Читать книгу Theory and Practice of Couples and Family Counseling - James Robert Bitter - Страница 51

Perhaps I should warn you now about this next part of the chapter: It is not going to be easy to understand immediately. So why am I going to talk about systemic thinking and cybernetics at all? Part of the answer is that these concepts, both historically and in current practice, inform the way family practitioners approach their work. Part of the answer is that it will challenge you to move from an individual focus to an interactive one. And part of the answer is that having this knowledge may create new possibilities for the ways in which you will choose to make a difference in the families you see.

Focusing on the family as a unit rather than focusing on the individual brings about an entirely new way of considering what is going on. Such a focus moves us away from evaluating individual actions toward understanding interaction—and even sequences of interaction. When an individual behaves in a certain way, especially one that seems peculiar to a large part of the community or culture, we have a tendency to ask why. The answers we posit are usually in the form of cause and effect: B happened because of A; A caused B to happen. It might be diagrammed as in Figure 2.1.

FIGURE 2.1 • A Causes B

When we think in terms of interaction, however, we can never really know why or what caused the interaction. We can describe the interaction and note what is happening, how it is going, and maybe even what purpose the interaction seeks or serves, but in an interaction, A and B occur in relation to each other. A and B may not have caused each other, but they certainly were an influence on each other. If we diagrammed a relational interaction, it might look like Figure 2.2.

If we replace any part of the interaction with someone or something else, the interaction would be different. If Ann says to Bob, “You never pick up around the house,” and Bob responds with irritation, “I like it messy; it has a lived-in look,” that is one interaction, and it is characteristic only of Ann and Bob at that moment in time and in that context. Let us say, however, that we replace Ann with Arthur and that Arthur and Bob are gay men who own a home together. Arthur says, “We’re having people over tonight. Maybe we should clean the place up.” Bob responds, but with a bemused tone in his voice: “I like it messy; it has a lived-in look.” Notice that Bob has not changed a thing about the content of his response: He has used exactly the same words. Still the meaning is different because his tone carries a metamessage. Metamessages are directions about how content is to be taken. It may be tempting to say that Bob responds with a different metamessage because of who is speaking, that is, whether it is Ann or Arthur. But such a simplification would not take into account a real difference in relationship, the impact of gender issues or being gay men in a heterosexist society, or even the choices Bob makes in how to focus his attention on what Ann or Arthur might say. Indeed, the minute we try to imply linear cause and effect, we are forced into a simplistic conceptualization that all but loses real meaning.

FIGURE 2.2 • Relational Interaction

Okay, here comes the really hard stuff. Anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1972) adopted the term “cybernetics” from the work of Norbert Wiener (1948). Cybernetics is an epistemology of systems, a way of thinking and conceptualizing how systems work, how they self-regulate, and how they remain stable. Wiener was a mathematician, and he primarily applied his ideas to machines and the development of computers. He was interested in the ways in which feedback could be used to correct and guide a system in its effort to be effective in different contexts. Among other things, feedback made it possible for systems to use past performance to regulate current processes. It became possible for systems to anticipate and influence future changes by choosing and selecting feedback to pass along now. Family members are constantly engaged in feedback, in the maintenance of family routines and rules, and in communications that affect the ways in which the family operates and faces future challenges. Each action or communication from an individual family member affects all others in the family, and in turn the responses from other family members also affect the individual in a kind of circular fashion. It is from cybernetics that we get the concepts of circular causality and feedback loops.

Circular causality is the idea that A causes B, which causes C, which causes D, and so on, and each of these entities (letters) acts on and is affected by every other entity in the system. In a car, which is a closed system, the ignition of gasoline may cause pistons to pump, which generates power for a host of other mechanical parts to move in line with directions received from shifting gears. But at the simplest level, the size of the piston also influences how much gasoline enters the chamber, and a breakdown in any part of the car’s system generally shuts down the whole system. Today modern cars are so complicated that they are regulated and checked by computers, the very machines that first benefited from the development of feedback loops.

A feedback loop is the process that any system uses to assess and bring correcting information back into the system: These feedback loops either initiate change (called a positive feedback loop) or deter change (called a negative feedback loop). The words “positive” and “negative,” in this sense, are not used to indicate good and bad or right and wrong; these are evaluations that can be asserted only through linear causality. Rather, these terms relate only to whether they promote change (positive) or not (negative).

In families, a bad or wrong individual behavior may lead to either a positive or negative feedback loop. For example, an adolescent uses cocaine (a bad behavior), is caught by the police in a public setting, and is charged with possession and use. His father declares that he “cannot handle this crazy family anymore” and disappears, leaving the mother and son to cope on their own. Change has occurred as a result of a positive feedback loop—even though all of the people in this system may feel lousy. In a different family system facing the same problem with their adolescent, two parents who are on the verge of divorce may pull together enough to focus on and try to address their child’s problems. In this case, the system maintains itself through a negative feedback loop—even though we may think that staying together for the adolescent is really a positive thing. Cybernetics therefore is actually the science of communication, and it can be applied to machines or humans with equal success.

