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Περιεχόμενα:
1) François, C. (1999). Systemics and cybernetics in a historical perspective. Systems
Research and Behavioral Science: The Official Journal of the International
Federation for Systems Research, 16(3), 203-219.
2) Heims, S. P. (1977). Gregory Bateson and the mathematicians: from
interdisciplinary interaction to societal functions. Journal of the History of the
Behavioral Sciences, 13(2), 141-159.
3) Brodkin, A. M. (1980). Family therapy: The making of a mental health
movement. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 50 (1), 4.
4) Beels, C. C. (2002). Notes for a cultural history of family therapy. Family Process,
41(1), 67-82.
5) Wilder, C. (1979). The Palo Alto group: Difficulties and directions of the
interactional view for human communication research. Human Communication
Research, 5(2), 171-186.
6) Geoghegan, B. D. (2017). The family as machine: film, infrastructure, and
cybernetic kinship in suburban America. Grey Room, 70-101.
7) Clarke, B. (2012). From Information to Cognition: The Systems Counterculture,
Heinz von Foerster's Pedagogy, and Second-Order Cybernetics. Constructivist
Foundations, 7(3).
8) Scott, R. (2011). Heinz von Foerster's heuristics course: A factor in the
development of second‐order cybernetics in the United States. Kybernetes,
40(7/8), 1149 - 1158
9) Manfrida, G., Giachi, E., & Eisenberg, E. (2013). Steps to a therapy of human
relationships: The evolution of family therapy in Italy. Contemporary Family
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10) Barbetta, P., & Telfener, U. (2021). The Milan Approach, History, and Evolution.
Family Process, 60(1), 4-16.
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12) Tseliou, E. (2013). Systemic family therapy in Greece: Polyphony and diversity.
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 Systems Research and Behavioral Science
Syst Res. 16, 203-219 (1999)

Research Paper

Systemics and Cybernetics

in a Historical Perspective
Charles François*
Argentine Association for General Systems Theory and Cybernetics, Libertad 742, 164 Martinez, Argentina

Systemics and cybernetics can be viewed as a metalanguage of concepts and models

for transdisciplinarian use, still now evolving and far from being stabilized. This is the
result of a slow process of accretion through inclusion and interconnection of many
notions, which came and are still coming from very different disciplines. The process
started more than a century ago, but has gathered momentum since 1948 through the
pioneering work of Wiener, von Neumann, von Bertalanffy, von Förster and Ashby,
among many others. This paper tries to retrace the history of the accretion process and
to show that our systemic and cybernetic language is an evolving conceptual network.
This is of course only a first and quite incomplete attempt, merely destined to give the
'feel' of the process. Systemic concepts and models are underlined in order to enhance
the perception of the process, as well as its systemic significance. Copyright © 1999
John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Keywords general systems history; systemic epistemology; systemic and cybernetic language;
semantic network

PRECURSORS (BEFORE 1948)
Prehistory of Systemic-Cybernetic Language
Some systemic-cybernetic terms have remote
origins. Hereafter they are traced back in time,
but connections with more recent developments
are signalled.
* Correspondence to: C. François, Argentine Association for General
Systems Theory and Cybernetics, Libertad 742, 1640 Martinez,
Argentina.
The Greek word 'sustema' stood for reunion,
conjunction or assembly. 'Kubernetes' (helms-
man) was used by Plato, already in the abstract
sense of 'pilot' of a political entity.
The concept of system resurfaced during the
seventeenth century, meaning a collection of
organized concepts, e.g. principally in a philo-
sophical sense. Descartes' 'Discours de la Méthode'
introduced a coordinated set of rules to be used to
reach coherent certainty, i.e. an epistemic
methodology of systematic and even possibly in
some sense systemic character. After Descartes,
practically all important philosophers did

