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Of Families and Other Cultures: The Shifting Paradigm of Family Therapy
Author(s) -
PARÉ DAVID A.
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
family process
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.011
H-Index - 74
eISSN - 1545-5300
pISSN - 0014-7370
DOI - 10.1111/j.1545-5300.1995.00001.x
Subject(s) - metaphor , epistemology , subjectivity , family therapy , meaning (existential) , postmodernism , social constructionism , interpretation (philosophy) , sociology , field (mathematics) , focus (optics) , ontology , paradigm shift , psychology , philosophy , linguistics , psychotherapist , physics , mathematics , pure mathematics , optics
This essay proposes that family therapy is currently undergoing a paradigm shift as a result of the ascendance of an epistemological focus absent in the foundational works that gave rise to the field's dominant clinical approaches. While systemic metaphors for the family are based on mechanistic, biological, and linguistic models primarily concerned with how the world is (ontology), postmodernism's social constructionist leanings give primacy to meaning, interpretation, and the inter‐subjectivity of knowledge (epistemology). Thus, the metaphor of the family as a system is gradually being subsumed by a metaphor that construes families as interpretive communities, or storying cultures. It is suggested that this largely implicit transformation be made explicit in order to explore more fully the clinical implications of the new epistemology.