A Menu Note on the Cybernetic Network

Erickson, Gerald D.

doi:10.1111/j.1545-5300.1984.00200.x

Cited by 3 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…It is not to be supposed that the arguments presented here are sufficient by themselves to decenter family therapy, or that systemic therapists will tremble and mend their ways. The material presented is simply part of a growing critique and set of evaluations of family therapy from differing points of view (e.g., Bernal & Diamond, 1984;Bograd, 1984;Erickson, 1984a, Liddle, 1984McIntyre, 1985;McCannell, 1986). Perhaps this critique will provide others with a space from which to launch their own personal evaluations.…”

Section: The Structuralist Model3mentioning

confidence: 99%

Against the grain: Decentering family therapy.

Erickson¹

1992

The Restoration of Dialogue: Readings in the Philosophy of Clinical Psychology.

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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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Section: The Structuralist Model3mentioning

confidence: 99%

Against the grain: Decentering family therapy.

Erickson¹

1992

The Restoration of Dialogue: Readings in the Philosophy of Clinical Psychology.

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Section: Is There a Therapist In This Family?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Against the Grain: Decentering Family Therapy

Erickson

1988

J Marital Family Therapy

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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.

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“…That is, the larger system provides a broader flow of information that is capable of interfering with the immediate family's tendency toward homeostasis. Erickson (3) assumes “(a) that what a therapist does initially is systemic analysis; (b) within a special way of seeing, understanding, and deciding and proceeding from a set of rules forming an epistemology of circularity and nonlinear causation; (c) that what is perceived by the therapist is a pattern of forms, a cybernetic network; (d) and what is to be changed are the patterns and forms of the whole network” (p. 200). Therefore, the role of the network therapists also differs in that they become a catalyst, mobilizing the larger system to intervene in the smaller one.…”

Section: The Network As a Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Through the therapeutic intervention, the two groups connect and bind together; the effect on the family, and therefore on the client, becomes lasting because the change will be constantly reinforced by the now permanently involved members of the network. Erickson (3) raises the issue of anti‐humanism and structuralism in relation to the systemic approach. In effect, network therapy, as it is applied here, may be seen as a structural intervention.…”

Section: The Network As a Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%