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CELEBRATORY CELEBRITY?
By Nick Child
For the celebratory, or was it celebrity (I was never sure), issue of CONTEXT, edited by Mark Rivett and Ged Smith, I was asked the set of questions several celebrities were asked. They got their answers published. Somehow mine got lost, an exclusion from being a celebrity that feels more comfortable. Anyway, written in July 1997, here they are now.
SCOOP! Although I haven't founded and marketed a school of family therapy, it was actually me that originated family therapy. Well, I feel I originated it in my own practice long before anyone told me about it. OK in my training in medicine in Edinburgh, I would have been taught by Dr John Evans as early as 1965 with a family based approach to adolescent psychiatry. But I think it always seemed merely sensible, when I was a junior houseman, to do a special round of the ward at visiting time to be available to relatives for their questions. Then in my first year of adult psychiatry (1972) I thought it was obvious that a young woman with a diagnosis of psychosis should be seen along with her parents, something I did with the social worker. And I've always thought that good social work is the same as good family work/therapy, both being based in human and social frameworks. Given my mystified non-upbringing, I have always aimed to demystify anything that seemed to need it. Medical psychiatry, child psychiatry, philosophy, psychotherapy and family therapy - from their very names onwards - seem to me to mystify unnecessarily.
From the mid-70s, as a Senior Registrar in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, doggedly trying to find the humanity I entered medicine for (- and incidentally finding it outside medicine in philosophy, if you want to know), I trained in the psychodynamically adapted Cassell-style YPU where John Evans and Mary Collins (US-trained social worker) saw referred adolescents with their parent/s, and (if they were admitted) the nurses ran multi-family groups which the cynics might say were to deal with the parents' envy of the staff, that is, to get them off their backs! One earlier SR, Alan Cooklin, had pushed off to London, taking something of the bagpipes in any seminal influence he had there, looking as ever, not over his own shoulder, but over the shoulder of the present to what future developments he could promote. There were only two other centres doing family therapy, we gathered - Cardiff and 'London', with Robin Skynner's 'One Flesh Separate Persons' to open the UK's batting to what had been a baseball game thus far. Minuchin, Haley and Watzlawick were the big names we read and discussed along with cases at our fortnightly FT Workshop.
While I was still an SR, AFT got started down South. I didn't go, but those colleagues who did criticised the evangelical tone and the prematurity of setting up a UK organisation before there was, as we saw it, sufficient numbers of developed centres of local practice. There was and remains a dogged anti-pretentious independence about Scottish family systems workers resulting in a less than banner-waving support for FT and AFT. I value this and keep my independence and distance from the Scottish centres and enjoy a constructively critical place in the peripheries of excellence. I joined AFT in the early 80s and began my corresponding and then more active part in AFT's conferences and committees - always aimed at debunking what I saw as mystification and confusing mystique in a very important way of working. Despite my copious writings, I have not to my knowledge been argued with or quoted in anyone else's work, though I receive gently appreciative comments enough to go on.
A few AFT Branches and Scottish events have come and moved on, affected by geography and other interest groups spreading the interest of the small population of professionals too thinly. While many services developed competent family therapy (now what we would be calling 'systemic) practice', the training was the Scottish ('Tavistock') IHR FT Project, drawing its origins from psychodynamic and McMaster methods, Rob Wrate and Dave Will crossing the Atlantic to bring in the latter goodies and live supervision just in time to stir up much needed trouble as I ended my SR training as Thatcher got in to begin her long reign of her own kind of trouble-making. Of course there were a few of the then usual master-therapist circus events crossing the border to impress and entertain us before moving South again. In our various ways, we got our heads down and steadily worked at developing relevant ways of working for our own settings, with each generation of helping professional trainees getting the benefit, and the FT Project's graduates often rather invisibly taking their learning home.
In summary then, FT originated in Britain by growing slowly in a few localities including Scotland. I don't know the history of the other localities. I both value and have criticised the obviously more marked and marketed centres of FT activity South of our border. While the US scene was the obvious source of ideas and energy, I'm fond of the British slow resistant adaptation which the Scottish scene has been best at. But to resist someone needs them to push against, for which a peripheral like myself must also be grateful to others. So I have for long periods had to work to help create the very establishment I was looking to constructively deconstruct (eg by holding the AFT banner in Scotland, and getting active in AFT)! It has been a pattern in my life that I work to create a good enough mountain before I'm prepared to climb it (and usually to get back off fairly quickly too). I suppose I'm a kind of systemic Munro-bagger - I go to see famous names to get a more direct feel for what they're like, to privately collect their scalps I suppose!
