 The Association for Family Therapy and Systemic Practice 1997.

Published by Blackwell
Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Journal of Family Therapy (1997) 19: 263–282
0163–4445 3.00

Engagement and the therapeutic relationship

in systemic therapy

Carmel Flaskasa

This 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 thera-
peutic 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 ‘good-
enough’ engagement as the environment or frame of therapy is devel-
oped, 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 prac-
tice examples.

The therapeutic relationship is central to the experience of both

therapist and clients in the process of therapy. Moreover, studies of
clients’ experience of therapy repeatledly stress the importance of
the therapeutic relationship in helpful therapeutic encounters
(Grunebaum, 1988). It is therefore ironic that so little attention has
been paid to this topic in the theory of systemic therapy, and that it
is only now beginning to be opened out as an area of discussion and
theory (Flaskas and Perlesz, 1996a).
This paper is a contribution to the emerging systemic literature
on the therapeutic relationship.1 I believe there are potentially
many useful understandings of the therapeutic relationship, but
here I will focus specifically on the process of engagement as one
way of exploring it. I will argue the need for a radical extension of
the idea of engagement in systemic therapy, and will be using this
paper to begin to develop some ideas about engagement as an
ongoing relational process of therapy. In exploring engagement in
these terms, there is necessarily a fluidity in the discussion between

a
Senior Lecturer, School of Social Work, University of NSW, Sydney 2052,
Australia.
1
Some of the themes in this paper develop earlier ideas in Flaskas, 1994, 1996,
and Flaskas and Perlesz, 1996a.
264 Carmel Flaskas
the more general topic of the therapeutic relationship, and the
focus on engagement. This fluidity reflects the way in which the
process of engagement constructs and ‘shows’ the therapeutic rela-
tionship. Highlighting engagement thus allows a more specific
exploration of the therapeutic relationship.
I will begin by outlining some fragments of ‘ordinary’ practice
which underscore the complexities of the process of engagement.
These examples will be used to comment on the historical failure
of systemic therapy to theorize engagement as a relational process,
and to advocate the need for the development of a much broader
understanding of engagement. The idea of a ‘good-enough’
engagement providing the ‘frame’ or ‘environment’ of therapy
will be explored first, and the paper will then consider the
systemic concept of sequences and the psychoanalytic ideas of
transference, countertransference and projective identification.
This theory discussion will then be used to reflect back on the
practice examples.

Fragments of practice: the ordinary complexities of engagement

A first fragment of practice

I see Cheryl and her two daughters, Simone, aged 7 and Katrina, 5. Simone
wakes at night with abdominal pain and becomes very upset, and often ends
up in tears during the day. In the second session, Simone brings me a picture
of herself as a baby being held by her father, Ron. Cheryl has never lived with
Ron, and their ongoing contact around the girls still makes her very
unhappy. Simone also tells me she thinks it would be good if they came to see
me every day. None the less, Simone proceeds to make a remarkably rapid
recovery – and her mother’s everyday distress becomes clearer. We agree that
I will see Cheryl for a few times, then see them all together again.
Cheryl’s story is distressing. Her mother had an untreated psychotic
illness; her father was not around; she and her younger sister were put in a
home when Cheryl was 5, and she tried to look after her; Cheryl’s younger
sister made a number of suicide attempts as a young adult, and one of these
attempts left her with a severe disability; Cheryl has always hoped for more
from Ron, and she gets very upset each time this doesn’t happen.
Our discussion of this is painful, yet it flows quite easily. Despite the easy
flow, I find myself becoming increasingly fearful in the sessions, and keep
thinking about closing off the work when the family meets again. From the
outside, the work would look a ‘success’ – the presenting problem is ‘cured’ –

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 Therapeutic relationship in systemic therapy 265
yet at another level I am quite clear that there is more therapeutic work to be
done for the ‘cure’ to hold.

A second fragment of practice

I read the intake notes before a first session. A middle-class two-parent family,
two children; the older 8 year old has temper tantrums. The mother has
attended a parenting course, and is keen to come for some more guidance.
After what has felt like an unremitting period of difficult work with abuse, I
cannot believe my luck in picking up such an easy referral . . .
During the first session, I decide that they are the most horrible family I’ve
ever met. The children are repulsive to each other and to me, the father
manages to sound sarcastic no matter what he’s saying, and the mother is so
patient I find her intensely irritating! In the meantime, I plod through the
first-session formula, asking the right questions, saying the right things back,
ending the session pleasantly and firmly. All disasters have been avoided,
and I seem to have become a total fake.

