Hope and hopelessness are coexisting and powerful experiences in the human condition. The dynamics of hope and hopelessness within intimate relationships are complex, and individual and family experiences of hope and hopelessness are embedded within historical contexts and wider social processes. This article rests on a relational set of understandings about hope and hopelessness, and offers a dual exploration. It focuses first on the complexities of the patterns of hope and hopelessness within families, and then on the complexities of the therapist's relationship to hope and hopelessness and the family's experience. Orienting to the balance of hope in constellations of hope and hopelessness provides one compass point of therapeutic practice. Reflective practice enables the use of the therapist's involvement in the therapeutic relationship, and helps the therapist to witness the coexistence of hope and hopelessness in a way that nurtures hope and emotionally holds both hope and hopelessness.

aThis paper is about the therapeutic relationship in systemic therapy and, more specifically, about engagement as a process. Beginning with some practice examples, a critique is made of the way in which both the therapeutic relationship and engagement have been under-theorized in systemic therapy. Two different sets of ideas are used to develop some thinking about the process of engagement: the notion of the 'goodenough' engagement as the environment or frame of therapy is developed, and the systemic concept of sequences is held alongside the psychoanalytic ideas of transference, countertransference and projective identification. This theory discussion is used to reflect on the original practice examples.

This is the first of two articles to map the landscape of practice theory in systemic family therapy. In this first article, the representation of knowledge for practice is explored, and an argument is made that while frameworks remain important, the relationship to them is now more conditional and pragmatic. A particular chronology is offered of the development of family therapy practice theory frameworks, beginning with the frameworks that emerged in the 1960s to the 1970s. An analysis is given of the important transitions in the 1980s and three sets of influences in this decade -ecosystemic epistemology, the feminist challenge and postmodernism -are identified. This reading emphasises hidden continuities in the transition, despite the seemingly discontinuous shifts in practice theory from the beginning of the 1980s to the beginning of the 1990s. Context and relationship are identified as the enduring parameters of systemic family therapy knowledge, though understandings of context and relationship have been recast in the contemporary (post-1990s) practice theory. The second article will explore the four contemporary influential approaches in Australian family therapy -the Milansystemic, narrative and solution-focused frameworks, and the dialogical perspective -and point to intersections in practice ideas and integrative movements.A foundational territory in teaching family therapy lies in how you choose to represent the parameters of the systemic field, how you choose to represent continuities and commonalities in the development of practice theory frameworks across time,

Despite a history of ambivalence, systemic family therapy has shown signs of a re‐engagement with psychoanalytic ideas over the past fifteen years. This article revisits the question: why bother with psychoanalytic ideas in family therapy? A brief description of work with a family is used to prompt the theory discussion, which identifies and discusses particular ideas from psychoanalysis that are potentially very useful for everyday family therapy practice. These ideas are the unconscious and unconscious communication; the concepts of transference, countertransference and projective identification, used for understanding particular kinds of experiences in the therapeutic relationship; attachment theory, particularly if allied with the recent research on the transforming potential of coherent narratives; and ideas about emotional containment and the capacity to think. Reflection on the initial therapy example finds the value in practice of these psychoanalytic ideas. The article concludes with a discussion of the current debate about how the use of psychoanalytic ideas in the systemic context of family therapy can, or should, be framed.

Both practice experience and empirical research underline the importance of the therapeutic relationship in the process and outcomes of therapy. Through its first thirty years, family therapy paid very little attention in its theory to the therapeutic relationship, yet in the wake of the postmodernist influence, the topic is now firmly back on the agenda. This paper reviews and explores recent thinking in family therapy about the therapeutic relationship: the adoption of collaborative and therapist‐present descriptions; the development of ideas about the positions of curiosity and not‐knowing; the re‐emphasis on therapist listening and witnessing; practices of transparency and the wider consideration of the therapist's use of self; the use of psychoanalytic ideas and a beginning engagement with impasse and failure. Though these different themes form no coherent whole, the paper concludes with a discussion of their contribution to understanding the therapeutic relationship, and the continuing challenge for our theory to describe the richness and complexity of practice.