I have always loved to hate models and schools, trying to understand and incorporate them, feeling myself substandard and badly trained in comparison to those skilled in them, but mainly feeling they are too narrow, mystifying and inappropriate for working with human beings who have personal problems. I have always felt that ordinary language and good human and professional practice turns out to be a good enough basis for developing my work and skills in a welfare state work-setting that does not allow the choice of client group or method that private practice does. Each model has been the baby of someone who has the showmanship and personal drive and apostolic urge - not to mention a need or search for an income or at least a hard-earned free lunch. Now you're asking, I do have an interest in the origins of organisations and developments, but I haven't been that interested or in a position to know about the origins of schools and methods. Britain has tended to do what I have, that is, to gently dismantle them to apply them in the more welfare state system we have compared with USA etc.
A theme I see returning in new forms is the nice/nasty dichotomy. With most of the founding fathers of FT being medics and analytically trained, it used to be psychodynamic vs any other kind. Then it was reflective vs directive therapists, then Milan team systemic vs various more directly interventive problem-solving schools, then feminist influenced vs the rest of the prior male schools, leading into the present various constructivist and second-order approaches vs various solution-focused approaches. So I suggest that one aspect of the emergence of schools is a systemic one, that a dissatisfaction with the PCness, or efficency or goodness of one model, dances constantly with the development of a corrective opposite in the market-place. Also, the US and Thatcher era market-place government has clearly favoured brief and solution-focused methods, though thankfully never to the extinction of the rest.
In summary, although I am usually interested in the history of organisations and developments, I can't be bothered with this aspect of schools and models of FT, being too busy sussing them out and dismantling them as they burgeon.
It follows from my comments above that the evolution was inherently conflictual as new ideas kick off against old. I personally was in conflict with ALL schools and models (as such) given my deconstructionist stance. At the start I agreed with those Scottish colleagues who saw the London activity as premature for a field without many local centres of practice. But I joined in AFT more actively and much sooner than many others did.
However, the FT field has been far far less conflictual than in any other psychotherapeutic/religious/political field I can think of. It is one of the great attractions of FT that difference is increasingly enjoyed and accepted and explored as a continuing creative process. There is much more awareness that people's views are a function of their context, work-setting and other stories, that noone is in a position to prejudicially destroy someone's published work. I would like there to be even more diminishment of pure abstract academic theory given it's endless power to generate (largely male) unproductive hot air and conflict. The ordinary views, feelings and experiences of human beings - clients and professionals - have been constantly (but less so as the years go by) subjugated under the mystique of academic schools of thought and training structures and technology. As ever, it has been women who have led the way to 'unsubjugating' these human 'knowledges'.
The image that comes to mind is that the early days in British FT, with the energetic but relatively few institutes and activities, is that they were the keen workmen erecting scaffolding with just a few tools hanging from their belts and not quite knowing what kind of building they were taking part in shaping. And now it's a what? A huge department store, a hotel? I don't know, but it's big and comfortably multifarious, with noone needing to be in overall charge. It's still multiplying and wonderfully unconstrained by any overall blueprint or science, but our uncontrolled hotel organisation has brought the town hall development force in the powerful shaping from professionalising as a psychotherapy. But even this can't prevent, and may even stimulate, uncontainable ideas and developments.
I think it is obvious that the cutting edge of the field is at present in the post-modern developments of reflecting team, narrative and solution-focused work. Creativity of all kinds is about pushing off from the past and generating new structures and frameworks. The people involved in this field are the warmest and most facilitating kind. But I often smell a correctness of thought and feeling that is almost monastic and I want to break out again. I still haven't separated my personal needs for lively fun and games from the demanding maturity of the professional task. I suggest that the best creative practices are probably in 'ordinary' practitioners and teams across the country using their own skills mixed carefully with selections from the array of incompatible ways and methods, and integrating them in their practice with colleagues for their particular work-setting and clientele.
My hope was and is that the good thinking and practice in what we call 'family therapy' can be better linked and taken fully back into much wider helping and other systems and their trainings. I have always argued that professionalising is logically a non-systemic step, except in that the system around us requires us to do it. As a necessary evil, we are at risk of FT becoming like all the worst institutions and professions. So, yes, we must strive to do what professionalising we have to to look after our dedicated FTists, and also to ensure that they serve the wider needs of Systemic Practice as we're now calling it. In fact, when the first mental 'hospital' or social services department goes properly systemic (whatever that would look like), I think that would be the most creative and innovative development in our field's practice. And the sign of real maturity in our field would be that the rest of us would have the wit to see it and learn from it. It will be done by rather more ordinary lively human skills and organisation than by reflecting teams, narrative work or solution-focused talk!
nick.child@virgin.net