CCC 1092-7026/99/030203-17 $17.50 Received 11 August 1997

Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd Accepted 24 November 1997
RESEARCH PAPER
construct their philosophical system, starting from
some basic interrelated postulates. Leibnitz, for
example, stated his 'principle of pre- established
harmony' between substances, according to which
any change in one substance is necessarily
correlated with every other. This is coherence in
complexity through reciprocal con- straints. It
would already be a kind of conceptual homeostat,
in Ashby's twentieth century terms!
Moreover these Leibnitzian correlations could be
eventually formulated in scientific laws. Thus are
scientific theories heralded, as conceptual
systems.
At the end of the eighteenth century, the
philosophical notion of system was firmly
established as a constructed set of practices and
methods usable to study the real world.
Much later, the unavoidable necessity of
correlations and mutual interdependence, associ-
ated with a complex causality, and leading
naturally to the concept of system, reappeared in
N. Hartmann's reconsideration of ontology (1912).
Hartmann also developed a theory of
stratification, i.e. hierarchy of levels of reality
through his theory of categories. His ideas were
quoted more than once by Bertalanffy (1949,
1950) and seem to have filtered, directly or
indirectly, for example, into the works of Miller
on living systems (1978), those of Mesarovic et
al. (1970) and other authors on hierarchies, and
possibly van Gigch's concept of metasystems
(1987b).
Again the concept of correlation is a very basic
one. Indeed, as natural entities undoubtedly
show numerous interrelations between their parts,
the notion of 'system' also starts to make
sense as descriptive of these natural entities. This
meaning of 'system' seems to have slowly seeped
into the English and French languages during the
eighteenth century, and became more
frequent throughout the next one, as shown
hereafter.
As to 'cybernetics', the term appeared in 1843 in
French with Ampère, 'to represent the art of
government' in his classification of sciences
(Essai sur la Philosophie des Sciences, 1843)
(Vallée, 1993). Vallée also notes that this very
same year 'Trentowski used the word 'kibernetiki'
in a book on management written in Polish'.
Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
204
Syst. Res.
From 1854-1878, the French physiologist
Bernard (see 1952) in a series of works estab-
lished the existence of the 'internal milieu' in the
living being, thus making clear the difference
between what happens 'inside' and what is now
called the 'environment' Vendryes, 1942). In his
Introduction a la Médecine Expérimentale (1865),
Bernard states: 'In the living being's organism, an
harmonic set of phenomena must be considered.'
'Harmonic' obviously implies the notion of
balanced interrelations, in this case
physicochemical ones related to 'water, tempera-
ture, air, pressure and chemical composition' in
the internal milieu. Obviously, the general
concepts of 'living system' and 'regulation' are
already latent at that time.
Indeed, in 1866 the brothers de Cyon dis-
covered in France the first example of a biological
regulator: the countervailing action of the
accelerator and the moderator nerves of the heart,
a discovery which elicited the following comment
by Bernard on 'the marvellous mechanism,
hitherto without precedent in physiology, of a
nervous self-regulator, able to determine the
heart's work and the strength of the resistances
that it must overcome' (French Academy of
Sciences, 1867).
While some previous technical devices, as for
example Watt's regulator, were already well
known, this seems to have been the first time that
the concept of regulation was formulated in an
implicit systemic context. It also heralds Cannon's
Wisdom of the Body (1932). Shortly before, at the
end of the nineteenth century, systemics and
cybernetics were already potentially rooted in
biology.
At the same time, and in a completely
independent way, a first inkling of the concept of
chaos emerged, even if not under that name at the
time. The French mathematician Poincaré
enounced the three-bodies problem concerning the
dynamics of the interactions of three celestial
bodies and proved that no precise solution could
be calculated if no arbitrary simplification was
introduced (1892-99). He produced a mathemat-
ical method, the so-called Poincaré section,
showing the vagaries of any specific trajectory.
He thus opened the whole field of instability
studies. And, of course, systems can be, and
Syst. Res., 16, 203-219 (1999)
C. François
Syst. Res.
frequently are, unstable. This work was to lead to
a wide-ranging research on the various types of
stability and on ergodic systems.
Poincaré also introduced a new type of
mathematical study, christened by him 'Analysis
Situs', which was the original form of topology, as
the science of forms - and deformations. Among
his conceptual heirs we must count Thompson
(On Growth and Form, 1916). Laville, with his
dynamics based on whorls (1950), and quite
recently McNeil (1993), who considers any
system as a torus or toroid resulting from inter-
acting fields. Obviously, equivalent concepts and
models are independently rediscovered gener-
ation after generation by researchers unaware of
former formulations. This is quite an interesting
feature from an epistemologic viewpoint: dynamic
systemic models clearly allow for significant
descriptions of nature, whatever their ontological
value.
As to Poincaré's work, it is one of the very first
steps towards the establishment of a new type of
qualitative mathematics appropriate for the study
of complex systems.
A second important advance in topology was
the publication in 1936 by Konig in Germany of
his Theorie der endlichen und unendlichen Graphen,
i.e. theory of graphs, which was in fact the first
elaborated mathematical theory of topological
interrelations - exactly two centuries after Euler's
problem of the bridges of Königsberg. It would
have been, for example, much more difficult for
Forrester (1973) to develop his 'Systems
Dynamics' without this important tool.
From another viewpoint, as shown later on by
von Förster (The Second Order Cybernetics of
Observing Systems, in 1981), cybernetics was also
in need of a non-contradictory logic of sets. This
was provided by Russell and Whitehead who, in
their Principia Mathematica of 1925, definitively
put paid to the innumerable contradictions and
paradoxes in the logics related to self-referring
Systems, from Epimenides the liar up to the
Cantor set and the Peano curve.
At the beginning of twentieth century, the
concept of system surfaced in linguistics. This
was mainly the work of Saussure, the Swiss
linguist. Saussure (Cours de Linguistique
Générale, 1906-1911) describes the set of sounds
Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Systemics and Cybernetics in a Historical Perspective
RESEARCH PAPER
used in a language as its 'phonologic system',
containing a 'determined number of well-
differentiated phonemes'. The way any language
interconnects these phonemes to construct words
is in effect quite strictly defined through precise
rules. These are not initially stated formally in the
spoken language. However, they become finally
explicated by grammarians. In cybernetic terms
these rules are phonetic constraints. The same is
true when the language is used to express
meanings. Saussure speaks of 'articulated
language' and specifies that 'in Latin, articulus
means member, part, subdivision in a series of
things'. He adds that, in this way, 'we observe the
subdivision of the chain of meanings into
significative units'. These articulations imply that
the language is made of permanently constructed
and reconstructed interrelations between words,
whose meaning depends on context, in a sense
analogous to the 'meaning' of a hydrogen atom in
H2O, HCI or NH3.
That is, words are elements that can combine in
semantic nets. And, like any elements, once
combined they lose some characteristics or
significance and acquire some other ones.
Obviously, this is one of the roots of con-
structivism. It also offers a good preview of all
types of combinatorics in systems.
As to Saussure's 'articulus', we find it again 30
years later in Vendryes' very general concept of
the articular relation (1942), which allows for the
choice among different possible relationships
between elements - until a choice is effectively
made, selecting one and only one of the virtual
relationships. It also curiously reminds one of
Heisenberg's indeterminacy, of wave collapse in
microphysics and even of the hapless Schrödin-
ger's cat. This again is giving defined signifi-
cance to a relationship through the introduction of
a constraint. Once more, we are led to Ashby.
In the realm of physics, another forgotten
precursor was the French physicist Bénard, who
made in 1908 a curious observation of hexagonal
convective cells forming in a jar of boiling water.
These 'dissipative structures' were at the time
considered merely an oddity. However, Prigo-
gine was to discover their deep thermodynamic
significance in systems brought far away from
energetic equilibrium, with an ever-growing
Syst. Res., 16, 203-219 (1999)
205
RESEARCH PAPER
number of examples from chemistry of what could
be called 'social physics' (Prigogine, since 1947,
numerous others more recently). However, much
longer ago the German geographer Christaller
(1933, 1937) and Losch in Switzerland (1944) had
discovered hexagonal structures in land
occupation. Until now such structures - which
could still be observed in a somewhat different
form around 1950 in the cyclical moves of semi-
nomadic Central African groups - have not been
widely understood as a general feature of the
dynamics of systems!
This same line also led to an original and deeper
understanding of the interrelations between
structures, energy overload and emergence. As
early as 1922, Lotka was investigating in a closely
related sense the 'energetics of evolution' and
proposed (1924) his 'world engine' model, based
on the cascade of energy from the sunlight,
through the whole of the correlated world of
living systems into final heat sinks. This was of
course creating a firm grounding for global
systemic ecology in thermodynamic terms.
Psychology also was in want of more global
views. After Brentano's research on the relation of
the subject with the object (Psychology from an
empirical viewpoint, 1874, 1911), Wertheimer's
research on the principles of perceptual organiz-
ation (1923) led to the formulation of Gestalt
psychology, i.e. psychology of perception of
forms, widely developed by Kohler (1929) and
Koffka (1935).
It became obvious that perception must start by
picking up static structures and dynamic
interrelations between elements, i.e. is systemic.
We have here yet another root of various
systemic-cybernetic interpretations of reality.
Again, von Förster's observer, and probably
Maturana's autopoiesis (1980), as well as von
Glasersfeld's constructivism (1995), Piaget's
version of structuralism (1967) and possibly
Gibson's concept of affordance (1986) owe a debt
to the Gestalt psychologists.
Another early precursor of the systemic view in
human sciences was the Romanian historian
Xenopol, according to whom history is a science
'which possesses the general elements of a system
of classificational truths', while admitting,
Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
206
Syst. Res.
however, that series of phenomena or events are
always unique and characteristic. Xenopol offered
'a whole system of principles relative to historical
science' (1899, 1911). The Portuguese historian
Salazar introduced (1942) the concept of 'historic
systems' with a surprising grasp of systemic
concepts - before their official appearance:
'Europe is the first historic system whose area of
influence covers the whole world'. Somewhat later
on, the French biologist Prat (1964) offered
interesting insights into the dynamics of historic
systems through the concept of 'aura', i.e. the
traces they leave after their destruction (this
concept should be definitively incorporated into
the systemic language, in view of its great
generality).
However, while historians like Toynbee and
Braudel, and even Sorokin in his theories about
the growth and decay of cultures, have worked
more or less implicitly along systemic lines, it
remains that the use of systemic and cybernetic
concepts and models in history is still largely
nowadays a no-man's land.
Four other precursors should yet be men-
tioned, who are unfortunately quite unknown from
most systemists.
One is Bogdanov, whose essay on 'Tektology'
(in Russian, 1921), which developed clearly
cybernetic concepts, was translated into English
only in 1980.
Another early, and quite improbable, systemist
was the South African General and statesman
Smuts, who published (1926) his book on Holism
and Evolution, introducing the term 'holon' and
developing the corresponding concept, much later
rediscovered by Koestler and Smythies (1969).
In 1932, Cannon introduced into biology the
concept of homeostasis, an important extension of
Bernard's idea of the stability of the 'internal
milieu'. This was in effect the birth of biological
cybernetics, but 20 years later the concept of
homeostasis was to be considerably generalized
by Ashby, as a feature of all types of systems in
dynamic equilibrium.
Cannon's work was paralleled from 1942 on by
the French biologist Vendryes (to whom the
author of this paper revealed Cannon's ideas in
1972!). Vendryes made an exhaustive study of
Syst. Res., 16, 203-219 (1999)
C. François
Syst. Res.
regulation first in living systems and, later on in
history, in social systems and in psychology. He
also extensively developed the concept of
autonomy (nearly 20 years before Maturana and
Varela - while in a different, but compatible
meaning). It was unfortunately impossible to
organize a debate between them all before
Vendryes' death in 1989. Vendryes was undoubt-
edly an early cybernetician, even if he himself
became aware of it only in the 1970's.
In 1938, the Romanian Odobleja published in
Paris his Psychologie Consonantiste, a first step
leading to the birth of the lively Romanian school
of cybernetics.
Biology, on the other hand, was still to
contribute more to systemics.
Driesch's famous experiences with embryos of
sea urchins (see Bertalanffy, 1949) brought him to
the conclusion that 'physical laws of nature were
transgressed' in living systems and led develop-
mental biology astray into a fierce controversy
between mechanistic and vitalistic views for more
than 40 years. However, in Bertalanffy's terms
'The strange result of his sea urchin experiment is
indicated by the notion of equifinality', i.e. 'the
same goal is reached from different starting points
and in different ways'. Until Woodger (1929) and
Bertalanffy, it appeared practically impossible to
escape from some more or less metaphysical
explanation.
However, it dawned on these authors that the
basic difference between non-living and living
systems was dynamic and adaptive organization
of the latter as wholes - a concept also developed
by the Belgian physiologist Dalcq (1941).
So, finally, vitalism gave way to organismic
biology, and led Bertalanffy to the formulation of
his original systemic views (1950). In his paper he
significantly signals the then very recent works of
Hartmann (1942), Korzybski (1933, 1950),
Wiener (1948) and Prigogine (1947), which shows
that he was already keenly aware of the close
connections between his systems concept and
general semantics, cybernetics and
thermodynamics, in the light of a renovated very
general epistemological perspective.
Another important work was Selye's on stress
and the 'general adaptation syndrome' (GAS) in
strained biological systems (from 1950 on). It is
Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Systemics and Cybernetics in a Historical Perspective
RESEARCH PAPER
impressive to find in the glossary of his main book
(1956, 1976) entries on adaptation energy,
developmental adaptation, heterostasis, homeo-
stasis, involution, metabolism, internal milieu and
resistance, whose meaning has been or could be
generalized to many kinds of systems. Moreover,
stress and the GAS are related to the general
conditions of stability and instability.
Still another biologist, McCulloch, concerned
himself in his outstanding paper 'Recollections of
the many sources of cybernetics' (1969, published
in 1974) with how the study of nervous nets, and
particularly of the brain, from Ramon y Cajal on,
led himself and Pitts to the discovery of 'A logical
calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous
activity'. This 1943 paper is as much a root of
cybernetics as Wiener's and von Neumann's
works. Moreover it neatly covers the logical as
well as epistemological aspects of cybernetics.
This is part of the conceptual thread which runs
from Fibonacci's numbers to Russell and White-
head's Principia, through Leibnitz's 'parts which
work one upon another, Boole's binary logic and
Peirce's notion that 'given a stochastic world,
order will evolve'. Moreover, McCulloch and
Pitts' (1943) work also introduced the basics of
neurophysiological cybernetics, which started von
Förster on his road to 'observing systems' and
Maturana towards autopoiesis.
A substantial synthesis on biology in its
relations to knowledge was published in 1967 by
Piaget.
Going back to logics, semiotics and semantics,
it is obvious that Peirce's work on symbols,
signals and the basic conditions of communi-
cation (of meanings) (see Peirce, 1961), the
beginning of this century, has been widely
influential on later systemists, as for example
Churchman, Ackoff, Warfield and their fol-
lowers.
After more than 60 years, any conceptual
construction, including of course cybernetics and
systemics, still remains under the pall of Gödel's
incompleteness theorem (1931), whose most
General implication is that any formal system
contains statements that cannot be proved within
that formal system. The lesson for systemics is
that models can be constructed and used, but that
they never offer an absolute value
Syst. Res., 16, 203-219 (1999)
207
RESEARCH PAPER
of truth. This seems in accordance with Russell
and Whitehead's reformulation of logics and
could be seen as an interesting fundament for
Poppers's falsifiability. It can also be considered
as the bedrock for van Gigch's concept of meta-
system. However, it leads to what the author of
this paper calls ontological skepticism – which,
while in any case is not too dramatic for practical
purposes, should always be remembered as a
psychological and conceptual background.
Another very important precursor was the
Polish logician, psychologist and semanticist
Korzybski, who published in 1933 (in the United
States) his seminal work on Science and Sanity,
wherein he developed a 'Non-Aristotelian' logic,
with very significant implications in psychology
and psychiatry. While his work is frequently
ignored by systemic psychologists, he explained
psycho-semantic pathologies in an obvious
systemic way. Bateson and probably most of his
direct intellectual heirs have had knowledge of
Korzybski's work. It is obvious that no satis-
factory conversation nor consensus can be
reached if psycho-semantic pathologies are not
understood.
The following section of this historical research
will consider the specific role of the pioneers or
'founding fathers' and some significant sidelines
(1947-1960). The final one will cover as much as
possible the basic advances after 1960 due to the
most prominent recent innovators.
FROM PRECURSORS TO PIONEERS
(1948-1960)
It would be quite redundant to insist on the
fundamental role of Wiener (1948) as the creator
of cybernetics (he himself duly acknowledged the
role of his co-workers, among them Bigelow
and Rosenblueth). Let us only briefly take stock of
the basic concepts he introduced, once and for
all.
His original goal was to address the problems
of prediction and control (in anti-aircraft artil-
lery) and, more generally, of steering. He found
that the basic condition for correct steering and
control was regulation by corrective feedback, a
term already used by control engineers. But the
Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
208
Syst. Res.
basic problem of control was 'centered not
around the technique of electrical engineering
but around the much more fundamental notion
of the message' (1948) –– and thus of infor-
mation to be transmitted. He adds that 'the
amount of information in a system is a measure of
its degree of organization, so the entropy of a
system is a measure of its degree of disorgan-
ization'. Wiener already had knowledge of
Shannon's work on communication, coding and
disturbances by noise.
Thus the whole of the original cybernetics
notions was to become neatly organized in a
coordinated bundle of concepts – something
that is still not always perceived nowadays.
Indeed, Wiener also at the time, informed about
McCulloch and Pitts' work on nervous connec-
tions, clearly understood – and stated – that
the new cybernetic viewpoint was to be useful in
many different disciplines, from physiology to
social sciences.
He also saw the necessary connections with
mathematics, logics and thermodynamics. In
short, this encyclopaedic mind opened avenues
and horizons so wide that they will possibly never
be totally explored.
In 1949, Shannon and Weaver published their
seminal Mathematical Theory of Communication,
frequently referred to as Theory of Information,
which is at least partly a confusing misnomer, as
their concept of information is not related to
meanings, but merely with quantitative and
entropic aspects. Here, in their own words:
'information should not be confused with
significance', - a warning still widely ignored,
even after MacKay's research and the distinction
he introduced between 'metron' and 'logon' in
information (1969).
The authors clarified the concept of communi-
cation by introducing the sequential concepts of
source, code, message, transmitter, signal,
channel and receptor (necessarily a decoder).
Shannon, as a Bell Telephone engineer, was
interested in solving the technical problem of the
satisfactory transmission of messages. Accord-
ingly, he researched the noise problem, i.e. the
distortions of messages by external disturbances
in channels. This led him to quantify the limits of
a channel's capacity and the use of redundancy.
Syst. Res., 16, 203-219 (1999)
C. François
Syst. Res.
All these notions are of utmost importance for
any class of systems, since all are made of
elements that must communicate in an efficient
manner. This branch of cybernetics thus also
became by necessity an indispensable part of
systemics.
Weaver, on the other side, emphasized the
connections of the theory with stochastic pro-
cesses, Markoff chains and ergodic Markovian
processes. This feature was shortly to be recon-
sidered and developed by Ashby (1956).
Shannon and Weaver also established a relation
between the probability of a message and a new
interpretation of entropy, as related to informa-
tion content. This subject was widely researched
by Brillouin during the late 1950s (e.g. 1959,
1962).
Obviously, Wiener's control, regulation and
feedbacks could never take place without
messages and efficient channels. Shannon and
Weaver's work is thus directly complementary to
Wiener's.
And again, systemics would not have been
possible without those very basic conceptual
tools.
Von Bertalanffy's main contribution was
neatly stated in his 1950 paper, in the British
Journal for the Philosophy of Science. However,
equally important was his role as a catalyst of the
systems view. This is so in at least two different
senses.
In the first place he clearly stated the central
concept of systems. The same could be said of
him that is said about Christopher Colombus
and America: after him there was never anymore
need to discover systems. On the other hand, he
strongly insisted on the existence of 'isomorphic
laws in science', giving convincing examples.
From this fact he deduced the possibility of a
new multidisciplinary approach and proposed a
'general system theory', by generalizing some
widely significant principles.
He presented the so-called theory as 'an
important regulative device in science' which
should lead to the 'unity of science'. However,
he merely discussed some specific subjects
as competition between parts, finality and
equifinality, closed and open systems, and
anamorphosis and catamorphosis.
Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Systemics and Cybernetics in a Historical Perspective
RESEARCH PAPER
Later on, he brought few significant contri-
butions and his role seems to have been more of a
communicator and a leader.
Boulding, an economist who remained all his
life somewhat sceptical about the ways in which
economics were theorized and practised, pro-
posed some interesting principles about the
phenomenon of growth in general (1956). He
was interested in topics that are generally
ignored by economists as, for example, nuclea-
tion (confirmed in a different way by Prigogine),
form as related to size, self-closure in growth
(a subject also explored by Maruyama and later
on, in a different perspective, by the Club of
Rome) and different types of growth rates,
particularly in relation to scale. All these aspects
can be translated into economics but correspond in
fact to basic principles applicable to the
dynamics of any evolving system. Unfortunately
Boulding's Programme has never been translated
into a systematic research, leaving a gaping hole
in systemics.
Boulding was also one of the first to under-
stand the nature of man's global relation with his
planet: he christened our man-planet system the
'Spaceship Earth' and was acutely conscious that
the whole planet is the commons of mankind as
a whole, and in danger of being promptly
destroyed by human universal and unrestrained
greed and spendthrift. More than 40 years later,
the lesson seems farther than ever from having
been learned.
Another very original line was developed in
the early 1950s by von Neumann, i.e. his theory
of automata, resumed in his 1956 and posthu-
mous 1966 works. The root of the modern idea of
automaton seems to be in Turing's theoretical
model for a computer (1950). Von Neumann's
ideas spawned a considerable number of models
of sets of potentially interactive elements, dis-
tributed in configurations that should be dynam-
ized by appropriate rules of transformation.
Von Neumann's automata, even if made of
unreliable components, may offer a coherent and
reliable behaviour. Automata are somehow on
the border (and crossing the border) between
collections of unorganized elements and true
complex systems, thus helping to bridge one of
the most gaping conceptual chiasms in systemics.
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Construction rules were proposed by Maruyama
(1963) and by Conway in his Game of Life,
popularized by Gardner since 1972 in his column
in Scientific American, even before the appearance
of the book.
These models have been used, for example, in
genetics (Kauffman, 1969 on) and for models of
the brain (Dubois, 1986 on). The latter may be
considered an extension of the McCulloch and
Pitts models. They are also related to properties
of composite (or quasi) systems, i.e. not strongly
integrated ones. Such properties are, for instance
avalanches, percolation, power laws and run-
away processes, all of which are now integrated in
the more general theory of self-criticality.
The field of automata is presently undergoing
an explosive development related to self-
organizing automata and so-called artificial life,
whose future could be awesome.
Von Neurnann was also seeking the grail of the
self-reproducing automation, in fact a kind of
cyclical cybernetics. He may thus be considered
as one of the forefathers of autopoiesis
(Maturana and Varela, 1980) and hypercycles
(Eigen and Winkler, 1975; Eigen and Schuster,
1979).
Automata research is now a whole field in
itself. Interesting classifications of the various
types of automata have been proposed by Klir
(1965) and Bunge (1979).
Von Förster is yet another of that peculiar
brand of humanist scientists (among them
Wiener, Bertalanffy, McCulloch, Pask, Miller,
etc.) who have illustrated systemics and cyber-
netics. The key to his contribution is in the
following comment: 'the cybernetician must
apply his competence to himself lest he will lose
all scientific credibility'. This was his
programme at the Biological Computer Laborat-
ory at the University of Illinois (Urbana) from
1957-1976, with collaborators like Ashby,
Löfgren, Pask and Maturana. The basic password
for his work is probably the German word Eigen,
i.e. self-, now incorporated into the systenüc
language as in eigenbehaviour, eigenelement,
eigenfunction, eigenprocess, eigenvalue, and the
like, not to mention the numerous expressions
beginning with 'self-'. No system could survive
without the capacity to maintain and reproduce
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its own behaviour and organization. This idea
led to enormous developments in systemics. It
has been at the root of von Förster's own second-
order cybernetics (how systems observe and
what implies the deliberately ambiguous expres-
sion observing systems), of Maturana's auto-
poiesis through organizational closure, of the
systemic psychology school, and of any systemic
epistemology. His work influenced numerous
other fields, and still undoubtedly will influence
them in the future.
The next great cybernetist was Ashby, whose
basic works appeared from 1951 to 1960.
However, he was also a great systemist and
probably the one who did most to connect the
two sets of concepts. His friendship with von
Förster may have been a crucial factor in this
sense. One of his most significant contributions
was the understanding that a system should be
'richly joined', but not overly so. He clearly
explained that no system could operate, nor even
exist, without 'constraints', but altogether that
sufficient leeway was an absolute necessity for the
system to be adaptive. His homeostat model
showed how a system made of interacting
components may oscillate and settle within
progressively self-defined limits of stability,
throwing a new light on the nature of ergodicity.
Another of his basic contributions was the
famous 'law of requisite variety', which defined
the general conditions of adaptiveness of a
system to the range of variability of its environ-
ment. The law is one of the most general
systemic-cybernetic principles, as it is useful
for the understanding of any type of system. An
important corollary was the Conant-Ashby
