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.