A third fragment of practice

I am seeing an Arabic Muslim couple about their various children, about
their fighting and unhappiness as a couple, and how this affects them as
parents in relation to their children. I really like them, though things in the
family are quite grim, and their story as a couple is quite grim. We usually
have the same excellent interpreter.
We are talking in one session about their eldest son. The parents wish he
had more Arabic friends. I asked whether he speaks Arabic, and they told me
yes, but not at a sophisticated level. I then asked how much he could under-
stand the content of their main (historical) argument as a couple. The
mother told me: ‘Oh yes, he knows what we’re arguing about, we don’t use
very sophisticated language when we argue.’ Just for something to say, I
said: ‘Oh yes, I can understand that, I don’t use very sophisticated language
when I argue either.’
I didn’t think that what I said was very funny, but first the father started
to laugh, then the mother, then the interpreter, and finally I had to laugh too
just to join in. I still don’t know that I entirely understand the joke, yet I
think of the moment as marking a significant point in the process of engage-
ment.

These practice fragments are all part of ‘ordinary’ therapy stories:

they don’t describe unusually difficult situations and are certainly

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266 Carmel Flaskas
not meant to be illustrations of exemplary therapeutic technique. I
think, however, that they can stand as illustrations of the everyday
complexities of engagement, complexities which are often taken for
granted when the therapy sails smoothly, but which none the less
present a central challenge in the process and task of therapy.
I feel embarrassed finding myself wanting to write that therapy is,
of course, a very personal encounter. Although the level of intimacy
of the therapeutic relationship may vary greatly in the systemic
context, depending on the situation at hand, therapy is none the
less always a human endeavour. Clients’ achievements in therapy,
impasse and failure, periods of danger and fear, very real tragedies,
painful histories and presents, moments of transcending hope, are
all experienced in a personal way by both clients and therapist.
There are some specific issues about what it is like to be a therapist
(or client) in a therapeutic relationship, yet in other ways the ther-
apeutic relationship is a relationship like any other. To say that the
therapeutic relationship is a relationship like any other is both
alarming, in that it raises the complexities of our emotional
responses as therapists to clients we work with, and consoling, in
that it simply places dilemmas in the therapeutic relationship along-
side the ‘ordinary’ relationship dilemmas we negotiate all the time.
My embarrassment about writing this is that I know that most
therapists will probably agree very readily with me – at a practice
level, I think it is commonplace knowledge. Yet I feel the need to
write it here precisely because at the level of theory and the systemic
discouse of formal knowledge, there has been a history of ignoring
the therapeutic relationship. I want to underscore the ordinary
complexities of the process of engagement, its context in the thera-
peutic relationship, and the importance of beginning to theorize
this area in order to ‘meet’ the experience of being a therapist as
well as the experience of working with clients. I will return to the
practice illustrations later.

Theorizing engagement in systemic therapy

The lack of theory discussion around engagement is of course part-
and-parcel of the lack of theory discussion around the therapeutic
relationship. Increasingly, there has been a recognition of a history in
systemic therapy of a ‘de-personalized’ discourse, particularly in the
period of the first-order therapies (Flaskas and Perlesz, 1996a). The
disciplinary need to distinguish the newly forming ‘family therapy’

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 Therapeutic relationship in systemic therapy 267
from the more established, and largely intra-psychic therapies has
led to a distancing of some traditional concerns of therapy.
Moreover, the need to develop radically different ways of under-
standing family relationships has given rise to a foundational privi-
leging of Gregory Bateson’s ideas and cybernetic theory (Jones,
1993). The language of cybernetics and Bateson’s ideas was in many
ways the antithesis of a humanized discourse on therapy, and this
point was made a number of times in the developing critiques of the
mid-1980s (see, for example, Falzer, 1986 and Luepnitz, 1988).
Theoretically, the move to second-order theory in systemic ther-
apy, which stressed the recursive context of therapist–family in the
therapeutic situation, should have placed the therapeutic relation-
ship squarely on the theory agenda of family therapy (Flaskas,
1993). However, this was still difficult to achieve within the language
confines of the biological metaphor of Bateson’s ideas, and subse-
quently the (biological) constructivist ideas of Maturana and Varela
which came to hold sway in the mid-1980s. It really remained until
the late 1980s for things to change – and this change reflected the
impact of both the feminist critiques of the first-order period, and
postmodernist and social constructionist ideas.
The change has shown itself in the past eight years in the emerg-
ing literature which explores the ‘personal’ interface of systemic
therapy. Studies have appeared on intimacy (James and Kirkland,
1993; Weingarten, 1991, 1992), on empathy (Harari, 1996; Perry,
1993; Wilkinson, 1992), on emotion (Flaskas, 1989; Krause, 1993;
Smith et al., 1990), on the therapist’s use of self (Hildebrand and
Speed, 1995; Hardham, 1996; Real, 1990), on the therapist’s posi-
tion in therapy (Anderson and Goolishian, 1992; Hoffman, 1993;
Paterson, 1996), and on other issues surrounding the therapeutic
relationship and the therapist–family system (Anderson, 1992;
Cecchin et al., 1993; Flaskas, 1994; Flaskas and Perlesz, 1996b;
Gibney, 1991; Gorrell Barnes and Henessy, 1995; Hedges and Lang,
1993; MacKinnon, 1993).
My listing here of this growing body of work is not an attempt to
do justice to the different strands of the developing ideas but to
point to the strength of the shift away from the earlier depersonal-
ized discourse of systemic therapy and to show the simultaneous
emergence of this shift in the North American, British and
European, and Australian and New Zealand contexts. With this
background in mind, it becomes easier to understand the paucity of
discussion of engagement in the systemic literature. A search for