principle according to which 'every good reg-
ulator of a system must be a model of that
system'. This is a kind of original side glance on
the independently developed concept of autop-
oiesis. Ashby also expanded the meaning of
redundancy, in relation to variety.
One of the most notable polymaths in cyber-
netics and systemics was Pask. He had that very
rare blend of talents which allowed him (apart
from his interest in architecture, theatre and art in
general) to create a number of practical devices,
to be a successful consultant and, at the same
time, an outstanding theorist, who investigated
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Syst. Res.
the implications of cybernetics for a wide range
of subjects. He explored the general self-
organization conditions for learning, the mean-
ing of recursivity, the conditions of conversation
and its relation to cognition - and much more.
He was one of those who 'humanized' cyber-
netics (Pask, 1975, 1993).
It is not possible to situate the long-lasting
influence of Prigogine on systemics at a specific
moment. His first works on the thermodynamics
of irreversible systems appeared in 1940 and 1947
and at the time did not escape the watchful mind
of Bertalanffy. Prigogine was one of the first
(after De Donder) to try to escape from the yoke
of the initial thermodynamic models inspired
from Clausius and Boltzmann – in fact, models
of ideally isolated systems, i.e. purely conceptual
ones. These views precluded any satisfactory
explanation of life and evolution in the general
direction of complexity and seemed to justify the
vitalist argument in biology – and the need for
Maxwell's demons (already 'exorcized', however,
by Szilard in 1929, who showed the practical
inapplicability of the 'isolated system' model).
The pieces of the thermodynamic puzzle were
to be collected by Prigogine (and his co-workers
in Brussels Free University and in Texas Univers-
ity at Austin) all along from the 1950s on, in a
constant flow of papers and books.
He was the first to understand clearly the
compensation of energy degradation in terms of
structuration. He thus recuperated Bénard's
structuration through dissipation of energy,
which proved to be the key to the emergence of
more complex systems.
Moreover, he understood that energized
systems are practically at the same time accel-
erators of entropy since they can construct their
structures and maintain them only by extracting a
more important energy allowance from their
environment and by increasing their production
of entropy until they reach a stable level of
energy dissipation, close to equilibrium, and in
accordance with their acquired degree of struc-
tural organization. This was Prigogine's theorem
of minimum entropy production (1945).
Later on, Prigogine came to explain what
happened when a system was pushed far from
equilibrium due to a massive absorption of
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energy. He showed that such a process produced
increasingly wide oscillations in the dynamics of
the system until a critical threshold of instability
was crossed. At such a point, bifurcations
became possible towards higher complexity
through stabilized dissipative structures and a
correspondingly higher level of minimum
entropy production. He also introduced the
concept of nucleation, showing that, at the
bifurcation point, any random event can become
decisive in the selection of the type of higher
level of organization. These are ponderous
contributions to the general understanding of
evolution, applicable to any class of evolving
systems, at least from chemistry and bio-
chemistry to biological and social evolution.
In synthesis, Prigogine reinstated irreversible
time in science and described understandable
dynamics in systems. His work is exerting a
powerful influence on the wider understanding
of systems (as shown by the great variety of his
collaborators and students works).
A lonely voice during the 1950s was Rosen-
blatt's, the developer of the perceptron (1962), an
electromechanical device able to recognize some
patterns among a number of stimuli it is able to
register. Truly, such a device could not be
satisfactorily programmed, as observed by Min-
sky, whose preference went to top-down pro-
grammed artificial intelligence based on the
manipulation through algorithmic transforma-
tion rules of symbols representing knowledge. It
has now become clear, however, that parallel
self-transforming natural systems do exist.
Minsky's own Society of the Mind (1986) (would
it not be better called The Social Brain?) seems to
be an example. Moreover Hillis's connection
machine, Langton et al.'s Artificial Life and
Rumelhart and McClelland's work on parallel
distributed processing show that Rosenblatt's
proposal, after all, did not lead into a dead
end. Of course, so-called artificial life (AL) is in
no way exclusive of our classical artificial
intelligence. AL is, however, a much more
difficult proposal because it is much less strictly
deterministic: ergodicity, chaos, sensibility to
initial conditions, stability conditions, stability
margins and many other topics will have to be
considered.
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Some ethologists, not necessarily closely
connected with the systems movement, made
interesting contributions to the pool of trans-
disciplinary concepts. Already in 1934, von
Uexkull had developed an understanding of the
environment as a percept, different from species
to species and even from individual to individual.
Other ethologists, as for example Bonner (1955),
investigated the general social aspects of animal
life. Bonner explored, for instance, colonies of
cells and microorganisms or, at a higher level of
complexity, coordination and cooperation in
animal societies (ants, termites, beavers, deer,
monkeys, seals). As these studies widely
expanded and are still going on nowadays, it
seems possible that a very general systemic theory
of sociality and its ways could finally emerge,
possibly connected to the recent research in AL.
Bonner also studied other systemic topics such as
differentiation, morphogenesis, patterns and limits
of growth, and symmetry.
INNOVATORS (AFTER 1960)
After 1960, it becomes quite difficult to spot
every innovator and to place her or him within
the general landscape of systemics and cyber-
netics.
An interesting contribution was that of
Maruyama, who introduced in 1963 his
'deviation-amplifying mutual causal processes',
describing the role of positive feedback, part-
icularly in the structuration of growing and
competing systems. The subject is close to von
Neumann's automata and Conway's game of
life. However, it highlights another interesting
angle, i.e. the antagonism between growth and
limiting factors, already considered during the
nineteenth century in a different way by Verhulst
and his logistic equation and developed by Lotka
and Volterra during the 1920s.
A limitless positive feedback, supposing a
considerable – but limited – source to feed
on, would indeed quickly turn absolutely
destructive. So, it is important to study limits to
such a growth. Even today, it seems that positive
feedbacks without any adequate braking process
(a characteristic and dangerous feature of our
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economies in relation to environment factors) are
still insufficiently researched. Maruyama called
this type of process 'second cybernetics', which
should not be confused with the very different
'cybernetics of second order' of von Förster.
In his 1962 paper on 'The architecture of
complexity', Simon successfully tried to throw
more light on the concept of complexity, until
then merely a not very clear password. Of
course, systems, as made of numerous inter-
acting components, and more generally identifi-
able sets of specifically interacting components,
are to be clearly differentiated from simple
unorganized collections of elements. Simon
gave a variety of examples in his paper, but
most of all made the difference crystal clear with
his famous Hora and Tempus parable of two
watchmakers, one of them working in a systemic
way, and the other merely in a linear sequential
way.
The discovery of criticality, as a characteristic
of quasi-systems, made clear quite recently that
complexity, i.e. structured organization, gener-
ally in levels, is a cardinal feature of systems-
complexity and systemicity are near synonyms,
both concepts corresponding to a wide embra-
cing way to describe many entities as perceived
by observers.
Miller started to publish his papers on living
systems in Behavioral Science in 1965, while his
book came out in 1978. His descriptive classifi-
cation was a milestone for systemics. It covers the
whole universe of systems from the cell to the
man-planet system, leaving out only physico-
chemical and ecological ones. Moreover it creates
at the same time a taxonomy of parts, or sub-
systems (originally 19 of them; 20 in the most
recent version) and of levels of complexity (now
eight of them, from seven originally). He added a
method for the discovery of cross-level iso-
morphies, thus giving systemics a significant and
workable research tool. While many other
interesting systems classifications have been
proposed, none is as satisfactority horizontally and
vertically structured, nor by far, as widely
embracing.
Miller's taxonomy largely implies systemics in
the same sense that Mendeleev's table of
chemical elements implied chemistry and part
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Syst. Res.
of physics and became a guideline for future
research. Both contain implicit principles of order
which had never been clearly stated before.
Living Systems surely enhanced the rational
and scientific status of systemics and led it closer
to experimental research by defining much more
clearly the areas that could be covered, in a
transdisciplinary way.
Haken proposed and developed his 'syner-
getics' during the 1970s and 1980s (Haken, 1983).
It amounts to a different and significant formula-
tion of systemics. Ashby's notion of constraints is
given here a considerable extension under the so-
called slaving principle, the final synthesis of
multiple constraints between numerous elements
(Leibnitz!) in growing confinement. In this way,
systemic correlations and cooperation result in an
order parameter, a very general feature, that can
be observed from laser light, solitons, hexagonal
dissipation, etc, to territorial occupation and
fashion fads.
Synergetics creates conceptual bridges
between chaos theory and thermodynamics of
irreversible systems. It also helps to understand
the genesis of complex systems, the general
conditions of stability and synchronization
phenomena (as for instance implosion, phase
locking and stigmergy – see below).
Also in Germany, Eigen together with his
coworkers Winkler (1973, 1975) and Schuster
(1978) investigated in a very synthetic way the
cyclical behaviour of many systems processes, a
subject closely related to autopoiesis. They
developed the important connective concept of
hypercycle, a hierarchy describing the second-
level circularity of a series of linked cycles. They
showed its relation to attractors, automata,
boundary conditions, dissipation, catalysis and
self-catalysis, eigenvalues, thermodynamics of
irreversible systems, morphogenesis (understood
as competitive stabilization), structural stability,
constrained growth, thresholds, and of course self-
reproduction, i.e. autopoiesis.
Steinbuch introduced in 1961 his matrix
models of learning, in German 'Lernmatrix'. He
proposed a 'Lernhase', in which meanings
become connected with signals or symbols, and
a habilitated 'Kennphase', when the constructed
connections are used to retrieve meanings from
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RESEARCH PAPER
signals or symbols, or conversely. Unfortunately
this research line, akin to Bateson's second- and
third-order learning, seems to have been
abandoned.
All of the aforementioned German cybernetists
and systemists very much deserve a wider
audience.
Maturana's considerable contribution has been
the discovery and elaboration of the concept of
autopoiesis, i.e. self-production, which emerged
from his research on the neurophysiology of
perception with Lettvin, McCulloch and Pitts.
Autopoiesis, enounced in 1973 in collaboration
with Varela (both Chileans, see Maturana et al.,
1980), is a multi-connected concept: it is signifi-
cant for problems of cognition, but also for the
self-reproduction of living systems (von Förster's
eigenbehaviour, eigenvalue, etc,). Associated with
autopoiesis are the significant concepts of self-
closure, self-reference, self-production process,
these latter also researched by Eigen. Autopoiesis
moreover is a cornerstone for autonomy.
Autopoiesis is equally significant for systemic
epistemology because it shows that which is
observed cannot be neatly abstracted and separ-
ated from the observer's own condition. It has
changed the whole perspective of systemics and
cybernetics (von Förster's second-order cyber-
netics).
Klir elaborated from 1965 on his 'reconstruct-
ability analysis', whose aim is the establishment of
a suitable strategy to reconstruct an ill-under-
stood system from fragmentary data, mainly in
order to solve systems problems. Klir situates his
reconstructability, analysis as 'an offspring of
Ashby's constraint analysis' (Klir, 1991).
As many constraints are cross-level, Miller's
methodology of creation of cross-level hypo-
thesis could possibly be correlated with Klir's
methodology. In turn, it would be interesting to
apply it, for instance, to the construction of the
basic models of systems used in Forrester's
'systems dynamics'.
We surely need better connections between so
many interesting systemic and cybernetic con-
cepts, models and tools.
The topic of hierarchy was widely explored by
Mesarovic and collaborators during the 1960s
(Mesarovic et al., 1970). Their work, quite
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formalized, included multi-level structures, inter-
actions, conflict resolution, optimization and
generally coordinability and coordination with
an eye on decision-making.
Hierarchies have also been investigated from
an ecological complexity perspective by Allen
and Starr (1982). A particularly interesting
feature of their book is a critical glossary of
many systemic terms.
Apart from his timely proposals for the
practical use of systemics in management
(1987a), van Gigch introduced into systemics
the very important translevel concept, generic-
ally characterized by the prefix 'meta-': meta-
system, metacontrol, metadecision-making, etc.
He thus translated to systemics - in cybernetic
terms of regulation and control – a much
clearer understanding of the deeper nature of
hierarchic levels. The parallel with Russell and
Whitehead's reformulation of logics and with
Gödel's 'incompleteness' is striking. But he
translated these high-level abstractions to the
practical world of real hierarchical organizations.
Curiously enough, some relationship of van
Gigch's ideas with Mandelbrot's fractals (1977)
could be less far-fetched than supposed at first
glance. The basic concept in Mandelbrot's work,
more than the fractal model itself, could be self-
similarity between levels of complexity. This
feature is obvious in every example of fractals
and this was so even a long time before the
computer produced fractal images. Self-similarity
is already visible for instance in Koch curves, or
in Sierpinski's sieves. Moreover, the concept
seems very close to Weierstrass's renormalization
equation (showing self-similarity through a
superposition of harmonic terms at different
scales in a curve – see West and Goldberger
(1987) – and generally to the notion of scaling.
And more or less hidden self-similarity can be,
observed in graphical representation of also more
or less complex cyclical processes. A deeper
exploration of the concept in different disciplines
would possibly bring rich rewards.
Still other new and important mathematical
and formal tools and models appeared between
1960 and 1985.
Zadeh proposed his fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic
in 1965, thus starting a lively special interest
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Syst. Res.
group in systemics. Fuzzy sets are useful in
studies of classes with unsharp boundaries,
which are numerous and very difficult to model.
Correlatively fuzzy algorithms, fuzzy categories,
fuzzy functions, fuzzy structures, fuzzy subsets
and fuzzy topological spaces have been intro-
duced.
The French mathematician Thom described in
1972 his models of structural stability, of
morphogenesis and of general morphology,
later to be known as theory of catastrophes,
i.e. sudden discontinuous changes. His table of
archetypal morphologies, however, covers prob-
ably all of the possible changes that may occur in
a process. Among the topics considered we find
attractors, bifurcations, chreods, epigenesis,
forms, gradients, Hamiltonian systems, infor-
mation, morphogenetic fields, various types of
processes, singularities, symmetry-breaking, to-
pological complexity and waves (see Thom,
1975).
Thorn's models have sometimes been put to
dubious uses by enthusiasts, but this does not
detract from their importance for a deeper
understanding of many systemic and cybernetic
features.
Chaos theory as the study of the irregular,
unpredictable behaviour of deterministic non-
linear systems is one of the most recent and
important innovations in systemics. Complex
systems are by nature non-linear, and accord-
ingly they cannot be perfectly reduced to linear
simplifications. Notwithstanding, a good concept
of the complexities of non-linearity was lacking
until the mid-1970s. Chaos theory, whose
original preview was introduced by Poincaré, is a
collective construction of a number of mainly
American, French and German researchers and
mathematicians. It has renewed our views on
determinism and randomness, now closely inter-
twined. It is significant for many systemic
processes, for instance irregular periodic beha-
viour, bifurcations, instabilities and threshold
crossings. It also helps in reconsidering the
problems of forecasting and predictability in
relation to initial conditions.
Another void in the formal scaffolding of
systemics has been covered recently by the
theory of self-organized criticality (Bak,
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Syst. Res.
Wiesenfeld and Chen, among others, 1988 on, and
in France by de Gennes). This theory studies
quasi-systems, or composite systems, made of
millions of elements interacting only over a short
range and intermittently, with no discernible
organized subsystems. Examples, some of them
quite unexpected, are snow fields, sand heaps,
stock markets, ecosystems, geological faults and
earthquakes, forest fires, traffic on highways and
panics in crowds. It could seemingly also be
applied to studying social behaviour in animal
societies (locust swarms, lemming mass
migrations). This listing shows that criticality is
obviously a transdisciplinarian tool. It introduces
new aspects of the notions of instability, instab-
ility thresholds, power laws and turbulence, as
well as new concepts and models as avalanches,
chain reactions and flicker noise. Self-organized
criticality is closely related to chaos, fractals,
transition matrices and vortices.
Conway's game of life has been used to model
critical situations in systems.
Another outstanding French cybernetician and
systemist, active since 1950, Vallée has con-
structed during the last 40 years under the
general name of 'epistemo-praxeology' an elab-
orate mathematical and logical theory of cogni-
tion as related to systems (1993, 1995). This work,
based on a very wide knowledge of the relevant
authors in the field (as for instance von Förster,
Maturana, McCulloch, Pitts and Wiener), intro-
duces the notions of observation operator,
inverse transfer and epistemo-praxeologic loop
in order to clarify the deeper nature of the
interrelations between the observer and that
which is observed.
In 1977, Le Moigne, also French, published his
first edition of his Théorie du Systeme Général,
which is in fact an attempt to establish a General
theory of modelization of complex systems of
any kind, i.e. a General systemography
('le systeme, en général' in Le Moigne's own
words). This theory was reworked by the author
in 1983, 1990 and 1994 and is now a very rich
source of insights into a synthetic understanding
of systemics.
Most theoretical and practical economists after
Boulding have consistently ignored systems
concepts. However, there has been one
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RESEARCH PAPER
outstanding exception with Georgescu-Roegen's
work (1971). This author showed that economy is
submitted to the thermodynamic laws, and
particularly to the irreversible and irrevocable
global increase of entropy.
Other authors - in the United States Odum
(1971), from the ecological viewpoint, Daly
(1973) on the conditions of a steady-state
economy, Pimentel (1977) about the energy
balance in agricultural production; in the United
Kingdom Mishan (1967) about the costs of
economic growth; and in France, Passet (1979)
about economic sustainability in general – have
tackled the subject. However, the main currents in
economic thinking still ignore these very basic
problems. As a result, as observed by Warfield,
economics in systemic terms is still largely a
pending subject. This is at the same time a very
serious failure of systemics and a very dangerous
situation for mankind in general. Subjects like
global management of energy flows, ecological
accounting, specific and general national and
global patrimonial accounting for sustainability,
sources depletion and sinks saturation, waste
recycling, etc., should urgently be researched
through a systemic-cybernetic approach.
General systemic conditions, as short- and long-
term stability and instability thresholds, chaos,
cycles and trends, dissipative structuration,
criticality and power laws, could lead to a better
understanding of the whole subject and be quite
useful in this task.
De Greene in the United States has contributed
since 1988 a series of significant studies in
systemic terms on long cycles in economic and
social systems. This work could lead to a
renewed interest in this topic, important for any
non-linear forecasting or planning activity.
Various social scientists, mainly from the
United States, made use of the concept of system,
in particular since the periodic conferences
instated by Grinker and Ruesch in Chicago
during the 1950s (see Grinker, 1956). The
participants freely used notions such as adapta-
tion, autonomy, boundaries, communication
nodes, effectors, energy system, environment,
Gestalt, hierarchy, homeostasis, information,
levels, processes of interaction and communica-
tion, open systems, organization, circularity of
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processes, rhythms, structures, steady state,
stability, stress, threshold, etc., showing clearly
the influence of the then developing cybernetics
and systems theory. Among the most prominent
participants were Deutsch, Parsons, Rapoport
(one of the founders of the original Society for
General Systems Research), Thompson and
Weiss.
To this list we may add Berrien (1968), Buckley
(whose compilations of 1967 and 1968 are still
useful), Vickers and Easton. However, the
systemic movement in sociology never really
took off, perhaps because most sociologists only
got a smattering of notions about systemics and in
many cases confused it with structuralism,
with functionalism or even with applied systems
analysis or with systems dynamics.
The controversy around Wilson's sociobiology
obscured still more the whole subject. Taking
into account the ever growing complexity of our
societies, it would be urgent to reconsider anew
the whole field from an all-embracing systemic
viewpoint.
One interesting angle in this sense is
Maruyama's concept of 'mindscapes', personal and
to a point cultural.
In a different perspective von Glasersfeld has
been developing since 1976 his 'constructivism' as
a general reflection on the conditions of
learning and knowing (see von Glasersfeld,
1995). He uses the following significant quotation
of von Förster: 'Objectivity is the delusion that
observations could be made without an
observer'. Consequently, von Glasersfeld's aim is
to discover how we perceive and construct
reality, to retrace the ways we follow to construct
concepts and to elaborate abstractions, and to
better understand the relation of the self with
others and with the environment in general.
Such a work amounts to a cybernetic-systemic
theory of knowledge, which is needed to put the
whole of cybernetic-systemic thinking into
perspective
The Argentinian-Canadian epistemologist
Bunge developed a very acute critical study of
systemics as a scientific methodology, and in a
sense philosophy. He debunked some myths
concerning abusive holism, but at the same time
revindicated the usefulness of systemics,
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Syst. Res.
especially in the fourth volume of his Treatise
on Basic Philosophy: Ontology II. A World of
Systems (Bunge, 1979).
Finally, Troncale's (1985) widely developed
paper on systemic thinking and modelling
methodology, unfortunately not sufficiently
known, seems fundamental if systemics and
cybernetics are to be practically used specifically
in the future as useful transdisciplinarian tools
in their own right. The fact that Troncale's
observations and proposals still largely remain
unheeded reflects a quite frequent and regret-
table indifference for practicality in many
systemic circles.
SOME SIGNIFICANT RECENT
CONTRIBUTIONS (AFTER 1985)
Some other very recent developments should
still be signalled. One is the Hungarian Csanyi's
work on the 'replicative model of self-organiz-
ation' (1989), which should be neatly distin-
guished from the autopoiesis model. This is a
significant step towards a General systemic
understanding of systems genesis. Before becom-
ing autopoietic (replicative in Csanyi's terminol-
ogy), any system has to get through its own
autogenesis, i.e. to' successfully become an
identifiable and viable new entity ordered from
formerly free elements.
Csanyi describes the conditions - i.e. rules
for a specific organizational process – needed
for a minimal set of components to be able to
start a replicative system and calls such a set the
autogenetic system precursors. Until such a set
does not start to develop functions it is a 'zero-
system'. The initial action of the rules is triggered
by some energy input and leads quite swiftly to a
growingly differentiated organization which
acquires closure through the appearance of
closed cycles and thus becomes self-replicative,
i.e. autopoietic. This sequence is becoming one of
the most active fields of biological study and
promises to be a very general set of guidelines for
the study of any type of social genesis and
sociality. The connection with Eigen's hyper-
cycles and the present research on AL is
noteworthy.
Syst. Res., 16, 203-219 (1999)
C. François
Syst. Res.
The new field of. AL, opened by various
investigators - Brooks, Langton (1989) and
others in the United States (1989); Steels in
Belgium; Delhaye and others in France, etc. is
leading to the discovery of uncanny similarities
between artificial and natural processes of social
construction in systems, from cellular automata
to social insects and, quite probably, human
societies. Sociality is obviously one of the most
general topics to be covered in a transdisciplinar-
ian way by systemics and cybernetics.
Sabelli (an Argentinian physician and psychi-
atrist working in the United States) and collab-
orators have been developing since 1985 a new
and quite general systemic theory of processes,
which puts much emphasis on the dynamic
aspects of systems and, furthermore, insists on
other characteristics such as symmetry-breaking,
process and structures oppositions, and thermo-
dynamical aspects mainly related to entropy.
Sabelli uses these concepts widely in biology,
physiology, psychology and social sciences,
revealing some unexpected relations between
these disciplines (1991). A better connection of
Sabelli's work with other systemics theories is
still to be worked out.
In 1993, McNeil proposed still another quite
general systems theory based on a set of con-
cepts reminiscent of the French Laville theory of
whorls, or vortexes (Laville, 1950). McNeil, who
was unaware of Laville's work, sees any system
as the result of dynamic interactions between
fields. Some of these lead, according to him, to
the stabilization of helical generated structures
called toroids. These toroids are a very
general model of dynamic equilibrium. The
theory has thermodynamic overtones and
seems to be related to Bénard's dissipative
structures and to Prigogine's principle of
minimum entropy production. It is rooted in
physical notions, which makes it interesting as
to the possibility of a better synthesis between
physical sciences and living systems. Its possi-
bilities in biology, economics and sociology are
intriguing.
As the editor of my recent Encyclopedia of
Systems, I included in this work some very
generally unknown concepts, which seem, how-
ever, of a quite systemic nature and, as such,
Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Systemics and Cybernetics in a Historical Perspective
RESEARCH PAPER
potentially useful. Three of the most significant
among these are:
the 'aura' (Prat), i.e. whatever traces remain of
the system after its demise (petrified wood, a
ship's wreck, Hammurabi's and Justinian's
code, Aristotle's logics);
'stigmergy' (Grassé), i.e. the alternate and
reciprocal transfer of structural and/or func-
tional information from individuals to the
system they are part of, or conversely;
'invisibility' (de Zeeuw), i.e. the non-
perception of some objects, features or situ-
ations due to the insufficiency of our observa-
tional competence.
I am convinced that there must still be a
number of other concepts or models of potent-
ially systemic generality scattered in some
(un)fairly unknown works of disappeared or
living researchers. We should dive for them in
the deeps of literature.
I dearly hope that I did not forget any
important innovator in this study. If this should
be the case, victims should feel free to protest
and I will be ready to amend!
Systemics and cybernetics practitioners will be
considered in another paper: Beer, Checkland,
Warfield, Banathy, Ackoff, Mitroff and Linstone,
Flood and Jackson, Johannessen and Hauan
among them.
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13 (1977): 141-159.

