This paper is concerned with the development and application of social network concepts in clinical practice. A framework of network levels and sets for ordering data and observations is proposed; the phenomenon of truncated networks is considered and two emphases in network intervention (gathering and connecting forms) are proposed to conceptualize network characteristics and practice that follows from such characteristics. A number of current examples of network practice are placed within the framework, and several advantages of utilizing a network perspective as a complement to existing models of family therapy are noted.
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.
The practice of clinicians in all the helping professions has undergone wide‐ranging change in the past two decades. This change has been uneven and halting, but an essential aspect has been a movement toward a wider arena of practice, including a variety of social network practices. The concept of personal network holds high promise for becoming a major unifying framework in clinical practice: as an analytic viewpoint, as a schema for problem location, and as an arena of practice and research. This paper will review the developing strands of network practice, examine some of the forms and characteristics of personal networks, and consider several theoretical and practice issues.
The traps laid by systemic family analysis are springing up everywhere and they permit no easy escape. The currently hegemonic circular-systemic paradigm, marked as it is by three powerful and negative ideals of our time-anti-humanism, anti-subjectivism, and anti-historicism (Sheridan, 1980)-has inevitably led to forms of analysis whereby families are taken as closed systems, where relations among members are given primacy, a division of these relations into manifesdlatent functions taken as a given, and wherein only the therapist is privileged to interpret the latent function. None of the major human problems of our era can be adequately addressed by, or treated within, a systemic paradigm, whether child abuse, the situations of formerly hospitalized individuals, gender inequality, problems of spousal violence, or social inequality (Ehgrad, 1984;Dell, 198613;McCannell, 1986). Such problems either cannot be perceived within a systemic view (how many sexually abusive fathers or step-fathers have been reframed as "cuddlers"?), or, if attention is called to them, must necessarily disappear into a set of interlocking and circular relations, the sum of which are said to serve a purpose of coherence and fit, of being homeostatic and helpful, of being required by the family, of being wanted and desired. The final chill of the systemic mode is provided by the totalizing view that: the family has to fit with its environment, just as the individual has to fit within the family, or the separate organs have to fit together in the system that is the biological self. And all have to fit together in the ecology of the whole. (Hoffman, 1981, p. 348) Reprinted from theJournal of Marital and Family Therapy, 14, 225-236. (1988). Copyright 0 1988 by the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
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