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268 Carmel Flaskas
theory ideas on engagement finds it dealt with in textbook chapters,
usually those discussing the first interview and the initial meeting
between the therapist and family in the first session. This reduction
of the process of engagement to a technical task, located in the
narrow time-limited frame of the initial meeting, seriously under-
cuts the complexities of engagement as an ongoing process of ther-
apy and a precondition of therapeutic change.
In one of the very few earlier journal articles theorizing engage-
ment, Jackson and Chable (1985) break with this tradition. In oppo-
sition to the stunted view of engagement as a joining technique,
they frame it as a continuous process, locate it within the therapeu-
tic relationship, and also stress the issue of ‘therapeutic fit’. They
write:
Engagement is a complex, reciprocal process concerning the relationship
between the therapist and family. It refers to the specific adjustments the
therapist makes to him/herself over time to accommodate to the particu-
lar family.
(Jackson and Chable, 1985: 65)

Eleven years on, this is a definition still well worth repeating,

precisely because of its emphasis on engagement as a continuous
relational process and because it explicitly prioritizes the therapist’s
use of self.

A ‘good-enough’ engagement as the environment or ‘frame’

of therapy
In building on the idea of engagement as a ‘complex reciprocal
process concerning the relationship between therapist and family’,
I would like to elaborate the idea that engagement is a process of
forming and holding a ‘good-enough’ relationship between thera-
pist and family so that the work of that particular therapy is able to
occur. Different families need different styles of engagement and
clients’ experience of us (and vice versa) is always mediated by
(among other things) the interlinking of class, culture, age and
gender. As Hardham (1996) argues, as therapists we are always
‘embodied’ in our work with families, and at the same time we are
always ‘embedded’ in the context of the therapeutic relationship.
In addition to different families needing different styles of
engagement, the emotional quality of the engagement is also
affected by the kind of work the family is attempting in therapy.

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 Therapeutic relationship in systemic therapy 269
This is a simple enough point: the emotional quality of an engage-
ment with a family presenting with a child’s behavioural difficulty
related to a developmental impasse will be very different to the
emotional quality of the engagement where the family is trying to
deal with the trauma of witnessing the father’s suicide.
To think about the ‘emotional quality’ of the therapeutic rela-
tionship raises the issue of the different levels of intimacy and
attachment required for different kinds of therapeutic work.
Intimacy and attachment, of course, are intensely relational
concepts: as descriptions, they describe only relational processes,
and cannot be parcelled off as simply the attribute or ‘property’ of
therapist or family. At a practice level in systemic therapy, we
routinely span very different forms of intimacy and attachment in
work with different families. Whereas therapies which have intrapsy-
chic change as their primary goal require a high level of intimacy
and attachment in the therapeutic relationship, in the relational
focus of systemic work there will be a much greater fluctuation of
levels of intimacy and attachment. In this sense, there is a condi-
tional pragmatism in systemic therapy with respect to intimacy and
attachment in the therapeutic relationship.
Ideas about a good-enough therapeutic relationship evoke
Winnicott’s psychoanalytic idea of good-enough mothering (1965).
Much as I would like to grace the ideas here with the heritage of
Winnicott, I have to admit I’ve been using ‘good-enough’ in a more
ordinary colloquial way, as in: “is that good enough to do the job?”
On the other hand, the importance of the contribution of
Winnicott’s idea of good-enough mothering lay exactly in his
attempt to theorize the ‘ordinary’ maternal relationship which
allows the possibility for infant emotional development – in this way,
it is at heart an intensely pragmatic concept.
Moreover, Winnicott’s idea of the ‘holding environment’ of
good-enough mothering has been used within psychoanalytic
family therapy as a central metaphor for the therapeutic relation-
ship (Harari, 1996). This metaphor of the therapeutic relationship
as an environment is quite harmonious with a systemic relational
focus and captures the second-order emphasis on the
therapist–family system providing the venue of therapeutic change,
meeting this emphasis in a way that an idea of engagement as a
technique simply does not.
Another metaphor for the therapeutic relationship which is often
used in analytic therapy is the idea of the therapy ‘frame’. This