GREGORY BATESON AND THE MATHEMATICIANS:

FROM INTERDISCIPLINARY INTERACTION
TO SOCIETAL FUNCTIONS
STEVEP. HEIMS*
An instance of fruitful cross-disciplinary contacts is examined in detail. The ideas in-
volved include (1) the double-bind hy othesis for schizophrenia, (2) the critique of
game theory from the viewpoint of antKropolog and psychiatry, and (3) the applica-
tion of concepts of communication theory anitheory of logical types to an inter-
pretation of psychoanalytic practice. The protagonists of the interchange are
Gregory Bateson and the two mathematicians Norbert Wiener and John von
Neumann; the date, March 1946. This interchange and its sequels are described.
While the interchanges between Bateson and Wiener were fruitful, those between
Bateson and von Neumann were much less so. The latter two held conflicting
premises concerning what is significant in science; Bateson’s and Wiener’s were com-
patible. In 1946, Wiener sug ested that information and communication might be
-
appropriate central concepts k r psychoanalytic theory a vague general idea which
Bateson (with Ruesch) related to contem orary clinical practice. For Bateson,
Wiener, and von Neumann, the cross-discipinary interactions foreshadowed a shift
in activities and new roles in society, to which the post-World War I1 period was con-
ducive. Von Neumann became a high-level government advisor; Wiener, an inter-
preter of science and technology for the general public; and Bateson, a counter-
culture figure.
While the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century can be characterized
as an era of increasing “professionalization” and “specialization” across the board in all
the sciences, there have also been countertrends. For example, the pattern of education of
scientists at Cambridge University in the 1920s encouraged broad, general, inter-
disciplinary interests. We need only mention the names of C. H. Waddington, Evelyn
Hutchinson, Joseph Needham, J. D. Bernal, and Gregory Bateson as notable products of
this educational pattern.
In a very different way, World War I1 catalyzed interdisciplinary efforts in the
United States. During the war, most physical scientists as well as many social scientists
had been engaged in goal-oriented team research which cut across the disciplines. With
some notable exceptions,’ universities, even after the war, continued to be organized
along strictly disciplinary lines. This narrow professionalization and departmentalization
seemed merely to provide the appropriate institutional form for science, as it had been
characterized by Max Weber in his classic essay on “Science as a Vocation” - “A really
definitive and good accomplishment is today always a specialized accomplishment. And
whoever lacks the capacity to put on blinders, so to speak, . . . may as well stay away
from science.”2 But, to some, the personal issue has always been that of reconciling a
commitment to science and the, at times, necessary wearing of blinders - the precise
and detailed work - with a broad vision and a wide scope.
Another small island, in the sea of the scientific community, where wide intellectual
scope was encouraged rather than discouraged, was a series’ of small conferences spon-
*My thanks are due to Gregory Bateson and to Neal Hartley, M.I.T. archivist, as well as to Jacques M.
Quen, Cornell Medical Center, and Barbara Ross who critically read the manuscript. For reprints contact
author at 24 Stanwood Avenue, Gloucester, Mass. 01930.

STEVE HEIMSreceived his doctorate in physics (1960)from Stanford University, and has taught at
Brandeis University and Wayne State University. Since 1967 he has taken an increasingly active in-
terest in /inding a humanistic perspective on science, and in 1970-71, he was a National Science
Faculty Fellow in the history and philosophy of science. He is currently working on two books, one
dealing with the interdisciplinary Mary Conferences on Cybernetics ( I 946-1953),and another dealing
with two twentieth century mathematicians. John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener.
141
142 STEVE P. HEIMS

sored by the Macy Foundation, the first of which was held in March 1946, on the subject
of “Teleological Mechanisms.” At the first meeting of this group, the behavioral scien-
tist Gregory Bateson (now teaching at the University of California in Santa Cruz) for the
first time met two of America’s leading mathematicians, Norbert Wiener and John von
Neumann (both deceased).
This article describes the intellectual, cross-disciplinary interaction among these
three. The format of the article emphasizes communication and feedback among the
three and, only secondarily, individual biographies. The natural historical unit to con-
sider is, in this instance, not one individual person, but the communication and feedback
loops involving more than one person. Other contexts come into play, such as
philosophical, political, and institutional, as do particular individuals’ objectives and the
actions taken to implement their purposes. In emphasizing contexts, communications,
purposes, and feedback loops in the story, I have taken a leaf out of my protagonists’
books.
This way of regarding the events can be contrasted to those science-historical
studies, which look to antecedents for explanation of events, such as the childhood ex-
periences of each of the scientists, the traditions out of which they came, or the prior
evolution of scientific ideas. Such a search for what is vulgarly referred to as “causes”
and more precisely as “continuities,” leads one further into the past, away from the event
with which one began. Elsewhere,‘ I have tried to interpret the same events and people
considered here in terms of the protagonists’ childhoods, and traditions, and the prior
state of science. The “interactive” approach taken in the present article does not dwell
on prior events, but leads to subsequent events; the circumstances described are seen
more as agents influencing or containing seeds of the future, than as consequences of the
past.
The story to be related is, then, of three men - two mathematicians and a
behavioral scientist, who, emerging from wartime projects, expand their intellectual
horizons through various contacts, particularly by participating, with avid interest, in the
small interdisciplinary “Teleological Mechanisms” conference in March 1946. Each of
the three men was in mid-life and had been successful in his earlier work. Consideration
of the interaction among the three men, their goals, and their institutional identifications
shows portents of change for each of the three men in a different direction. This change
was facilitated by the many viable options open to scientists in that period of high
prestige and economic support of science, the same period (the McCarthy era) during
which other freedoms were at a low ebb. All three men shift in the direction of new kinds
of audiences and co-workers; the audiences they find are not only fellow scientists but
groups of laymen, different types of groups for each of the three men. In effect, each is
defining a new role or function in society for himself, in each case, a function which
transcends the purely academic one; thereby, each plays a historical role of a scientist,
who, as scientist, has a direct impact outside of the scientific community. It is part of my
purpose in this paper to call attention to the historical significance of the societal roles
which these scientists chose.
WORLDWAR I1
During World War 11, Norbert Wiener was assigned to section D-2 of the National
Defense Research Committee, as part of an interdisciplinary team at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, to work on mathematical aspects of the guidance and control of
antiaircraft fire. John von Neumann was the foremost mathematical consultant to the in-
 GREGORY BATESON AND THE MATHEMATICIANS 143

terdisciplinary “Manhattan Project” in Los Alamos, New Mexico (i.e., the construction
of the first nuclear weapons). He had been present at the dramatic first explosion of an
atomic bomb in 1945.
Under the pressure of wartime, von Neumann had devised radically new patterns of
formal logical organization for computers, thereby advancing that technology
significantly.6 It came to his attention that the logical calculus, devised by Pitts and
McCulloch8 to describe the functioning of the human nervous system, could also be used
to describe general purpose computers. From this insight, in 1943, evolved von
Neumann’s avid interest in and exploration of the possibility of devising a formal-logical
theory, which would, as a matter of course, encompass computers, but which also - and
this was the awesome challenge - would eventually lead to a formal-logical description
of the detailed pattern of organization of the human brain. In 1943, von Neumann knew
very little empirical neurophysiology or experimental psychology, but he proceeded to
learn’ whatever was needed to guide his exploration in formal logics. In 1943 he had also
completed another work, which took him into applications of mathematics to the social
sciences; the seminal book, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, was written
jointly with economist Oskar Morgenstern.
Norbert Wiener, although a mathematician, had had a long-standing interest in
physiology. He had, since about 1933, participated in an interdisciplinary seminar group
at the Harvard University Medical School;8 over the ensuing decade, he learned an im-
pressive amount of detailed physiology, and gained the self-confidence to speak about the
subject. A seminal paper, in 1943, resulted from Wiener’s collaboration with engineer
Bigelow and neurophysiologist Rosenblueth; it might be regarded as a position paper on
the subject of “behavior,” the role of voluntary action or “purpose,” and also that of
“negative feedback.” The definitions which were made of these concepts were intended
to include organisms as well as machines, and to deal explicitly with the several
similarities, as well as the differences, between the behavior of the two. Their underlying
methodological viewpoint was a t variance with the strictly operational attitudes towards
science, as the following excerpt illustrates: ‘‘. . . although the definition of purposeful
behavior is relatively vague, and hence operationally largely meaningless, the concept of
purpose is useful and should, therefore, be retained.”e Wiener was also in communication
with psychologist Edwin Boring, who had prepared a list of psychological functions from
a behaviorist’s perspective as challenges for Wiener; Boring wanted to see if Wiener, in-
deed, could “specify electrical or electronic systems that will give the same specificity of
‘output’ to ‘input.’ ”lo Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow had, in effect, announced a new
paradigm in science, according to which one seeks an overarching theory to include
machines and organisms; the theory would clearly involve ideas of information, control,
and feedback. Of all things, it had been consideration of the guided (“purposeful”) an-
tiaircraft projectiles which had brought home to Wiener and Bigelow the similarity of
organisms and machines.
By 1943, von Neumann’s and Wiener’s thoughts on the utility of studying machines
and organisms together, thoughts made cogent by their wartime work, had dovetailed
sufficiently to consider making common cause, and they were in communication with
each other. By 1945, with the war drawing to a close, they were setting up plans to imple-
ment their ideas. They organized a small study group which included neurophysiologists,
mathematicians, and engineers.” In particular, Wiener and von Neumann visited each
other frequently to engage in lengthy talks about the scientific and technical possibilities.
144 STEVE P. HElMS

On the practical level, they discussed and took steps to arrange with MIT an inter-
disciplinary research center, which would provide a home for their joint undertaking and
for the related engineering and physiology.’* When von Neumann’s employer, the
Princeton Institute of Advanced Study, finally agreed to let von Neumann build a
prototype computer there, von Neumann decided to stay on in Princeton.la Conse-
quently, the “joint center” never materialized, but the MIT offer, resulting from the
idea, had helped to persuade Princeton.“ Wiener meanwhile helped to arrange to bring
some neurophysiological research to MIT.16 In particular, he arranged for himself to
work together with physiologist Rosenblueth (at MIT and Mexico City) on concrete
studies of nerve conduction, excitations in cardiac muscle, and the neuromuscular os-
cillations known as “clonus.”
Although an Englishman, Gregory Bateson, mostly known as a cultural
anthropologist at that time, had been working for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services in
India, China, and Ceylon, during the war. His interests, it would seem, were at the op-
posite end of the scientific spectrum from those of “hard scientists” von Neumann and
Wiener. Bateson was not satisfied with his interpretations of his own social
anthropological fieldwork;18 the theoretical concepts he had introduced seemed ad hoc
and awkward. He understood, for example, that the transvestite Naven ceremony served
to prevent “symmetrical schismogenesis,” as he called it, in the Iatmul culture, but he
sought a general or abstract theoretical context into which to place this type of
phenomenon. To give another example, he had related the differences among appercep-
tive habits, characteristic of various cultures, to the various types of learning contexts, as
they had been enumerated by experimental psychologist^;^^ by using a relatively abstract
vocabulary to describe laboratory experiments on learning, Bateson was able to, in some
degree, make the desired connection between learning and cultural differences. But was
there, still, a more general context into which to place these concepts?
Before he left the U.S. for his wartime activity, Bateson attended a conference on
hypnosis;18 at that conference, he had heard a verbal report on the contents of an un-
published Rosenblueth-Wiener-Bigelow article. Bateson was immediately excited, and
anticipated that these ideas were sufficiently deep and sufficiently general, so that out of
them might come a vocabulary suitable for a conceptual framework for the behavioral
sciences. Others shared his enthu~iasm.’~