Gregory Bateson (1972) was the first person to outline the ways in which cybernetic thinking could be applied to human communications and psychopathology. Bateson suggested that very often superficial changes, what we would now call first-order changes, were simply ways in which a family system stayed the same, “an effort to maintain some constancy” (p. 381) or homeostasis and balance in the system. He was more concerned with the possibility of second-order changes, or changes in the family system that endured and transformed family process altogether. Even though Bateson would never practice family counseling himself, he influenced the practitioners, Don Jackson, Jay Haley, and John Weakland, who founded MRI in Palo Alto, California. There they would study families that included identified patients with schizophrenia. Applying the principles of cybernetics to the family system, they came to see schizophrenic families as locked in transactional no-win/no-escape processes they described as double binds (Bateson et al., 1956).

Bateson’s team described a mother’s visit to her hospitalized schizophrenic son: The mother’s body tightened up when the boy attempted to hug her. When he withdrew, the mother asked, “Don’t you love me anymore?” The boy’s face reddened, and the mother said, “Dear, you must not be so easily embarrassed and afraid of your feelings.” The mother-son relationship was a no-escape relationship, and this interaction constituted a set of directives in which the boy could not win. One such experience can be tolerated or dismissed; however, the MRI group posited that schizophrenic families were engaged in relatively constant double binds.

Double-bind theory would prove inadequate for addressing schizophrenia as a whole. It launched the field of family counseling, however, through its attempt to understand symptoms as meaningful within the systems that support and maintain them.

Because cybernetics grew out of the structures applied in mathematics and the computer sciences, there has been a tendency to look at systems mechanically. Machines are almost always closed systems: They have a certain structure, function in a certain way, and produce a given and predicted outcome. Biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968) developed general systems theory from his study of living systems, a systems model that describes families and human systems as both open and contextual. Living systems develop and grow. They act in an effort to become, rather than merely to exist, and to resist or initiate change. Almost every living system is made up of subsystems. Similarly, every system is a subsystem of larger systems.

Most families have spousal, parental, and sibling subsystems, which we consider more fully in Chapter 9 on structural family therapy. A nuclear family is also a subsystem of extended families, ancestral families, churches, communities, cultures, governments, and the global community. Families also act in and interact with the physical and social environments they encounter. Like all living systems, families are by definition open systems, in which all of the parts contribute to all of the rest of the parts. Family members are not locked into a singular outcome by a fixed structure (as machines are) but have the capacity for what von Bertalanffy (1968) called equifinality, or the ability to achieve a desired end in many different ways. Children bring new ideas and resources to family life and can enrich parents as much as parents can anticipate children’s needs and provide care and developmental opportunities for their youngsters. Personal growth does not really exist, because the growth in any one person almost always affects the growth of everyone else in the system. Parents may have a significant influence on the development of their youngest child, but it is equally possible that the influence of siblings is more important and/or has made a major contribution to the growth of that child. This is equifinality within a family system: two or more ways to get to or account for the same observable end.

von Bertalanffy reminded family therapists who focused on the nuclear family and the principle of homeostasis that they were, in effect, reducing the family system to a closed machine (Davidson, 1983). In addition to emphasizing the concept of equifinality, von Bertalanffy’s theory insisted that systems were more than the sum of their parts; that systems should be viewed holistically, having systems within and interacting with larger systems in the environment; that human (living) systems were ecological, not mechanical; and that living systems engage in spontaneous activity rather than merely react.

When cybernetics is applied to machines, a kind of first-order cybernetic stance is actually possible: Structure, patterns of interaction and organization, feedback, and systemic function can all be observed objectively without necessarily affecting the performance of the inanimate object. The observer and that which is being observed are separate; the observer can carry out changes in the system without becoming part of the system. This is called first-order cybernetics. The principles of general systems theory applied to living organisms called into question the possibility of an independent observer. Indeed, anyone attempting to observe and change a family participates in it and becomes part of an actual living system: The observer both influences and is influenced by the family. This is called second-order cybernetics (I. Goldenberg et al., 2017). As we will see in Chapter 12 on social constructionism, some postmodern therapists have come to distrust the power imbalance inherent in modernism and first-order cybernetics. They have adopted a not-knowing or decentered position in an attempt to focus on the client as expert and all but remove the therapist from imposing personal or professional influence on the family. von Bertalanffy, however, believed that it was impossible for therapists not to influence the family system; he noted that not all values, positions, and perspectives were of equal value. Indeed, some positions—even those held by the family—can cause damage to the system and the environment. It is therefore essential that therapists study and understand the values, assumptions, and convictions that have been adopted in their own lives and evaluate their theories and practices in relation to the impact these will have on the family, the commu nity, and the culture. This is a position that we consider further when we look at Bowen’s multigenerational family therapy.