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270 Carmel Flaskas
metaphor conjures up an image of a structure within which some-
thing is placed, and with the shape of a frame built in proportion to
the picture it encloses. The process of engagement as the building
of the therapeutic relationship is thus in proportion to the thera-
peutic work of the particular therapy.
Engagement in the systemic context can thus be thought of as
the process of forming and holding a good-enough therapeutic
relationship so that the work of a particular therapy can occur. The
engagement is ‘good enough’ in the sense of the therapist and
family finding some ‘fit’ between them, and in the sense of a ‘fit’
developing between the demands of the therapeutic work and the
attachment and intimacy of the therapeutic relationship. A condi-
tional pragmatism characterizes engagement in the systemic
context, where engagement may be thought of as providing the
‘environment’ or ‘frame’ of the therapeutic work.

Sequences, and the concepts of transference, countertransference

and projective identification
The discussion so far has reflected one of the pitfalls of separating
out engagement as a concept from its context in the therapeutic
relationship: in discussing engagement, it is easy to begin to speak of
it as if it is fixed in time. To avoid a ‘frozen’ snapshot of engagement,
it becomes necessary to keep at the forefront the changing nature of
specific engagements in therapy across time, and also to reflect on
the pattern of engagement as an expression of the relationship
connections within the therapist–family system. The systemic
concept of sequence addresses this territory in thinking about the
family system, and can be productive in thinking about engagement
issues, especially if used in conjunction with the psychoanalytic ideas
of transference, contertransference and projective identification.
Sequences are traditionally defined as patterns of behaviour
across time (Breunlin and Schwartz, 1986; Breunlin et al., 1992).
Developed and used initially in the earlier strategic therapies, the
concept of sequences is one attempt to ‘map’ relational patterns
within the family, and both the behavioural emphasis and the strict
focusing on sequences surrounding the presenting problem reflect
strategic goals. If we want to broaden the strategic emphasis on
behaviour, we might begin to consider the way in which the pattern
of behaviour in relationships is always recursively linked to parallel
patterns of meanings and emotions.

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 Therapeutic relationship in systemic therapy 271
For example, in thinking about the sequence of fighting in a
particular couple’s relationship, one may note the point in the
sequence in which one partner subtly begins to pick an argument
with the other. Behaviourally, she begins to ‘set up’ the fight, but the
behaviour is not occurring in a vacuum – it occurs at the point when
she feels resentful and humiliated because she believes her partner
does not value her and enjoys making her appear stupid in front of
their friends. Thus behaviour, emotion and meaning are always
connected in relational sequences, and to broaden the concept of
sequences from its focus on behaviour to include the levels of
emotion and meaning has the potential to enrich its theory value
and its clinical usefulness.
Breunlin and Schwartz (1986) have extended the idea of
sequences in another way, by using them to conceptualize the
patterns of connectedness across time in family life. They thus
consider how sequences of behaviour across a time frame of
minutes to an hour (say, the immediate sequence around a present-
ing problem) may recursively interlink with a sequence in the family
which takes place across hours to a day, may recursively interlink
with a sequenced pattern from months to several years, which may
in turn be interlinked with intergenerational patterns within a
family. This ‘punctuation’ of the time frame of patterns of relating
to four ‘time zones’ is to some extent arbitrary, yet it does focus
attention on the connectedness of the immediate experience of
relationships with the current environment of those relationships
and the longer term family history.
Although sequences are usually used in family therapy to
describe the family’s relationships, we can also use this lens to
consider patterns of engagement within the therapist–family rela-
tionship. To use the concept of sequences to consider engagement
patterns may be one way of pragmatically acknowledging the thera-
peutic relationship, and accepting that engagement sequences have
the potential to be rich and complicated in a not dissimilar way to
sequences in ‘ordinary’ relationships.2

2
This idea of extending the concept of sequences to mapping the therapeutic
relationship is not common within the systemic literature. The more general idea
of including the therapist’s role in thinking about the family’s sequences is not new
however. It appears mainly within the earlier strategic literature – for example, Jay
Haley (1976) in his discussion of sequences gives a number of examples of family
sequences in which the therapist’s role has become embedded.