THECONFERENCE
By March 1946, and with the end of the war, as scientists were leaving their mission-
oriented research, they were looking for the opportunity to carry out ideas that had been
left unexplored, or were seeking new research projects. It was a time for new beginnings,
with a certain hope for scientific solutions to all kinds of problems; it was also a time at
which money was becoming increasingly available for civiliar. science. In the U.S., the
prestige of science had never been higher. The time was ripe for an interdisciplinary con-
ference. Although it was primarily devoted to medical research, the Macy Foundation
was persuaded to sponsor a small conference on “Teleological Mechanisms,” in the con-
viction that the conference could be a useful meeting ground for representatives of the
most diverse scientific disciplines. In March 1946, the conference took place at the
Beekman Hotel in New York City; John von Neumann (age forty-three), Norbert
Wiener (age fifty-two), and Gregory Bateson (age forty) were among the conferees, By
that time, Bateson had at least some knowledge of the von Neumann-Morgenstern work
 GREGORY BATESON A N D THE MATHEMATICIANS 145

and was hoping to find new conceptual tools in that theory, as well as in the Wiener-
Rosenblueth-Bigelow ideas. Incidentally, four bona fide psychologists20were among the
twenty-three conferees: Mollie Harrower, Heinrich Kluever, Kurt Lewin, and Donald
Marquis, as well as the psychoanalyst, Lawrence Kubie.*’
When Bateson’s turn came, he spoke on the requirements of an adequate theoretical
structure for the social sciences, and discussed learning theory and difficulties in describ-
ing mechanisms for stability in cultures. His purpose or reason for participating at the
meeting lay in his search for new concepts and abstract formulations which social and
behavioral scientists might borrow from the mathematicians and communication
engineers. On these two days of the conference Bateson witnessed expositions, by Wiener
and von Neumann, of a whole collection of concepts originating in mathematics and
engineering, on which he would draw heavily thenceforth: the difference between
“analogical” and “digital” processes, coding, circuits, servomechanisms, positive and
negative feedback, time series, measure of information and its relation to entropy, binary
systems, Russell’s Theory of Logical Types, “pathological” oscillations induced in a
computer confronted with a Russellian paradox, the idea that the crucial concept to use
in understanding communication systems is “information” and not “energy,” etc. As to
this last idea, Wiener had mentioned it in commenting on a psychoanalytic description of
neurosis by Lawrence Kubie in which concepts such as “libido,” “energy to be released,”
and “psychic tension” had been employed. Bateson was also exposed to a presentation by
von Neumann of the simpler portions of his Theory of Games.2z During these two days,
in effect, Bateson was presented with a set of tools; he would make it his task to under-
stand them as precisely as he could without mathematics, to examine them to see which
of them would be useful to him for theory construction in the behavioral sciences, and he
would learn to use them.
In order to test the correctness of his own understanding of the collection of con-
cepts, Bateson sought to try out his own interpretations of the formal concepts with the
mathematicians. While his personal relations with von Neumann were pleasant, he ap-
parently had difficulty following von Neumann’s presentations. Von Neumann spoke
rapidly; at the “cybernetics meeting he was pouring all the stuff out and punching with
both fists, you know,” Bateson told me?’ Von Neumann was usually precise, carrying
out arguments rapidly, in a strictly logical, step-by-step sequence. Beyond that, while
both von Neumann and Bateson sought, as scientists, to describe “order” in events and
generality, the kinds of order they sought were very different. Von Neumann was com-
mitted to theories which were free of contradiction and rigorously expressible in terms of
formal logics or mathematics. He had little sympathy for the conceptual, verbal descrip-
tions which satisfied Bateson. The challenge presented at that March meeting, which
stimulated von Neumann, would have made abstract formalism concrete. It was posed
by Heinrich Kleuver: to explain in terms of formal-logical theory (i.e., a mechanical
model involving coding and transfer of information and mechanisms of control) how the
brain perceives visual form. Von Neumann would repeatedly come back to this concrete
instance, wondering what new and interesting kinds of logic would have to be invented to
obtain agreement with the, as yet, insufficient empirical knowledge from experimental
neurophysiology or experimental psychology, in this problem of “visual analogy,” as he
called it?‘ It was evident to him that all known logics were far from adequate for dealing
with Kluever’s challenge.
Von Neumann’s participation at the conferences was consonant with his conscious
purposes on two levels. Von Neumann was devoted to advancing progress in the high
146 STEVE P. HEIMS

technology of computers; he was forever looking for innovations in computer

technology, even if it made his own previous computer design obsolete.26Discussions of
the nervous system and behavior of organisms might stimulate innovations for computer
design, (i.e., nature’s means of organization, control, and communication would be
suggestive). On March 8 von Neumann had led off the conference with a description of
the organization and the patterns of communication and control in the most advanced
computers, then only in the design stage. There was a second purpose, which arose from
von Neumann’s conviction that the glue that holds together all the sciences is formal
logics, including mathematics.le His scientific objective, then, was to work out the logics
for the patterns of organization of functional simulacra of organisms. While he was ever
conscious of the desideratum of ultimately describing the logics of the organization of the
human brain, he proceeded in his automata theory to deal with specific, formally
manageable functional simulacra with particular properties. The conferences put him in
touch with empirics concerning organisms, enabling him to assess the extent to which
and the respects in which computers and his formal logical automata failed to correspond
to the human brain.
Von Neumann’s pleasure, passion, and power lay just in his ability to give rigorous
mathematical-logical form to everything that came his way. Elements of competitiveness
and aggressiveness in modern society he contained within a strictly axiomatic theory of
games, in which all definitions are reduced to operational ones. It was not so important
to von Neumann that the theory lacked an empirical basis. Von Neumann was relatively
little interested in conceptual issues or philosophical issues, which could only be ex-
pressed in necessarily ambiguous verbal forms and not in the form of logics. I think that,
for von Neumann, as for others before him, only the strictly logical form transcended
ambiguity, transcended fashion, transcended time, and transcended death; and that
mattered to him.
Bateson understood relatively little mathematics; his interest was in the concepts
from logical and mathematical theories which he could use, as metaphors or in an
heuristic way, to formulate conceptual schemes in the behavioral and social sciences. His
tool was and is the English language, and he tried to achieve clarity and precision in its
use, as far as was possible, but never mathematical rigor. He was not willing to restrict
his attention to topics amenable to rigorous logic, but, instead, chose topics that
mattered to him: human communications, insanity, play, etc. He respected empirics,
himself being a conscientious and careful observer of nature, of people. With such
differences in scientific outlook, it is not surprising that Bateson did not use von
Neumann as his mentor or his sounding board.
Wiener and Bateson had far more common ground. Wiener, already in his fifties,
had made his mark in mathematics, despite his simultaneous serious interests in biology,
philosophy, and high technology. With his collaborators, he had begun to cultivate
mathematical biology, relating the two disciplines. There he could show that the
mathematical description of experimental clonus in the cat was identical with the
mathematics of certain servomechanisms; or that the mathematical techniques useful for
analyzing time series in communication systems, were also fruitful in analyzing elec-
troencepholograms. But Wiener was looking for a broader synthesis; he lamented that
“since Leibnitz there has perhaps been no man who has had a full command of all the in-
tellectual activity of his day.”l’ Wiener, himself, was inclined to connect everything to
everything else in conversation. He used the Macy Group as an audience for the wide
 GREGORY BATESON AND THE MATHEMATICIANS 147

range of his thinking, seeking criticism, assurance, and new information. His own rather
untidy comprehensiveness can be seen in his Cybernetics; there are precise mathematical
statements and descriptions, but he does not hesitate to extend the ideas contained in the
theorems to a broader class of circumstances. Essentially, Wiener used the physics,
mathematics, and communication engineering as a source of metaphor; he easily glides
from the mathematical to the philosophical or literary mode. His consideration of
cybernetic machines, sophisticated robots created by man, leads him to passionate reflec-
tions on ethics and politics.
Some of his colleagues found this mixture highly disconcerting. But like Bateson,
Wiener used metaphors from the mathematical sciences to devise conceptual schemes for
behavior?* He was convinced that the world is far too rich and complex to ever be con-
tained by formal logic.PeHe loved language, and appreciated Bateson’s knowledge of and
sensitivity to the nature of human communications. His expository style, unsystematic
and intuitive, was also congenial to Bateson. Morever, they shared a sense that
everything is connected to everything else, and that, on an abstract or philosophical level,
such connections can be manifested. So it happened that Bateson made Wiener his chief
sounding board and mentor in the concepts and vocabulary of computers, communica-
tion theory, and formal logic. Wiener and Bateson communicated, not only at subse-
quent conferences of the series sponsored by the Macy Foundation, but through letters
and visits.

-
BATESON WIENERDIALOGUE
(1) On various occasions,” Bateson urged Wiener to apply his mathematical power,
and especially his prediction theory, to the social sciences, but Wiener demurred. He
viewed himself more as a humanist than as a social scientist. While, at one point, he con-
sidered the possibility of using his prediction theory to analyze data on voting behavior,81
he soon concluded that generally statistical runs in the social sciences are too short, and
that the social scientist interacts too strongly with his subject to be a sufficiently good
probe to warrant the application of precise measurement or mathematical p r e d i c t i ~ n . ~ ~
According to Wiener, “There is much which we must leave, whether we like it or not, to
the un-‘scientific,’ narrative method of the professional historian.”
(2) But how about the von Neumann theory of games? As a mathematician, Wiener
admired von Neumann’s elegant mathematical theory. Moreover, he saw it as applicable
to the market economy, even though it contained the abstraction of “perfectly intelligent,
perfectly ruthless players.” In 1947, Wiener saw the solutions of game theory as describ-
ing “a welter of betrayal, turncoatism and deception, which is only too true a picture of
the higher business life, or the closely related lives of politics, diplomacy and war. . . .
There is no homeostasis whatever.”8a Wiener admired game theory, but objected to the
morality of the players. Nevertheless, in his view, it was appropriate to attribute such a
morality or immorality to the power elite.
Bateson incorporated the ideas of von Neumann’s game theory into his intellectual
repertoire rapidly; in the 1940s, when writing about Balinese and Iatmul culture, he used
the assumptions of game theory as a well-defined model, for the sake of comparing and
contrasting the actual human culture^.^' While, in his later writings, game theory no
longer plays a significant role, the process of increasingly recognizing its irrelevance and
even its harmfulness as a “self-validating hypothesis’’ was tested out in conversations and
correspondence with Wiener. In 1952, Bateson wrote to Wiener concerning his own
148 STEVE P. HEIMS

analysis of the social relevance of game theory. He was troubled by military planners’ use
of game theory:*O
What applications of the theory of games do, is to reinforce the players’ acceptance
of the rules and competitive premises, and therefore make it more and more difficult
for the players to conceive that there might be other ways of meeting and dealing
with each other. . . . The theory may be “static” within itself, but its use propagates
changes, and I suspect that the long term changes so propagated are in a paranoidal
direction and odious. I am thinking not only of the propagation of the premises of
distrust which are built into the von Neumann model ex hypothesi, but also of the
more abstract premise that human nature is unchangeable. This premise. . . is the
reflection or corollary of the fact that the original theory was set up only to describe
the games in which the rules are unchanging and the psychological characters of the
players are fixed ex hypothesi. I know as an anthropologist that the “rules” of the
cultural game are not constant; that the psychology of the players is not fixed; and
even that the psychology can be at times out of step with the rules.
He adds, incidentally, that “Von Neumann’s ‘players’ differ profoundly from people and
mammals in that those robots totally lack humor and are totally unable to ‘play’ (in the
sense in which the word is applied to kittens and puppies).” Bateson urged Wiener to
take an active interest in a critique of game theory, as only one versed in mathematics
could do authoritatively. In 1948, Wiener still spoke of designing a mechanical chess
player in terms of game theory,s6 but in the second edition of his The Human Use of
Human Beings (1954), Wiener, in a discursive style, points to the inapplicability of game
theory to an automated chess player, and expresses alarm over the application of game-
theoretical thinking to the formulation of military strategy in the Cold War. Finally, in
1959, in a lecture to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Wiener
gave a clear analysis of the shortcomings of the game-theoretical approach in various
practical, and especially nuclear strategy, application^.^^ His comment was consonant
with Bateson’s comment in the 1952 letter. Bateson,S8and Wiener too, regarded the von
Neumann game player as a prototype, by definition incapable of protolearning, mis-
guided and limited by his rigidity.
The poignancy of the discussion of game theory in the early 1950s can only be ap-
preciated if one takes cognizance of the fact that it was at the height of the Cold War.
Bateson’s relative optimism concerning the changeability of the psychological character
of people was characteristic of the period. As Bateson had a strong dislike of the use of
the social sciences for the purpose of manipulating people, he did not participate in such
active programs as the World Mental Health Movement. On the other hand, John von
Neumann was one of the most vigorous and unmitigated Cold Warriors in the scientific
community. He also tended to interpret international conflict in game-theoretical
terms.s8 In discussion with colleagues, von Neumann would mingle his knowledge of
military history with game-theoretic reasoning to support his militant, cold warrior view-
point.40 In any case, the military-political strategists at that time were conversant with
game theory,” but not with Bateson’s criticisms of its premises; and Wiener was hardly
on speaking terms with them. Game-theoretic arguments lent support to policies of
deterrence by threat of massive retaliation with nuclear weapons and to the nuclear
weapons race. Governments, dealing with plans and actions, are more interested in tools
for developing and implementing strategies than they are in examining the basic premises
underlying them. When, more recently, one military-political strategist, imbued with
game-theoretic thinking, indeed did examine his own value premises critically, and acted
on his insights, political history was made. I am referring to Daniel Ell~berg.~’
 GREGORY BATESON AND THE MATHEMATICIANS 149

(3) An entirely different theme had to do with Wiener’s comment, at the March
1946 meeting, on information and communication in connection with psychoanalysis.
Bateson was interested in the task of transferring the concepts of communication
engineering and cybernetics to psychiatry (viz., psychotherapy and psychoanalysis); he
had perceived within psychiatry a shift towards emphasis on interaction and communica-
tion, as well. He talked about it with Wiener at the March 1946 meeting, and on subse-
quent occasions in 1946 and 1947.
Wiener’s 8 March 1946 remark in connection with psychoanalysis indicated the
direction of his thinking. It appears from a talk he gave in November 194648and from his
book completed a year later,44that his general ideas on the subject became somewhat
elaborated during that year and a half. There is no way of determining the role that con-
versations with Bateson may have played. In 1947, Wiener conjectured that, just as in the
malfunctioning of a computer, the physical basis of so-called “functional disorders” may
have to do with “instructions,” “messages,” “programs,” and “memory.” Conse-
quently, the techniques of the psychoanalyst are “perfectly consistent” with the point of
view of cybernetics.“ The standpoint is that a fully materialistic explanation of func-
tional and organic disorders would in principle be possible if the concepts of “message,”
etc., were included in the explanation.
Since the 1930s Wiener had interpreted Leibnitz’s monads, usually seen as ideal es-
sences, in informational-material He now envisaged that id, unconscious,
archetype, etc., might also be amenable to an informational-material interpretation. As
Bateson saw it, the ideas of cybernetics resolved the ancient problem of body-mind
dichotomy:’ permitting a description of “mind” as imminent in systems, rather than
transcendent. He took on the task, working with psychiatrist Juergen Ruesch, and com-
bining his sophisticated understanding of interpersonal communication with the new
ideas and vocabulary learned from Wiener and others of the Macy Group, to put psy-
chiatric practice in the context of a theoretical description of human communication.
Wiener and Bateson shared an attitude, often frowned upon by scientists, yet central
to the two men’s mutual rapport. Wiener was familiar with some exact theorems of
physics, of communication engineering, and of formal logics, as well as the principles of
the operation of computers and goal-seeking devices. He translated these exact
statements into relatively loose, verbal, formal statements, and on the basis of intuitively
seeing their possible applicability elsewhere, suggested they might be far more generally
applicable in a heuristic way than only in the narrow area where they turn into exact
statements.
It was Wiener’s belief that these ideas could provide a unified view of the sciences,
even though, as general principles, they lacked the precision of mathematical com-
munication theory. Wiener had always been conscious of the limitations and paradoxes
of formal logics, the ubiquity of randomness, the necessity of incompleteness of
kn~wledge.‘~ Cybernetic ideas had to incorporate incompleteness and paradox; it was not
a well-defined closed system. Wiener had a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary knowledge of
empirics, but as a scientist he appreciated that “as a rule ‘high’ order, very abstract and
general statements, are not amenable to experimental test. They have to be broken down
into more specific terms. . . .”4e To explore whether general cybernetic ideas were consis-
tent with, and perhaps even fruitful in, psychiatry and psychology would require far more
work by scientists familiar with the fields in question. The unusual premise that Bateson
and Wiener shared, is that, notwithstanding untestability and some vagueness, general
150 STEVE P. HEIMS

