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AGAINST THE GRAIN: DECENTERING FAMILY THERAPY
Author(s) -
Erickson Gerald D.
Publication year - 1988
Publication title -
journal of marital and family therapy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.868
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1752-0606
pISSN - 0194-472X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1752-0606.1988.tb00742.x
Subject(s) - perspective (graphical) , argument (complex analysis) , family therapy , epistemology , authoritarianism , sociology , position (finance) , systemic therapy , psychology , perception , space (punctuation) , social psychology , psychotherapist , computer science , law , medicine , political science , business , philosophy , democracy , finance , cancer , artificial intelligence , politics , breast cancer , operating system
This paper is an interpretive polemic. It has two aims: (a) to clarify the concept of “system” as it is employed in family therapy, and, by doing so, to undermine and call into question the practice that follows from, or is contained within, a systemic perspective, 1 (b) it will offer several suggestions towards the development of an alternative perspective which preserves the idea of system in a social network/diachronic framework. With respect to the first aim, an argument will be made that there are severe and insurmountable problems in attempting to maintain a systemic perspective, that the methodology of analysis is fatally flawed, and that the results of analysis imprisons the therapist in a framework, which though extremely powerful interpersonally, must be rejected as overly authoritarian and overly restrictive in the range of perceptions of social situations allowed. A position will be adopted advocating a move of decentering family therapy to a more peripheral space within a social network perspective. What immediately follows is a redefinition and repunctuation of what can only be considered as a highly problematic paradigm.