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272 Carmel Flaskas
The ideas of transference, countertransference and projective
identification are attractive to bring into the discussion at this point
precisely because they have been used within psychoanalysis to
conceptualize the therapeutic relationship. Clearly I am not able
here to do justice to the richness of these concepts within psycho-
analytic discourse, or to the long history of their development. In
the context of the aims of this paper, I want simply to intersect them
with the systemic concept of sequences, and more specifically the
question of engagement sequences. This focus necessitates a
‘borrowing’ approach rather than any more ambitious integrative
project, and also requires some translation of psychoanalytic ideas
given that my interest is in their use in the systemic context.3
Transference, countertransference and projective identification
may be thought of as ideas which conceptualize the interactional
patterns within the therapeutic relationship – or in other terms
perhaps more faithful to the analytic frame, they conceptualize the
inter-psychic communication of the therapeutic relationship. I will
give brief descriptions of these three concepts.
Transference refers to the process of a person re-creating her or his
patterns of emotional experience in the immediate context of a
present relationship. An earlier stereotype of transference is the
idea of someone ‘transferring’ their feelings about an early attach-
ment figure (usually the mother) on to the therapist in the process
of therapy. Although transference may occasionally be just as
concrete as this, it describes a subtle and complex emotional
sequence. It is not so much that someone ‘stands in’ for the mother,
but that we come to construct the other in a familiar (and often
familial) way, and begin to re-create and re-experience a familiar
pattern of relationship, and the familiar spot that we have come to
adopt in those patterns. Although transference is usually used as a
description in the context of the therapist–client interaction, as a
process it in fact can (and indeed does) occur in any significant
relationship.
Whereas transference is used to describe the clients’ process in
the therapeutic relationship, countertransference describes the thera-
pist side of the coin. Countertransference refers to the involvement
of the therapist in the relationship, and the emotions, attitudes and

3
See Flaskas (1996) for a much fuller discussion of the different environments
of analytic and systemic therapies, and of the concepts of transference, counter-
transference and projective identification.

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 Therapeutic relationship in systemic therapy 273
patterns of relating that the therapist may begin to feel and enact in
the context of the therapeutic relationship. Countertransference is
thus a broader concept than transference, in that it includes the
therapist’s emotions and attitudes as well as her ‘foundational’
patterns of relating.
Projective identification is one aspect of countertransference. It
describes an unconscious process of communication from client to
therapist, which the therapist comes to know about by her own
emotional experience of that communication. Within psychoana-
lytic thinking, projection occurs when something is emotionally
unbearable and emotionally unknowable. A thought or feeling may
be too overwhelming (too hideous, too painful, too disloyal, too
dangerous, too frightening) to emotionally experience or know
about at a conscious level, and so it becomes split off from conscious
experience and ‘projected’ on to another person in the context of
a relationship. The ‘identification’ part of projective identification
refers to how the other person (in this case, the therapist) responds
to the projection, and comes to know it not by seeing it in the client,
but by experiencing the split-off thought or feeling as if it were her
own thought or feeling.
Casement gives one example of this when he describes seeing a
couple who had had two babies die of a constitutional brain disor-
der. The mother described in a very flat way the experience of the
first baby dying and then the second baby dying, while the therapist
in the interview felt nearly overwhelmed with a sense of pain and
loss (Casement, 1990: 78–79). I think this kind of experience of
projective identification is very common in therapy, precisely
because of the nature of the issues that people bring to therapy:
something has often become ‘too much’. Projective identification is
in many ways a difficult concept, perhaps partly because it describes
unconscious communication, partly because the idea of the defence
of projection is not too popular in the systemic arena, and partly
because it also describes points in the therapy relationship in which
the therapist’s own emotional experience becomes necessarily
entangled with the family’s emotional experience.
It is clear from the above descriptions that the concepts of trans-
ference, countertransference and projective identification all
describe relational processes, and as such have the capacity to be
linked with the systemic concept of sequences. If we accept the idea
of broadening the systemic concept of sequences from the restriction
of a purely behavioural focus to an idea of the recursive relationship

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274 Carmel Flaskas
patterns of meaning, emotion and behaviour, we can think of these
analytic concepts as addressing relational patterns of conscious and
unconscious meaning and emotion. Moreover, following the way in
which Breunlin and Schwartz have used different time frames of
sequences within families, linking immediate here-and-now
sequences through time to intergenerational family patterns, it also
becomes possible to think of transference, countertransference and
projective identification as one description of the patterns that
connect across time. Much of the analytic writing addresses this
aspect very directly – Scharff and Scharff (1991: 203), for example,
speak of transference as ‘the living history of ways of relating’, while
Riesenberg Malcolm (1986: 433) writes of it as ‘the expression of
the patient’s past in all its multiple transformations’. These kinds of
metaphors about transference neatly capture the same quality of
connectedness across time which the systemic concept of sequences
also tries to address.
I have argued in this section that there is value in using an
extended version of the systemic concept of sequences to analyse
the therapeutic relationship and the process of engagement.
Sequences map patterns of relatedness across time, and these
patterns can be thought of as recursively linking behaviour,
emotion and meaning. This extended version of sequences allows
some points of compatibility with the psychoanalytic ideas of trans-
ference, countertransference and projective identification.