cross-disciplinary principles are interesting. It is a legitimate human endeavor to under-

stand the world about us in more than a piecemeal, “departmentalized” way. But, then,
one must accept some paradoxes, some incompleteness, some tentativeness, some
vagueness in the bargain. In fact, the general statements are verbal and conceptual,
rather than mathematical. Such a movement from concrete science towards more
general and philosophical discussion, is, in a sense, a retreat from the concrete and
verifiable, but it is often a productive, strategic retreat.
It was in this spirit that Bateson wrote his book with Ruesch. Wiener liked the book,
and spoke of Bateson’s “valiant work in attempting to bring psychoanalytic processes
under the heading of cybernetics.” But he noted that this work “is and must be sketchy,”
because, in psychology, the elementary processes themselves are only incompletely
known.6oThe book appeared in 1951, when cybernetics was in its heyday. Many scien-
tists who did not appreciate the kind of theory cybernetics is had undue expectations
from it, and took it too literally.61
What we see in Bateson and Wiener is the human desire to describe the world and
ourselves in some comprehensive, holistic way, and yet to function as scientists. The long
era of narrow specialization as the sine qua non of science had made such efforts at
generality disreputable, and the impulse for universality among scientists was often
ridiculed and had become largely muted.
(4) As a final example of Bateson-Wiener interaction, I consider the genesis of
Bateson’s theory of play and fantasy and, in particular, that of the double-bind in
schizophrenia. In the 8-9 March 1946 meeting, Wiener had described a computer’s 0s-
cillatory response to being presented with a Russellian paradox: the computer replies
yes-no-yes-no-yes-no . . . etc. Wiener had been a student of Russell and was well-
acquainted with the Russell-Whitehead theories. Bateson had spoken of “learning about
learning” at that same conference and had opposed it to simple “learning.” It was ap-
parent that learning about learning could lead to something analogous to a Russellian
paradox (e.g., if one learns that whatever one learns is nonsense, one has a paradoxical
bit of knowledge).
Over the years, Bateson developed his theories of play, humor, fantasy, and
schizophrenia, in all of which the concept of such a paradox was central. Moreover, in
California, Bateson encountered his fellow expatriate Englishman, Alan Watts, who was
a prolific author of books about Zen Buddhism. Bateson and Watts discussed at length
the Zen counterpart of occidental psychotherapy, in which the Koan, a paradox to be
resolved, plays a central Typically for Bateson, he was drawing his ideas from a
mathematician, on the one hand, and from a student of oriental mysticism, on the other.
Bateson sought these ideas, specifically, to help understand schizophrenia, but Bateson
respected the mystic’s approach to life as much as the scientist’s, and was finding connec-
tions between them. Again, Wiener was the sounding board for his ideas. As early as
1952 Bateson wrote to Wiener, suggesting that he suppose a computer6*
were to suffer from a defect - say an idkefixe, a rooted memory or an erroneous
over-specialization . . . is it not conceivable that to pose a paradox to the machines
might be therapeutic?. . . All this leads to the possibility that the psychotherapist,
dealing with a human patient might be able to improve his methods . . . he might be
able to select that category of paradoxes which would in fact exercise the particular
part which is stuck in the particular patient, always supposing that diagnosis would
be good enough. But it also leads to a more difficult problem. Suppose the stuck
part to be such that paradox is generated in the machine, even when non-
 GREGORY BATESON AND THE MATHEMATICIANS 151

paradoxical problems are presented, what sort of psychotherapy would you ad-
minister? (This actually seems to be a rather common type of pathology - and in-
cidentally, is a pathology which might be generated by the type of therapy suggested
above.)
This letter to Wiener reveals some of the thinking and questioning that lay behind the
well-known, double-bind hypothesis given a definite form four years later. What is
remarkable in his letter is that it shows Bateson seeking clues for psychotherapy from
Wiener’s thoughts about computers. Some years later, Bateson recalleds4 that in a con-
versation Wiener had suggested that a
telephone exchange could be called “schizophrenic ”in a formal sense if it mistook
numbers mentioned in the conversation between subscribers for those numbers
which are the names of subscribers. The double-bind idea was born out of the ques-
tion “how would one teach a telephone exchange to make this error?”
Once Bateson had formulated the double-bind idea, he immediately wrote to Wiener for
confirmation of his own understanding of the logic involved. Of course, while in formal
logical reasoning the Russellian paradoxes are to be avoided, Bateson came to the con-
clusion that, in ordinary communication, analogs to the logical paradoxes make changes
of habits, make humor, and make much else possible.

INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXTS
So far we have depicted something of the role of the Bateson-Wiener interchanges,
especially in Bateson’s theory construction. Of course, Bateson had special opportunities
to talk with Wiener because of their joint participation in the small conferences of which
the March 1946 meeting was only the first. However, the ideas of cybernetics were far
from exclusive. Wiener and von Neumann, especially in late 1945 when they were plan-
ning to estabiish a center, were actively propagandizing their ideas. After that March
1946 meeting, Bateson himself organized a meeting of “social scientists” to talk with
Wiener and von Neumann, a meeting held in September of that year.ss Lawrence K.
Frank, the director of the Caroline Zachary Institute of Human Development, and
former vice-president of the Macy Foundation, was enthusiastic about Wiener’s ideas,
just as Bateson was, and organized a larger conference for that October, under auspices
of the New York Academy of Sciences; Frank saw himself as “actively participating in
creating this new climate of opinion,’’66by propagating the new ideas presented at the 8
March meeting. Moreover, at the same time Bertalanffy was publishing his “general
system theory,” Shannon and Gabor published their information theories, so that some
psychologists came to seek general principles for the behavioral sciences in some of the
same group of ideas, but arrived there through very different routes than Bateson had,
and had different attitudes towards them.s7 After Wiener’s best selling book Cybernetics
appeared in 1948, the subject matter suffered, if anything, from too much uncritical
attention.
One social institution which had played a central role in the first meeting and in sub-
sequent conversations between Bateson and Wiener, obviously, was that of the small, in-
terdisciplinary conference. We have not, so far, commented on Bateson’s, Wiener’s, and
von Neumann’s working conditions in their day-to-day research or on other contexts im-
pinging on them.
Since 1933, von Neumann had been a highly respected, tenured member of
the Princeton Institute of Advanced Study. In 1946, von Neumann’s successful effort to
152 STEVE P. HEIMS

bring engineers and large government contracts to build a computer in this place of quiet
and esoteric scholarship was greeted by many of the scholars as the intrusion of the un-
welcome machine into the garden.s* His primary source of funds for the advanced
prototype computer was the government; in particular, the military services. While, at
the end of World War 11, most scientists had abandoned weapons research, von
Neumann became increasingly active in it. In 1946 and 1947 he divided his time between
the computer project at Princeton and the hydrogen bomb research in Los Alamos, to
which he brought the most advanced computer technology available. At Los Alamos he
worked with physicists; at Princeton, primarily with the engineers and mathematicians
he had hired, Through the Macy Conferences, von Neumann was periodically in touch
with physiologists, and could interchange ideas and knowledge concerning the analogies
between brains and computers. In the late 1940s he also began some highly original
work, initiating the work in formal logic known as “automata theory.” In the ensuing
few years, however, von Neumann devoted an increasing portion of his time and energy
to participation on high-level government committees concerned with weapons develop-
ment. With nuclear weapons and missiles, as with computers, he favored the fastest
possible rate of technical i n n o v a t i ~ n He
. ~ ~was a strong proponent of and effective con-
tributor to “winning” the nuclear armament race, and he prized, greatly, the medals and
government honors which he received for his services.6oWith these outside interests, he
spent less and less time at his home base in Princeton, and found fewer opportunities for
long talks with Wiener.
Wiener was the resident genius and the pride of MIT. Nonetheless, his salary was a
modest $9,600 for the year 1946-1947. He states in his autobiography that in 1947, when
he wrote Cybernetics, he was hoping to write himself out of a financial hole. Interper-
sonally, Wiener was regarded as “difficult” by many, but, nonetheless, he was well loved
and much at home at MIT. He worked with neurophysiologist Rosenblueth of Mexico
City, each spending half-time in the other’s location; he also associated closely with
philosopher Giorgio de Santillana and had the gifted, albeit eccentric, young
collaborator, Walter Pitts. The political aftermath of World War I1 affected him as
strongly as it did von Neumann, but in the opposite direction. As early as 1946, he
precipitously decided to cooperate no longer with the military; his public statement to
that effect?’ in the Atlantic Monthly, generated a strain in his relations with some
colleagues. Several times, he was on the verge of abandoning science altogether.6a One
scientific area that he put his mind to, however, assuaged his conscience: to create
prosthetic devices for the deaf, which would allow sounds to be transformed into tactile
sensations; and prosthetic limbs for amputees, in which the action potential of muscles in
the limb stump is utilized for activating the artificial limbs. To implement these, he had
to expand his knowledge of sensory physiology.egThe way he established the program in
prosthesis at MIT ensured that any patents that might emerge would be in the public do-
main, and manufacture would be in good nonexploitive hands.
Through his ideas, active interest, and prestige, Wiener generated outside interest,
as well as financial support, for work in prosthesis, and his political action made it easier
for other scientists to take an antimilitary stand. On the other hand, von Neumann’s
prestige and leadership helped bring intellectual respectability to the study of military
strategy, to working with computers, and to high-level governmental technical advising.
Wiener and von Neumann both deliberately implemented the political or humanitarian
purposes in which they believed, by making use of their technical abilities.
 GREGORY BATESON AND THE MATHEMATICIANS 153

In 1946, Bateson had no regular institutional affiliation. His work had been in
several disciplines, yet he was not strongly identified with any one. For one year, he held
a visiting professorship at the New School for Social Research; he spent another year at
Harvard. Then he went west, where he worked as a research associate in the department
of psychiatry at the University of California Medical School for a year, collaborating
with Ruesch. After that, he began his relatively long association with the Veteran’s Ad-
ministration.Hospita1 in Palo Alto, California, with some lecturing at Stanford Univer-
sity. Bateson did not become a regular, tenured faculty member at Stanford-University,
any more than he had at Harvard. His associates were not primarily academics; instead,
he cavorted with schizophrenics, alcoholics, mystics, poets, and otters at the zoo. He
liked his title at the V.A. hospital, viz., “ethnologist.” There, he gathered a group of co-
workers, in particular Jay Haley, Don Jackson, and John Weakland. To perform the
research on communication, they survived on research grants, which Bateson was able to
obtain from the Rockefeller and Macy Foundations. Bateson reports that, once, between
grants “my team loyally stayed with me without pay.”” Although Bateson had a wide
circle of personal acquaintances, and although the level of scientific funding was
generally high in the postwar period, Bateson had to contend with a lack of finances. One
context of Bateson’s work, then, was periodic uncertainty concerning the future, a
greater measure of insecurity than either Wiener or von Neumann had to contend with.
The political issues of the Cold War became grist for Bateson’s theoretical thinking, but
did not shift the direction of his work, as they did Wiener’s and von Neumann’s. Bateson
was, in a sense, apolitical.
In his style, Bateson was skeptical of conventional psychiatric attitudes and ex-
perimented with radically different ones. Towards his patients labeled “schizophrenic,”
he was likely to act as a friend, interested in their language; with some, he would drink
beer or play golf. As early as 1949, Bateson and his collaborators thought that family
therapy would, in some cases, be more appropriate than individual therapy.e6Somewhat
later, Bateson raised the question whether a schizophrenic episode might not be regarded
as akin to a spontaneous initiation ceremony, rather than to an “illness,”B6thus calling
into question conventional ideas of psychosis. In all this, Bateson was not a psychiatrist
or clinical psychologist; he was merely a researcher in human and animal com-
munications.
EMERGING SOCIETAL FUNCTION
As one reflects about the interaction of the three men at the 1946 interdisciplinary
conference, it becomes apparent that each, in his own way, wanted to expand his
horizons or his range of activities, to give a fuller range to his personality. Concurrent
with the expansion of their intellectual horizons through the interdisciplinary interac-
tions, was the emergence for each one of a social function as a scientist, an explicit or im-
plicit personal choice, reflecting and defining who they were; their emerging societal
function gave each a place in history. Their interests, goals, and interactions in March
1946, together with the institutional contexts in which their activities were then taking
place, already strongly suggest the direction in which each of their functions in society
would lie. One wonders whether the hydrogen bomb development and the committees in
Washington would have interested von Neumann less, if he had been able to build his
computer without creating the hostility and discord that disturbed him at Princeton, and
if he had had congenial sensory physiologists and geneticists among his immediate
colleagues.
154 STEVE P. HElMS

During the war, at Los Alamos, von Neumann, a jolly, friendly man, had been
regarded as a paragon of equanimity and sober, rational judgment.67In the 1940s he was,
perhaps, the major contributor to the technological advancements in the modern com-
puter. Aside from his technical contribution and innovation, he became an effective
political proponent of the support of a rapid rate of innovation in spawning new
generations of computers.88 Bigger and better computers were needed for the design of
thermonuclear bombs. Von Neumann, again, was not only a technical contributor, but
an active proponent of an accelerated rate of innovation in weapons production. He sat
on the highest-level government committees dealing with weapons and personally con-
ferred with President Eisenhower to urge him to give top priority to the development of
intercontinental nuclear missiles, and he helped, actively, to make this priority effective.
Finally, he became an Atomic Energy Commissioner and moved from Princeton to
Washington D.C. for his full-time government activity. Eventually all the military chiefs
of staff, the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and the Secretaries of
Defense, and of the Army, Navy, and Air Force would come to depend on his quick mind
and his unequalled clear, logical, instrumental thinking.68 Around 1950, he was
reportedly advocating a first strike (i.e., immediately bombing the Soviet Union) as a
rational act to prevent future thermonuclear wars.7oClearly, this is the kind of thinking
to which Bateson had referred, in his informal comment on game theory, as paranoid. To
say the least, the thinking of the more zealous cold warriors of that period, which in-
cluded the willingness to inflict death and enormous suffering on a large number of peo-
ple, suggests the actualizing of fantasies which probably reflected fears, angers, and con-
flicts on a more personal level.
The debate among historians as to the proper interpretation of the cold warriors
continues, and what one historian sees as a drive for aggrandizement and collective
paranoia, another views (as did von Neumann, himself) as hard-boiled realism, and a
third, perhaps, as both. But however one interprets them, John von Neumann’s powerful,
logical thinking was increasingly in the service of “that.” As far as I know, there is no in-
compatibility between paranoid premises and the implementation of their consequences
by clear logic.
What then is von Neumann’s historic role, beyond his significant role in the internal
history of mathematics and science? In a certain kind of popular history, his role would
be identified in terms of his innovations in computer development, but this is a mis-
understanding of technological change. For here, as is typical of technical change,71
numerous patent suits testify72 to the near simultaneity of similar innovations by
different research groups. Von Neumann’s role is more correctly characterized as
speeding the rate of advancement of the technology; more reliable and faster computers
were available sooner because of him. The same could be said concerning his role in
weapons development and the armament race. What is different in the case of weapons
development is that the speed with which the weapons development took place precluded
the option that the more slowly changing political conditions could obviate these
developments. Von Neumann as technologist, as a high-level, superbly capable expert in
government, is an early prototype of what D. Bell has characterized as a central figure in
postindustrial Through the respect in which he was and is widely held, es-
pecially on account of his brilliance and competence, he has helped to give status - es-
pecially among scientific intellectuals - to a particular kind of role in our technocratic
society.
 GREGORY BATESON AND THE MATHEMATICIANS 155

