Family Therapy: Out from Behind the Hero Narrative

Abstract

Schools of family therapy have been highly selective in their presentation of the theory/practice nexus. Family therapy's method of teaching (the infamous workshop format) has hampered it's growth as a practice and academic discipline. An inadvertent, unhelpful legacy of Gregory Bateson has been that lesser scholars have aped his capacity to draw on other fields of knowledge without his rigour, or his propriety. Family therapy's cavalier dealings with bodies of knowledge and its reliance on miraculous case studies has resulted in the bypassing of individual suffering. The heroic narrative that has dominated family therapy has precluded other styles of stories for therapists, theorists and clients. Family therapy has been dominated by the myth of the hero, with its accompanying motif of the puer eternus (the eternal youth). Family therapy has been forever reinventing itself, forever the ‘new kid on the block’. This fascination with newness has interfered with family therapy's capacity, at times, to consolidate its genuine value as a therapeutic entity.