Reflecting on practice experience

So far, the process of engagement has been explored at a theory
level using two different kinds of lenses. The idea of a ‘good-
enough’ engagement addresses the ‘environment’ or the ‘frame’ of
the therapeutic relationship within which the therapy work takes
place. Using the idea of sequences alongside the psychoanalytic
ideas of transference, countertransference and projective identifi-
cation allows the possibility of introducing the dynamic of time
expressed in engagement, both past and present time for the family
and therapist, and the unfolding of the engagement sequence in
the therapeutic relationship. This second set of ideas addresses the
action of the therapeutic relationship within the frame.
I would now like to return to the practice examples given at the
beginning of the paper. Rather than trying to neatly ‘box’ the prac-
tice examples into the theory ideas, I would prefer to begin simply

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 Therapeutic relationship in systemic therapy 275
by presenting some reflections on this experience in a way that
intertwines the theory ideas.

The first fragment of practice

So what can be said of my experience of the engagement with the family where
the child, Simone, comes with abdominal pain during the night and distress
during the day, and her mother Cheryl tells of a painful background of loss
and rejection and her sister’s tragedy? The thing I guess that surprised me
most about my own reactions in the course of the first few sessions was my
increasing alarm and fear, despite there seeming to be no good reason for this,
and the increasingly persistent thought that I could finish with them because,
after all, Simone’s symptoms had disappeared . . .
To think of the emotional sequence, the parallel emotions of Simone’s
behaviour are distress (daytime tears) and anxiety/fear (nightime abdominal
pain). In the therapist–family sequence within the first few sessions, Simone
very easily gives up her behavioural symptoms – and her mother expresses
more pain and distress and I come to feel alarmed and anxious.
Although the thought that I would finish with the family was persistent,
I never really felt in danger of acting on it. Yet it’s an interesting fantasy,
and I can’t help but wonder about the momentum to ‘give up’ prematurely
on this family, and think of the kind of resonance with Cheryl’s actual expe-
rience of being ‘given up’ prematurely as a child when she and her sister were
taken into care. I’m not especially wanting to force this as a straightforward
repetitive therapy sequence (and indeed, the sequence did not get enacted),
but given that Cheryl’s early experience was so much part of her emotional
landscape, I think that it was showing itself in some way in my thought.
To use analytic language, I think my thought of finishing was a response
to a transference sequence in my engagement with Cheryl. Further, that my
feeling of alarm was the process of projective identification – the pain and
distress was consciously known about and experienced in this family, and in
some ways Cheryl very readily took this over from her daughter; however,
there were no words about fear in circulation in the family, and indeed fear
had come to be expressed physically through Simone waking up in pain.
If I were to think about why there was never really any danger of my acting
on the thought of finishing, then I think that the solidness of the ‘frame’ of
the therapeutic relationship provided the safety net. The very lack of chronic-
ity of the child’s symptoms was touching; her assertiveness in bringing in the
photo of herself as a baby in her father’s arms, her sister’s willingness to chime
in about what it was like when her Dad didn’t come to take them out the way
he said he would, her mother’s readiness to talk about her own pain about

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276 Carmel Flaskas
this – all these things were, if you like, invitations to me to become fully
involved with them as a therapist. Their attachment to the therapy and to
me, and my attachment to them as a therapist, did not mean that I saw them
forever, or every day as requested by Simone in the second session! But I did
see them for about eight months, with a bit of coming and going after that,
and always with a very open-ended finishing.