Bateson’s societal identity lay in a different direction. The seeds of it are found in his
nonidentification with the academies, even though he was a serious intellectual and
behavioral scientist. It is also foreshadowed in his sympathetic interest in mysticism (Zen
Buddhism), and in his respect for Blake’s approach to truth as on a par with that of
Darwin or N e ~ t o n . ~His
‘ fascination with metascience and metapsychiatry, combined
with his experience in anthropology, led this, in many respects conservative, individual to
radical critiques of our cultural assumptions. Thus, his radical suggestions concerning
the nature of psychotic processes contained an implicit criticism of much of psychiatric
practi~e.’~ By asserting the legitimacy, as a “motive for scientific inquiry,” of “the desire
to build a comprehensive view of the universe which should show what Man is and how
he is related to the rest of the universe,” a view of the universe which was ethical and
aesthetic, he was sharply at odds with the conventional view of the scientific e n t e r p r i ~ e . ~ ~
The counterculture, emerging in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, expressed a
strong disaffection from the conventional Occidental cultural premises and was seeking
alternatives;” it was prone to rejecting science altogether. A countercultural movement
within psychiatry, especially the group associated with R.D. Laing, enthusiastically took
up Bateson’s tentative suggestions concerning the nature of schizophrenic The
younger generation of the widespread, popular countercultural movement slowly dis-
covered Bateson, the man who found aspiration for holistic understanding to be compati-
ble with science; who asserted that clear thinking, theoretical formulations, and detailed
observations are means rather than hindrances to holistic understanding; who dis-
associated himself from the conventional cultural assumptions.
Bateson’s approach was also congenial to the later ecology movement; for whether
he talked of a New Guinea culture, or of the family interactions of a schizophrenic, or of
cybernetics, his emphasis had always been on ecological pattern^.?^ Bateson, himself,
turned towards the counterculture. He had befriended not only Alan Watts, but also
Alan Ginsberg and Paul Goodman - major counterculture figures. He tried LSD and
readily referred to his experience under the influence of the drug, the changed premises.
And when, in 1972, Bateson put together an anthology of his own work, entitled Steps to
an Ecology o f m i n d , a student wrote the preface. It states in part:
I believe that this is a very important book, not only for those who are professionally
concerned with the behavioral sciences, biology, and philosophy, but also and es-
pecially for those of my generation born since Hiroshima - who are searching for a
better understanding of themselves and their world. . . . This book is a sample of the
best thinking I’ve found. I commend it to you, my brothers and sisters of the new
culture, in the hope that it will help us on our journey.8o
If von Neumann’s new audiences were high-level government and military men, and
Bateson’s the members of the counterculture “searching for a better understanding of
themselves and their world,” then Wiener’s new audience came from various segments of
the general public. With his best selling books, Cybernetics and The Human Use of
Human Beings (1950), he had become a public figure, a speaker in great demand, usually
talking to overflow audiences. The mass media liked to quote particular passages from
the introduction to his Cybernetics, which had dramatic overtones, as, for example, the
assertion that, with computers and automation, we are “in the presence of another social
potentiality of unheard of importance for good and for evil.. . .” This was not mere
rhetoric, for Wiener had, indeed, taken a number of actions which indicate his genuine
concern about the misapplications of science and technology. He had publicly announced
156 STEVE P. HEIMS

his decision, which violated the scientific ethos, but served other values:81 “I do not ex-
pect to publish any future work of mine which may do damage in the hands of irresponsi-
ble militarists.” He had contacted and corresponded with Walter Reuther, the labor
leader,82who, in turn, gave publicity to Wiener’s thinking in the union journals. Wiener’s
research turned to prosthetic devices for the deaf and for amputees. The overall context
out of which these ethical decisions were derived, viz., his view of the relation of modern
man to his technological creations, is amply described in his books. His actions indicate
that he put humanitarian values above those of the scientific ethos. He did not become
part of any movement, but, after Wiener’s death, in the late 1960s during the Vietnam
War, the antiwar movement among scientists and technologists called upon Wiener’s
memory as a precedent to its actions. The high point of this movement occurred on 4
March 1969 when dissenting professors at MIT initiated a “work stoppage” and teach-in
to oppose research for destuctive military purposes and generally to oppose the misuse of
science and technology. The 4 March work stoppage and teach-in extended to thirty
other major universities and technical schools across the country.8aIt does not appear at
present that this movement resulted in a major reformation of science and technology,
but the consciousness of the issues involved at least has penetrated scientific and
technological practice. Wiener’s books were part of the literature of the movement. In
his own day, Wiener’s antimilitary conscience had been viewed with considerable an-
noyance by most of his scientific and mathematical colleague^.^'
Wiener’s humane reflections and moral decision was one part of his public role.
Another was his heralding, recognition, and interpretation of a new era: the era
dominated by the concerns and the technology of communication, control, information,
and organization. This recognition and interpretation of the present era was imbedded in
and supported by a rich texture of historic and philosophical insight and a wide-ranging
familiarity with contemporary science and high technology; morever, it was presented
with literary fluency, style, and passion. His public function had become not that of a
“mere” scientist, but that of an intellectual, an original thinker about the state of our
society and civilization, one who also had a first-hand acquaintance with science and
technology. Without that first-hand knowledge, he would not have been nearly so convin-
cing. At M I T he came to play the role of peripatetic interdisciplinary genius, wandering
from department to department, bending any willing listener’s ear with ideas, concerns,
and suggestions, which might deal with topics in mathematics, physics, biology,
engineering, psychology, or philosophy. Often, however, they dealt with humane and
human concerns.
FOOTNOTES
1. Among these were the University of Chicago, and the Research Laboratory for Electronics at MIT. In
both institutions, cross-disciplinary research dealing with topics now referred to as cybernetics, the subject of
the “Teleological Mechanism” conference, flourished.
2. From Mux Weber. trans. and ed. Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1946), p. 135. The essay was first published in German in 1919.
3. Altogether the series consisted of ten conferences, the last five of which were recorded and the
proceedings published. Transactions of the Conference on Cybernetics, 5 vols., ed., H. von Foerster, M.
Mead, and H . L. Teuber. The conference series is described in!ol. 9 of the Transactions; in Norbert Wiener’s
Cybernetics (New York: Wiley, 1948) and in Steve Heims, Encounter of Behavioral Sciences with New
Machine-Organism Analogies in the 1940s,” Journal of the History of the BehavioralSciences 11( 1975): 368-
373.
4. Two books in preparation.
5 . See Arthur W. Burks’s introduction to John von Neumann, Theory ofself-Reproducing Automata. ed.,
A.W. Burks (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966); and Herman H. Goldstine, The Computer from
Pmcal to Von Neumann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). For a different view see the review of
Goldstine’s book by Harry D. Huskey in Science 180(1973): 588-590.
 GREGORY BATESON AND THE MATHEMATICIANS 157

6. Warren S. McCulloch and Walter H. Pitts, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Ac-
tivity,” Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 5( 1943): 115-133.
7. The proceedings of the 1948 Hixon Sym osium are full of von Neumann’s comments, and questions
asked of physiologists and sychologists, a n l i n particular detailed and probing questions about vision.
Cerebral Mechanisms in BeEavior. ed., L. A. Jeffress (New York: Wiley, 1951).
8. Among the participants were A. Rosenblueth, S. S. Stevens, R.S. Morison, G. B. Wislocki, A. B.
Hastings, S. Vallarta, E. W. Dempsey, C. Lashley, M. Coffman, A. Grafflin, F. A. Simeone (based on
recollections of E.W.Dempsey and R. S. Morison).
9. Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow, “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology,”
Philosophy of Science lO(1943): 18-24.
10. Letter from Boring to Wiener, 13 November 1944.
I I . Participants were H. Aiken, L. E. Cunningham, W.E. Deming. H. H. Goldstine, R. Lorente de No. W.
S. McCulloch, Walter H. Pitts, E. H. Vestine and S. S. Wilks, aside from von Neumann and Wiener.
(Reference: Form letter of 12 January 1945 by von Neumann to all of them.)
12. Wiener-von Neumann correspondence, January to May 1945.
13. Herman H. Goldstine, op. cit., and Freeman Dyson, “The Future of Physics,” Physics Today 23(1970):
23-28.
14. George Harrison to von Neumann, 23 August 1945; von Neumann to Frank Aydelotte, 25 August 1945.
15. At first, A. Rosenblueth; later, also Warren McCulloch and Jerome Lettvin.
16. See e.g., Gregory Bateson, Naven (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1936), pp. 1-5.
17. Gregory Bateson, “Social Planning and the Concept of Deutero-Learning,” in G. Bateson, Steps to an
Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972). pp. 159-176.
18. Macy Conference on “Cerebral Inhibition,” New York City, 14-15 May 1942.
19. Besides his own and his wife’s (Margaret Mead) recollections, one could cite a letter from Mead to
McCulloch of 27 February 1945 and the “Note by the Editors” in vol. 9 of Trunsactions of the Conference on
Cybernetics. cited.
20. I am indebted to the late Frank Fremont-Smith for providing me with a list of participants.
21. Lawrence K. Frank, foundation executive and author of books on social psychology, also attended.
22. Summary of the conference, prepared by its chairman, Warren S. McCulloch.
23. 13 August 1968.
24. Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior, cited; John von Neumann, Computer and the Brain (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1958).
25. John von Neumann, Collected Works. ed., A. H . Taub (New York: Macmillan, 1963). 5: 238-247; H.
H. Goldstine, op. cit., pp. 331-332.
26. Biographical study in preparation.
27. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics. cited, p. 8.
28. Rosenblueth et al., loc cit.; Norbert Wiener and Arturo Rosenblueth, “The Role of Models in Science,”
Philosophy of Science 12(1945): 316-322; see also Cybernetics, cited; Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of
Human Beings, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950).
29. He took issue with Bertrand Russell and the British school of analytical philosophy. He welcomed
Goedel’s theorem, when it appeared, and saw in it confirmation of his intuitive view of the role of logics.
30. Cybernetics, op. cit., pp, 33-34; Bateson to Wiener 22 September 1952; summary of the first three
“Teleological Mechanism” meetings prepared by Warren McCulloch.
3 1. Summary of the second “Teleological Mechanisms” conference, cited.
32. Cybernetics. op. cit., p. 191.
33. Ibid., pp. 185-186.
34. Gregory Bateson, “Bali, the Value System of a Steady State,” in Steps fo an Ecology of Mind, op. cit.,
pp. 107-127.
35. 22 September 1952.
36. Cybernetics, op. cit.
37. Norbert Wiener, “Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation,” Science 131 (1960): 1355-
1358.
38. Juergen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson, Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (New York:
Norton, 1968), p. 21811; “Bali, The Value System of a Steady State,” loc. cit.; Gregory Bateson, “The
Message of Reinforcement” in Language Behavior: A Book of Readings in Communication, ed., J. Akin
(The Hague: Mouton, 1970). pp. 62-72.
39. Stainslaw M. Ulam notes this explicitly in his essay, “John von Neumann, 1903-1957,” Bulletin of the
American Mathematical Society 64(1958): 1-49 (see p. 6); see also e.g., I n the Matter of J . Robert
Oppenheimer: Transcript of Hearing Before Personnel Security Board and Text of Principal Documents and
Letters (Cambridge, Mass,: M I T Press, 1971), top of page 651, where von Neumann comments on Russia.
Incidentally, von Neumann defended his colleague, Oppenheimer, at the hearlng.
40. See e.g., S. Ulam, loc. cit., p. 6.
158 STEVE P . HEIMS

41. Philipp Green, Deadly Logic (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1966).
42. Actually, already in a Harvard thesis in economics (1952) Ellsberg studied game theory. He used game
theory in a heuristic way in his “Crude Analysis of Strategic Choices,” American Economics Review
51(1961): 472-478. His change of premises is described in an autobiographical passage of Daniel Ellsberg,
Papers on the War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), p. 28.
43. Norbert Wiener, “Time, Communication, and the Nervous System,” Annals of the New York
Academy of Sciences 50(1948): 197-220.
44. Cybernetics, op. cit., Chapter 7.
45. Ibid.
46. Norbert Wiener, “Quantum Mechanics, Haldane, and Leibniz,” Philosophy ofScience l(1934): 479-
482.
47. Juergen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson, loc. cit., p. 177. The viewpoint was expressed more sharply later
in Gregory Bateson’s “The Cybernetics of ‘Self‘: A Theory of Alcoholism,” Psychiatry 34(1971): 1-18.
48. This was a central theme in Wiener’s work, which pervades nearly all of his philosophical writings, as
well as much of his mathematics.
49. Norbert Wiener and Arturo Rosenblueth, “The Role of Models in Science,” Philosophy of Science
12(1945): 316-322.
50. Norbert Wiener to Lawrence K. Frank, 26 October 1951.
51. The general mood has been described by Yehoshua Bar-Hillel in Language and Information (Reading,
Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1964), p. 6: “This was also the time when Cybernetics and Information Theory
reached their common heydays and created among many of us the feeling that the new synthesis heralded in
them was destined to open new vistas on everything human and to help solve many of the disturbing open
problems concerning man and humanity.”
52. Alan Watts, In M y Own Way (New York: Random House, 1972), pp. 273, 332-334.
53. Gregory Bateson to Norbert Wiener, 22 September 1952.
54. Gregory Bateson to Steve Heims, 17 August 1970.
55. The conference on ‘Teleological Mechanisms in Society” was sponsored by the Macy Foundation, and
held on 20 September 1946 at the Beekman Hotel, New York City.
56. Lawrence K . Frank, “Foreword,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 50(1948): 189-196, p.
192.
57. George A. Miller and Frederick C. Frick, “Statistical Behavioristics and Sequences of Responses,”
Psychological Review 56(1949): 31 1-324; George A. Miller, Language and Communication (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 195 1); James G . Miller, “Toward a General Theory for the Behavioral Sciences,” American
Psychologist 10 (1955): 513-531; George A. Miller, Eugene H. Galanter, and Karl Pribram, Plans andStruc-
ture of Behavior (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960).
58. Freeman Dyson, loc. cit.
59. Some discussion of von Neumann’s governmental function is given in Herbert York, Race to Oblivion
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970). See also von Neumann’s public statements, “Defense in Atomic
War” and “Can We Survive Technology?” in John Von Neumann Collected Works, ed., A. H. Taub (New
York: Macmillan, 1963), 6: 523-525 and 504-519.
60. Numerous friends have commented on it. For example, Lewis Strauss, John von Neumann memorial
dinner remarks, 22 May 1971; Oskar Morgenstern’s comments in the film John Von Neumann, A. Novak,
producer (Providence, R.I.: American Mathematical Society, 1958).
61. Norbert Wiener, “A Scientist Rebels,” Atlantic Monthly 179 (1947): 46.
62. Draft of a letter of resignation from M I T by Norbert Wiener, 18 October 1945. The letter describes his
intention to withdraw from all scientific work. See also Dirk J. Struik, “Norbert Wiener - Colleague and
Friend,’ American Diaiog 3(March-April 1966): 34-37.
63. Wiener’s contribution to sensory and muscular-skeletal prosthesis has been reviewed by Robert W.
Mann in Norbert Wiener: Collected Works. vol. 3, to be published by M I T Presy, Cambridge, Mass.
Wiener’s papers on these topics are: “Sound Communication with the Deaf,” Philosophy ofscience l6( 1949):
260-262; “Some Problems in Sensory Prosthesis” (with L. Levine), Science 1 lO(1949): 512; “Problems of
Sensory Prosthesis,” Bulletin ofthe American Mathematical Society 56( 195 1): 27-35; “Contribution by Dr.
Wiener” to Proceedings of the International Symposium on the Application of Automatic Control in
Prosthetic Design. 27-3 1 August 1962, Opatija, Yugoslavia, pp. 132-133; (Belgrade: Rad, 1963) “Epilogue”
in Progress in Brain Research, ed., J. P. Schade (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1963), 2: 264-268.
64. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind. op. cit., p. 11.
65. Gregory Bateson in interview with Stewart Brand: “We made a film in ’49 at Langley-Porter Clinic
the fact that the minor patterns of interchange in a family are the major sources of mental illness
sf
Stewart Brand, I1 Cybernetic Frontiers (New York: Random House, 1974), p. 29.
66. Gregory Bateson, “Introduction” in Perceval’s Narrative: A Patient’s Account of his Psychosis, 1830-
1832, ed., G . Bateson (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1961), pp. v-xxii.
67. For typical opinions see e.g., Laura Ferrni, Illustrious Immigrants, (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1971), p. 212.
 GREGORY BATESON AND THE MATHEMATICIANS 159

68. John von Neurnann, Collected Works. ed., A. H. Taub, (New York: Macmillan, 1963). 5: 238-247; H.
H. Goldstine, op. cit., pp. 331-332.
69. Lewis Strauss [Men and Decisions, (New York: Doubleday, 1962), p. 236) describes a poignant incident.
70. I have satisfied myself through discussion with some of John von Neumann’s close associates, including
Oskar Morgenstern (1 1 May 1970), that he indeed held these views. Also see Lve 42(25 February 1957): 96.
71. S. Colum Gilgillan, The Sociology of Invention (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970).
72. H. H. Goldstine, op. cit.; H. D. Huskey, loc. cit.
73. Daniel Bell, “Notes on the Post-Industrial Society,” The Public Interest 6(1967): 24-35, and 7(1967):
102-1 18.
74. Gregory Bateson, “Minimal Requirements for a Theory of Schizophrenia,” American Medical
Association Archives o j General Psychiatry 2( 1960): 477-491.
75. Perceval’s Narrative, op. cit.
76. “Minimal Requirements for a Theory of Schizophrenia,” cited.
77. Theodore Roszak, Th Making o f a Counter Culture (New York: Doubleday, 1969).
78. Ronald D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Ballantine, 1967).
79. Stewart Brand, loc. cit. The magazine Coevolution Quarterly has also given considerable space to
Bateson: see 4, (1974). 24-29; 6 (1975): 132-136; and 7 (1975): 32-47.
80. Mark Engel, “Preface” in Steps to an Ecology o f M i n d . op. cit., p. vii.
81. “A Scientist Rebels,” loc. cit.
82. The initial letter from Norbert Wiener to Walter Reuther is dated 13 August 1949. In S ring 1950
Wiener was making contacts among scientists, and Reuther among labor leaders for the establisgment of a
labor-science council.
83. Paul Goodman, New Reformation (New York: Random House, 1970).
84. This I conclude primarily from discussion with a relatively small sample of the mathematical com-
munity that was acquainted with Wiener, some of whom still seemed angry with him in 1969 or 1971. One of
his tactics for asserting his antimilitary conscience was that of snubbing colleagues who were in weapons
work. (The snubbing tactic was described to me by Armand,Siegel, 8 June 1971, and by H. H. Goldstine, 26
February 1971). Dirk Struik, loc. cit., refers to Wiener’s feeling isolated in his worries” concerning the
military, See also Norbert Wiener, I am a Mathematician (Cambridge, Mass.: M I T Press, 1964). p. 298.
 Amer. J . Orthopsychiat. 50(1), January 1980

THEORY AND REVIEW

FAMILY THERAPY:
The Making of a Mental Health Movement
Adele M. Brodkin, Ph.D.

