child and he calms down. At first sight, it seems to be the child who is giving the orders, but the mother is also using the child to gratify her sense of power. “I am the mother who generates. As well as producing this child, I also produce milk to feed him. I am incredibly powerful.” When others come to talk to her, she couldn’t care less and tells them to go away because it is she who has created this reciprocal use. Infanticide may even occur. At such times, the mother’s power no longer seems to work. On the contrary, she feels impotent, unable to set this amazing reciprocity mechanism in motion.
Many therapists think that it is the mother who acts unambiguously on the child – the idea is fundamental to the theory of attachment, for example. However, Lorna Smith Benjamin (2002) watched mothers suffering from post-natal depression interacting with their babies, and concluded that an important reciprocity mechanism was at work between them. At times, even though the mother wasn’t looking at her baby, the baby reacted positively to her and in turn elicited a positive secondary reaction from the mother.
The story could be told another way. For example, the mother has been abused by a man who raped her and made her pregnant. She gives birth to her baby. Then her father, mother and sister look askance at her and whisper, “You’re an unmarried mother. You’ve ruined your life”. A context has been created in which she doesn’t have the authority. A context whose dominant idea is the end, not the means.
Another example is kamikaze fighters, who kill themselves to save themselves, their people, and even all humanity. Here, it is they who offer themselves as an end for their people. Is this not madness? If they think that, to save their people, they have to talk, start a conversation, find some form of mediation, wouldn’t they have risked seeming sane? Perhaps we need another ecology of mind.
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