The second fragment of practice

But the second story of a therapy engagement has a very different flavour.
The family I look forward to seeing – desperate for some work that’s not about
abuse – turn out to be nasty to each other and to me. I think the children are
horrible, the father is repulsively sarcastic and the mother must be in cloud-
cuckoo-land to sit there acting like nothing peculiar is going on while she
talks about children’s developmental phases as if this is the model nuclear
family. So I then help it along by tuning out on an emotional level, and
proceed to conduct a ‘fake’ first session!
The contribution of my own countertransference is perhaps all too obvious
in the sequence of this first session, and indeed in my failure to engage in a
therapeutic way with this family. If we think of the idea of immediate
sequences being embedded in another ‘class’ of sequences, then I think that
my readiness to refuse to engage in a congruent way emotionally with this
family was very firmly part of my feeling at that precise time of being inun-
dated by work with abuse. Most of us have a certain emotional ‘threshold’ for
how much work we can do with abuse at any one time, and I was at my
threshold. One of the common sequences around work with abuse, I think, is
the point at which there is a strong momentum to not want to know, to not
want to look at it, and to not want to be involved with it. As a therapist, I
was not showing this countertransference with families where the work was
around abuse, but I think I did act it out when I saw a family I hoped would
be ‘easy’ who turned out to be very attacking.
I am writing this pragmatically rather than as an act of professional
confession, because for most of us these kinds of therapeutic failures are part
and parcel of everyday practice. But one of the interesting things about fail-
ure in engagement (and indeed therapeutic failure in general) is the way in
which the form of the failure is often illuminating in terms of the family’s
struggles. On one level, my actions replicated the mother’s way of dealing
with the attacks and unhappiness in the family – she held to the textbook
phrases about childhood development, while I held to the textbook formula for
the first session. The attacks in a moment-to-moment way could scarcely be
ignored, but the deep unhappiness of the family remained unacknowledged.

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 Therapeutic relationship in systemic therapy 277
It was interesting that it was the mother about whom I felt most irritated,
despite the level of censorship and intimidation in the father’s sarcasm. In
the family’s sequences in the session, it was indeed the mother who was most
attacked by the father and the children, and the father who was most success-
fully intimidating towards the mother and children. In some ways I think I
joined the family’s sequences, at least in thought if not in deed! Once you’ve
done this, of course, it does give some idea of what it might be like to be
‘inside’ this family’s patterns of relating . . .
In retrospect, I don’t think I would necessarily have changed anything
about the words I used in that session, but I think if I had been able to stay
more emotionally congruent, the family would have had a more reassuring
initial experience. Certainly there would have been less repair work to be done
in subsequent sessions.

The third fragment of practice

We come then to the last example. I had a ‘good’ therapeutic relationship with
the Muslim Arabic couple, whom I had seen across several sessions. The work
had been quite intimate, in the way that work with couples does often raise
very intimate issues very quickly. For each of them, it seemed important that
I witness their very different stories about the early part of their married life.
The stories involved their different migration histories, loss, intra-cultural
and religious difference between them, gender issues very explicitly named as
such by each of them, and a tragic accident which left the father disabled and
for which he continued to blame his wife. Ten years later, their constant argu-
ments relived (and re-created) this history.
I was surprised in some way that the sessions proceeded with ease, despite
(or because of?) my being so foreign. Even the formality of the session struc-
ture and the momentary time lulls of simultaneous interpreting seemed to
suit the work. Being foreign, of course, can be an advantage – and where the
therapist is outnumbered in the therapy room, this positioning of the thera-
pist-as-different (rather than the clients) can mediate, though never super-
sede, a wider social context of cultural dominance. At any rate, the
ferociousness of the couple’s arguing calmed, the father’s threats to end the
marriage abated (always a powerful stalemate in his favour in the sequence
of arguing), and they decided to have a ‘truce’ and focus on the children.
It was in this period that the ‘joke’ occurred. I’m not sure what the couple
or interpreter would say about why they found it so funny when I said that
I didn’t use sophisticated language either when I argued. I came to find it
funny because it was clear that though I’d said something about my simi-
larity to the couple, the very act of my saying it underlined my difference. I

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278 Carmel Flaskas
don’t think that I had acted the way a (woman? Anglo-Australian?) thera-
pist was supposed to act, and yet the joke did not threaten the frame of the
therapeutic engagement, it strengthened it. The joke was very pleasurable,
and it was the kind of pleasure that was not in spite of the cultural differ-
ence, but rather because of it.
The example of this engagement raises, I think, the specificity of the issue
of ‘therapeutic fit’, and what constitutes in any given therapy a ‘good-
enough’ fit to do the work. It also raises something about the specifics of the
different forms of attachment and intimacy which are constructed in differ-
ent therapeutic relationships. To repeat Hardham’s idea (1996), we are
always embodied in our work with clients – I have a culture, an age, a
gender, and indeed a social and emotional self. And we are always embed-
ded in the context of therapy – which in this case very directly included the
context of cultural and language difference, and the social context of
cultural dominance and marginalization.

