Family Therapy in the Postmodern Era

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to chronicle theoretical developments and clinical trends that have emerged in profession of marriage and family therapy in recent years, an historical period so marked by transition and new ways of seeing world that popular press has dubbed it Postmodern era. On simplest level, transition from recent modern era to postmodern era is marked by a flagging societal belief in one absolute, fixed reality for all people and an increasing acknowledgment that our culture embodies an infinite variety of equally valid ways to view world (Anderson, 1990). Gone for increasing numbers of people are fixed standards that have historically divided right from wrong, decent from indecent, noble from savage. Family values, for increasing numbers of people, are less rooted in sacred principles of church and community than in a very private mix of personal, situational beliefs. The evolution of family therapy has been tremendously influenced by this postmodern environment in two ways. First of all, families are changing, partly due to increased prevalence of divorce and remarriage during last 20 years. Currently, over half of first marriages end in divorce, and projections show a full 67% of all recent first marriages may dissolve (Martin & Bumpass, 1989). Only half of all children living in U.S. will reach 18 having lived continuously with both biological parents (Furstenberg, Nord, Peterson, & Zill, 1983). Family diversity is evident in other ways as well; societal strictures have eased regarding gay and lesbian families, cohabitating families, bi-racial families, and a host of other family definitions. American society's idea of family and what constitutes family is seemingly open to new interpretation, and family therapists must recognize multiple perspectives as a matter of course. Secondly, over last decade, theories explaining how reality is processed, or how we come to know what we know, have seized imagination of family therapists and given field a rich metaphorical context for working with families in postmodern era. The most influential of these theories, second-order cybernetics, constructivism, and finally, social constructionism, have radically influenced current practice of family therapy. We will briefly discuss these theories, their common respect for language as medium of change, and then show how they are represented in four influential approaches to family therapy. POSTMODERN THEORETICAL DEVELOPMENT Second-Order Cybernetics In early to mid-1980s, family therapists began to strain against basic cybernetic model (Weiner, 1948, 1961) that had informed work in field since 1960s. The original cybernetic model, sometimes referred to as first cybernetics or Post-order cybernetics, grew out of communication engineering and computer science and offered a coherent explanation of how systems of all kinds are regulated. Defined by Sluzki (1985) as the science of patterns of organization (p. 26), cybernetic model was useful for family therapists as a way to conceptualize how families (as systems) maintain their organization. This was a technical paradigm, and families were assumed to follow a discernible and disruptible pattern of self-correction which therapist, as an outside observer, could adjust through skillful and informed intervention. During 1980s, largely through influence of Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana's work in mechanics of perception, this traditional way of thinking about role of family therapist as a social-science engineer came into serious question. Maturana, writing with cognitive scientist Francisco Varela (1980) and other thinkers such as cybernetician Heinz von Foerster (1981), strongly challenged idea of objective observer. They postulated that we process information internally, and, therefore, reality as we know it is a construction of our own private and idiosyncratic way of organizing information rather than an accurate and universally true representation of what is out there. …