I happen rather to enjoy the fact that we can juggle alternate descriptions of our clinical material. I confess that I am not at all convinced that the psychoanalytic and the family-systems paradigms need at this point to be considered mutually exclusive in our practice. I don't see why I should not try to be equally aware of the impact of present messages, and of each patient's characteristic modes of seeking relationships or avoiding anxiety. Most clinicians have had the experience of freeing an adolescent from a double-binding family, only to see him replay the same script elsewhere. Similarly, most of us have had the experience of offering tactfully supportive "directives," or even the most deftly casual (or metaphoric) "suggestions," or some implicit model of behavior, only to have them backfire in our faces because we were insufficiently aware of what a positive suggestion would mean to that particular patient at that particular time (e.g.—that we did not take his suffering seriously enough, that we were trying to take him over, etc.).
The therapeutic situation is more complex than Lynn Hoffman's partisanship seems to allow, and I would suggest we try to bring to it every form of understanding we have. We do not make ourselves more skillful by ruling out our intuitive empathy, or by decreeing that the inner life is merely epiphenomenal, or by the sophistical argument that since all therapy is in some sense directive (as I would agree) then the most explicitly manipulative therapies will work better and faster.
To untangle a further muddle, let me add that I have too much respect for the healing rituals of other cultures to "dismiss" any remedy simply because it is "age old." I cannot imagine why my looking for "age old" or universally therapeutic elements in family therapy should be considered an attempt at disparagement. Lynn Hoffman and Jay Haley, among others, have taught us that when we examine any form of therapy we ought to see if we can account for what it does in terms other than the mythology of its practitioners. This is what I was trying to do.
I chose to point out probable transference elements to counter the dogma of some family therapists that transference to an "active" therapist is negligible, as in Jackson and Weakland's classic and otherwise edifying paper "Conjoint Family Therapy" (1961), which declared that transference is an artifact of the psychoanalytic situation, and does not occur in family therapy, largely because the room is already so crowded with current events. This is a serious misunderstanding of the notion of transference. My impression is that the skill of trainee family therapists would be much enhanced if they were allowed and taught to recognize transference phenomena when they occur, which is quite often. They are particularly caught off guard by hostile transference because they don't recognize it early, as they take for granted that they will be viewed as benign.
And when I said that psychoanalytic interpretations could also be seen as a form of relabeling, this was surely not a disparagement of relabeling. It was actually a somewhat daring suggestion that we use ideas which family therapy has brought forward (namely, the notions of context and of context change) in looking at what psychoanalysts do, also.
There was little in Watzlawick, Weakland, and Fisch's theoretical exposition that seemed new, and therefore I chose to introduce readers instead to Bateson's original version.
To assess Watzlawick, Weakland, and Fisch's work in the manner they ask would require a different book from the one they have written, and their request therefore places me in a double bind. For reasons of their own they have chosen not to include the sort of detailed clinical material which would allow one to judge independently what sort of changes they have brought about, nor to ask whether alternate accounts of their results might not be equally cogent.
Thebindistricky:Ifintheirworldexplan
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