Reflecting on the use of the theory ideas

The discussion I have just given is not meant to be programmatic,
in the sense of mapping how these pieces of practice experience
‘should’ be understood by using the theory ideas as prescriptions
for analysis. My own project here has been rather more modest: to
begin to develop some ideas which encourage reflection on thera-
peutic engagement, and which have the capacity to open out some
thinking about engagement and the therapeutic relationship in
specific practice situations. If you like, the theory ideas are not
meant to have a lineal explanatory value, but rather a reflective
value for practice experience.
In intertwining the theory ideas in the discussion of these three
situations, different ideas became useful at different points. In the
first situation, the psychoanalytic ideas of transference and projec-
tive identification gave a way of thinking about aspects of my
response to this family which were hard for me to understand in the
immediacy of my work with them. My fear and alarm, and the
momentum to finish too early, became something to be used by me
rather than cancelled out or fought against. The way in which the
therapist–family system mediates the sequence around the child’s
presenting problem, so that I take on the fear while the mother
takes on the pain, gives a window to view the dynamics of family
sequences which link behaviour, emotion and meaning. The
analytic ideas of transference and projective identification, and the

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 Therapeutic relationship in systemic therapy 279
concept of sequences, may be used harmoniously, and both give
some way of thinking about historical time in the immediate rela-
tionship pattern.
In the second situation, it is my countertransference which
directly relates to the failure to establish a therapeutic engage-
ment in the first session. My own threshold for abuse and attack in
part dictates my response of withdrawing emotionally in the
session. Yet the form of my withdrawal almost remorselessly paral-
lels the family’s sequence. Like the mother, I act like there is noth-
ing terrible happening; like the father, I want to attack the
mother; like the children, I am intimidated by the father, and
think only of attacking the mother and not him. The concept of
sequences is the main theory idea to be used in this practice
reflection, but the countertransference of my own emotional
limits is very much connected to the way I join in the family’s
pattern of relating. Again, these two sets of ideas may be used in
conjunction with each other.
The third practice situation prompted reflections on the idea of
therapeutic fit, brought to the foreground by the very visible
cultural, language and religious difference, and by the social
context of the cultural dominance of the therapist’s culture and the
marginalization of the clients’ culture. A good-enough relationship
emerges between the therapist and couple – the differences are not
the kind that become lost; they continue to exist as a barrier, and
yet they may also exist as a source of pleasure and intimacy in the
very specific and personal connectedness of the therapy.
The idea of therapeutic fit and the issue of a good-enough
engagement, though used most in reflecting on the third situation,
also find a place in thinking about the first two situations. My attach-
ment to the first family and the therapeutic fit act as a safety net in
preventing an unhelpful enactment on my part of the family’s strug-
gle – there is not a premature finishing. In the second situation,
there is not a good-enough relationship in this first meeting in ther-
apy – I may fit with the family’s sequences, but it is an anti-thera-
peutic fit, and I have limits in my ability at that point in time to form
an attachment to mediate this. Although the words sounded fine,
the first session comes and goes without the construction of a hold-
ing frame for the work ahead.
This section has explored the way in which the theory ideas
were used to reflect on the practice experience, and one final
point may be made in light of the discussion. It seems that the

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280 Carmel Flaskas
ideas of a good-enough relationship and therapeutic fit may be
used to think in general about the therapeutic relationship – and
this general applicability reflects the focus of these ideas on the
frame or environment of therapy. The ideas of sequences and trans-
ference, countertransference and projective identification may
have a more strategic usefulness: in systemic therapy they are more
likely to be helpful when something needs to be understood to
prevent or repair difficulties in engagement sequences. This strate-
gic value reflects the focus of these ideas on the action within the
frame of the therapy, which is seen in the engagement sequences of
therapist and family.

Conclusion
In order to develop thinking about engagement, I have discussed
two sets of ideas. The notion of the good-enough engagement and
the importance of therapeutic fit were explored as the environ-
ment or frame of the therapeutic work. In the second set of ideas,
the systemic concept of sequences, broadened to include the recur-
sive linking of patterns of emotion, meaning and behaviour, was
held alongside the psychoanalytic ideas of transference, counter-
transference and projective identification. This second set of ideas
addressed the fluidity of interaction in the therapeutic relation-
ship, and the way in which different levels of time – past and
present – can show themselves in the pattern of engagement in
therapy.
The final exploration of the practice examples is not an attempt
to ‘apply’ the theory ideas in any neat way. Instead, it was a reflec-
tion which intertwined the theory ideas as they seemed useful. In
the discussion that followed, it was argued that the first set of ideas
is applicable in a general way to the therapeutic relationship, while
the second set of ideas is more likely to have a strategic usefulness
in understanding engagement sequences which have the potential
to be problematic in therapeutic work.
All this is by way of summary. The theory ideas developed here
provide one way of enquiring into the process of engagement in
specific examples. But of course, there are many ways of being curi-
ous about something, and I am optimistic enough to think that in
the current milieu of systemic therapy there will continue to be the
development of different kinds of enquiry into both the process of
engagement and the therapeutic relationship.

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 Therapeutic relationship in systemic therapy 281

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