Premium
Tolstoy and The Heroes of Family Therapy
Author(s) -
Larner Glenn
Publication year - 1991
Publication title -
australian and new zealand journal of family therapy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.297
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1467-8438
pISSN - 0814-723X
DOI - 10.1002/j.1467-8438.1991.tb00844.x
Subject(s) - metaphor , family therapy , conversation , sociology , epistemology , aesthetics , psychotherapist , psychology , psychoanalysis , philosophy , linguistics , communication
This paper presents Tolstoy's view of history in ‘War and Peace’ against the background of recent post‐modern developments in philosophy and family therapy. Family therapy, like philosophy, is now caught between a modernist and a post‐modernist outlook, between ‘systematising’ or traditional scientific tendencies, and ‘edifying’ or literary practices. The former is represented by the idea of the family as a system and the latter in a metaphor of therapy as conversation. It is proposed that the edifying philosopher is sounding very much like the family therapist of the 1990s. Both share a newer metaphor of keeping the conversation going, and the idea that therapy is philosophy and philosophy a therapy. The discussion is grounded in Tolstoy's understanding of heroes in history and some implications for family therapy.