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Family Therapy: Inner, Outer and the Issue of Pathology
Author(s) -
Gibney Paul
Publication year - 1996
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.1467-8438.1996.tb01097.x
Subject(s) - family therapy , metaphor , intuition , feeling , psychotherapist , field (mathematics) , psychology , psychoanalysis , epistemology , sociology , social psychology , philosophy , cognitive science , linguistics , mathematics , pure mathematics
This paper sets out to examine the relationship between ‘the inner’, ‘the outer’, and ‘the issue of pathology’ in the family therapy field. It begins with the observations that ‘pathology’ has become a rarely mentioned issue in family therapy, and ‘what is wrong’ is increasingly located in ‘the outer’: the family ‘game’, ‘linguistic activity’ or ‘the cultural discourse’. At the same time, family therapy often hosts forums in which presenters are ‘attacked’ for not seeming to hold the ‘correct view’. The paper considers these phenomena in tandem, looks at the matter of ‘method’, and applies James Hillman's critique of psychoanalysis to family therapy. The suggestion is that family therapy has been blinded by its own metaphor of ‘seeing’, symbolised and literalised in the one way screen. Alternative metaphors privileging intuition, feeling and aesthetics are put forward, before discussion points are raised, and before this paper on therapy concludes poetically, or this paper concludes that therapy may be poetry.