Div. of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Dept. of Psychiatry and Mental Health Science,
CMDNJ-New Jersey Medical School

Family therapy, unlike many fleeting therapeutic fads, has flourished in

established mental health circles for the past 22 years. This paper examines
the socio-historical sources of family therapy’s popularity, and considers the
growth and development of this contemporary American therapeutic phe-
nomenon from a sociological perspective.

ver the past quarter of a century,
0 family therapy has emerged as a
major treatment modality. Mental
health workers with disparate training
have become congenial companions in
family treatment centers, and many
American psychotherapy clients have
come home to “family cure.” This pa-
per will consider the history of family
therapy from a sociological perspective.
It goes without saying that such a pro-
ject requires the firm bracketing of the
matter of family therapy’s merits or
flaws. T h e only assumption made at the
outset is that the steps in the evolution
of family therapy are no accident of so-
cial history. Rather, family therapy, in
all its forms, will be viewed as the prod-
uct of an ongoing interplay between
macrosocial conditions and micropsy-
chological experiences of Americans
during this last half of the twentieth
century.
Three roughly chronological phases
will be described as characterizing the
family therapy movement to date.
Through a consideration of the high
points of these phases and of the family
therapy enterprise as a whole, the paper
will begin to address the question of
why family therapy has flourished in
contemporary America, and to identify
the private and public needs it has
promised to meet.

A n expanded version of a paper presented at the 1979 annual meeting of the American Orfho-
psychiatric Association, in Washington, D.C.
4 0002-9432/80/010004-14S00.75 @ I980 American Orthopsychiatric Association, Inc.
ADELE M. BRODKIN 5

TOWARD A DEFINITION may be professionals, paraprofessionals,

OF FAMILY THERAPY
or lay therapists; 8) the length of treat-
T h e phenomenon that will be de- ment; 9) the particular set of values;
scribed is not so much a therapeutic 10) the degree to which the therapist
technique or a theoretical model as it is emphasizes intrapsychic, interpersonal,
a paradigm in several Kuhnian 23 senses. or situational factors; I I ) the extent to
It is a “world view,” a “tacit knowl- which the focus is on conscious or un-
edge,” elicited here from the writings conscious forces, content or affect, past
of its best known proponents. T h e fam- or present; 1 2 ) the degree to which the
ily therapy paradigm is still sufficiently therapist relies on reeducation, manipu-
unformed to prevent any neat delinea- lation, or interpretation of emotional
tion of its method from its model. Most conflict.’
of its advocates have recognized family T h i s confusing state of the art is
therapy as a “movement” of the band- underscored 1)y the smorgasbord of sci-
wagon variety. They know i t as a per- ence that informs its theory. It has bor-
spective unique to its community of lowed tidbits of behavioral science, be-
practitioners, who can agree on very ginning with aspects of anthropology.
little else but their shared conviction The, culture and personality strand of
about the redefined locus of psychologi- anthropology provided a cultural rela-
cal problems and focus of their rcmedia- tivism with which Ackerman and other
tion. early family therapists were comfort-
Nathan Ackerman, acknowledged as able. Bateson’s inquiries into human
the founding father of the family ther- communication underlie the opus of
apy movement, reviewed the difficulty the Palo Alto school of family therapy,
in defining family therapy with some which merits more detailed discussion
dismay: later. Selections from sociology have
been invoked by family workers in
One is tempted to spcculate as to whether
there arc . . . almost as many forms of family
search of a legitimating model. Par-
treatment as there arc therapists . . . O n scan- sons and Bales’s 31 work with small
ning the fieltl. one is overwhelmed by the be- groups, and their functionalist princi-
wildering array of forms of family treatment. ples for successful socialization have
One has thc distinct impression that each ;her- been firmly transplanted in this new
apist is “doing. his thing,” b u t eveti a s one
watchrs. lie changcs his “thing” . . .I (p. 412)
therapeutic ground. Generational role
differentiation is considered essential
;Ickerman found that different thera- lor functional family life, and even Par-
pists determine, according to their dif- sons’s sex role differentiation model has
ferent predelictions: I ) the unit of treat- been called upon to put family mem-
ment; 2) the treatment setting; 3) the bers back in their proper places. Of
criteria for diagnostic assessment, or course, family therapists share Parsons’s
whether there need be any such assess- conviction about the generic natural-
ment; 4 ) the therapeutic goals; 5) the ness of modern nuclear family life. Fam-
theoretical orientation, from among the ily theory is also seasoned with socio-
many theories of human behavior; 6) logical spice from deviance theory, role
the therapeutic Orientation; 7) the need theory, labeling theory, the sociology
for single or multiple therapists, who of organizations, the works o f Goffman,
6 FAMILY THERAPY
Simmel, and even a Marxian vocabu-
lary in the writings of R. D. Laing.
Psychological theory, in all of its
variations, is well represented in the
eclectic arrangement of family theory.
Learning theory is represented by the
extremes of gestalt and behaviorism.
Each modern personality theory, of
course, has salted some aspect of the
family movement. There is room for re-
visions of Freud. Sullivan and Adler are
most often credited as original influ-
ences, but there is a place for many of
the newest individualistic therapy the-
ories and techniques as well. Transac-
tional analysis, psychodrama, all of the
old and new versions of group therapv,
including encounter, have left their
mark on family therapy technique. T h e
human potential movement, indeed all
of the growth theories, have been
adopted by some family workers. Even
hypnosis, through the work of Milton
Erickson, has had a crucial influence on
family therapy technique.’n
T h e physical sciences are hardly ne-
glected by family workers in search of
a model. Biological metaphors aboiintl
in the family therapy literature. T h e
word “systems” is borrowed from either
biology or engineering by virtually
every family therapy theorist; “eco” is
a favorite prefix. Mathematics and the
computer and information sciences,
starting with cybernetics and adding a
touch of linguistirs, have all contrib-
uted to the scientific legitimation of tlir
family therapy enterprise.
T h e pluralistic style of family tlier-
apy does not stop with the potpourri of
contemporary scientific and psychother-
apeutic paradigms that i t has employed.
Pluralism invades the everyday world
of family therapy, for its practitioners
have ridden a merry-go-round of mod-
ern American mobility, leaving Chicago
for Palo Alto, New York for Philadel-
phia, Washington for Denver for New
Haven, etc.,18 discarding worn out
methods and models along with old
furnishings that won’t fit in their next
temporary headquarters, which also
houses a set of new significant others.
It is not surprising that integration has
not been achieved in a field that
abounds with its own cognitive contam-
inations and compromises, reflecting
the pluralism, mobility, uncertainty,
and weightlessness of that very world it
promises to solidify.
CAN HISTORY HELP
TO HONE THE DEFINITION?
Family therapy emerged simultane-
ously in several separate therapeutic
quarters. No heads had been put to-
gether to come u p with the find of “fam-
ily therapy.” T h e many initiators of the
method were at first unaware of each
other’s parallel efforts. Indeed, the
seemingly unrelated forays into this
new field and the sparsity of theoretical
forewarnings of its arrival are, I suggest,
two bits of evidence of its social con-
struction. Put simply, family therapy
needed a social-psychological, social-
structural “push” to get it off the
ground.
Ackerman was apparently the first
American psychiatrist to take the leap
from child psychiatry to family ther-
apy, and he was ahead of his time. His
interest in the effects of chronic unem-
ployment on depression-era families was
combined with his psychoanalytic and
child-guidance training and a “flirta-
tion” with the psychoanalytic-anthro-
pological work of Kardiner and others
of the culture-and-personality school.
By the early 1940s, although still doing
ADELE M. BRODKIN 7

traditional psychiatry in his public dividual’s pain. There is no easily iden-

clinic work, Ackerman was experiment- tifiable point at which the urgency of
ing with family therapy in his private the individual identity crisis gave way
practice. Ackerman’s progress can be to the struggle to save the family for the
seen as a microcosm of the birth and sake of the social order. A close approx-
growth of the family therapy move- imation of that moment, however, may
ment. He began working with children have been concurrent with the counter-
alone, then saw mother and child to- culture movement of the 1960s, since
gether, then both parents, and ulti- the institution of the family had never
mately took on the entire family. He been in greater jeopardy:
seemed to sense that the trouble of any . . . of all the institutions that were challenged
family has both a social basis and a during the 1960’s-the universities, the schools,
societal impact. As an adult analyst and the military, the government itself-it is the
a child psychiatrist with broad social- American home that has been shaken most
scientific interests, Ackerman was able profoundly. It is no longer possible to take
the family for granted as a haven of stability
to sense the nomic urgency of the fam- and togetherness.33 (p. 2)
ily institution for the individual child
and adult, as well as for the modern so- It was at the height of this “anarchistic”
cial structure.2 threat to family solidarity, then, that
Elsewhere,13 I have argued that any family therapy moved beyond its early
contemporary psychotherapy has twin therapeutic aim, and went public. Still,
authors: the identity crisis of the indi- the American credo of individual sa-
vidual and the crisis of order in a plu- credness dies hard.* As thc high-styled
ralistic social setting. Family therapy is hullabaloo of the youth culture grew
no exception. It, too, is designed to han- calmer and its advocates older, the
dle the double crisis of modernity, homely remedies applied to the institu-
which Ackerman knew had been inten- tional crisis relaxed to reveal a core
sified by the social events of the thirties dichotomy of contemporary conscious-
and the forties. While family therapists ness. I n the third, and most current,
from Ackerman on have all unwittingly stage of family therapy, individual and
confronted both the identity crisis of institution are concurrent clients; fam-
the intlivitlual and the crisis of a pri- ily therapists protect and restore indi-
mary institution of the social order, a vidual autonomy, while they attempt to
definition of the family therapy move- maintain family solidarity.
ment may best be approached through
Phase I :
demarcation of three not-quite-clear-cut
Saving t h e Individual, Family Style
stages, each informed by the crisis of its
particular historical moment. T h e family therapy movement ac-
I n the beginning, although Ackerman quired its first firm roots from two epi-
was a “healer” of both facets of the sodes in the modern American mental
sociopsychological crisis, most of his health saga: the child guidance move-
peers attended primarily to the anguisli ment and the eruption of schizophrenia
of the individual. Even when they con- research that was well supported by the
vened the entire family for therapy, government in the post-war period. I n
their goal was the alleviation of an in- each instance, it was the individual’s an-
8 FAMILY THERAPY
guish that was addressed by the new
family modality.
I n America, child guidance clinics
liad offered separate and unequal ther-
apeutic intervention for children and
their mothers until Ackerman, in a radi-
cal break with tradition, began to send
his staff on home visits in the late 1940s.
Ackerman found individual identity
and family identity to be inextricably
interwoven: to save the individual
child, the therapist must relinquish the
blaming of mothers and restore the
nomic role of the family.
I n the forties and fifties, several “clas-
sical” works by child psychiatric theo-
reticians expressed an affinity with the
rumblings that were already undermin-
ing the certainties of tlierapists used to
working separately with each single cli-
ent. I n 1943, an influential report on
maternal overprotection by David
Levy 24 set the scene for dyadic-based
intervention in the family. I n 1948,
Fromm-Reichman lG coined the term
“schizophrenogenic mother”; four years
later, Mahler “7 described the “state of
symbiosis” between the mother and the
child schizophrenic. There followed a
spate of dyadic-style studies of scliizo-
phrenics emerging from a psyclioanaly-
tic framework and implicating the
motlier-child relationship.
T h e notion of the dyadic etiology of
schizophrenia was seized upon by the
second strand of early family therapists
-those who answered the plaintive cry
for help sent forth through the “tlis-
turbed” communication of young schiz-
ophrenics. Extreme “reality disturb-
ances” of young adults represented se-
vere versions of identity confusion and
called for the reassertion of reality
maintenance tlirougli therapeutic inter-
vention. The severity of the situation
that threatened the sanity of these indi-
viduals required a “repair crew” that
could restore the family as the primary
identity assigner and maintainer, sal-
vaging the “damaged” world in order to
save its suffering inhabitants. Originally
without knowledge of each other’s pro-
jects, many psychiatrists began to con-
duct family therapy for schizophrenics
in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Bate-
son, Jackson, Weakland and Haley “in-
vented” family therapy in Palo Alto,
while Bowen did the same thing at
NIMH, as did Lidz at Yale and Whit-
aker in Atlanta, among others.
T h e “Bateson Project” in Palo Alto
had begun as a general investigation of
the nature of communication. Bateson,
an anthropologist, collaborated with
Weakland, originally a chemical engi-
neer, and Haley, then completing a
graduate dissertation in communications
at Stanford. Early in the project, this
threesome was joined by two psyclii-
atrists, Fry and Jackson. Tlieir addition
to the research team heralded the re-
finement of a concern with general com-
munications issues to the study of com-
munication of schizophrenics. T o put
the Hateson group’s position succinctly,
the disturbed coinmunication of the
schizophrenic was relabeled as a re-
sponse to faulty communication in his
social setting.
I n 1954, Jackson “0 presented his dis-
tillation of Bateson’s communication
theory as it applied to families. The
family, according to Jackson, is a homeo-
static system; the systemic “wheel” of
the family may enlist the sickness of a n
individual “cog” to keep i t going. A
cybernetics, engineering ethos invaded
the family therapy movement from the
Bateson project. T h e Palo Alto team
practiced what it preached, with exten-
ADELE M. BRODKIN 9

sive use of technological tools sucli as phrenia was a process of family “stuck
;iudio tapes and films, which wcrc to togetherness,” which denies genera-
become important accoutrements for tional or individual boundaries. T h e
the entire family therapeutic endeavor. carly Bowenian model impugned not
In 1956, the Bateson group published only the overinvolved mother and the
the now classic paper, “Toward a The- “stuck together” family group, b u t also
ory of Schizophrenia,” 2 1 which cstab- “emotionally divorced” parents as etio-
lished the hypothesis of the “double logical co-conspirators in the case of
bind”-that contradictory communica- schizophrenia of the young.
tion from the powerful parental figure At approximately the same time that
incites the victimized child to witlidraw Bowen began what lie called his pro-
From human involvement. gression “from couch to coach,” l o
Wynnc, working in a separate setting Lidz 2o was constructing a comparable
under N I M H support, came to related model out of therapeutic research with
though different conclusions about the young schizophrenics at Yale. Although
family etiology of schizophrenia. Wynne Lidz’s work concurrently confronted the
and his associates took the concept of crisis of the schizophrenic individual
repression out of the intrapsychic closet and the crisis of the institution of the
and relocatcd i t on the family mantel. family,5 the moving force of his 1950s
Repressive forces in the family were model, like that of his family therapy
deemed responsible for the denial of peers, was clearly the mission to save
self-realization in children. Wynne’s he child.
concepts of “pseudomutuality” and Supported by a post-war public com-
“i’seudo-Iiostility” highlighted his no- mitted to mental health programs, vari-
tions of the games parents play with ations on the early family therapeutic
their vulnerable offspring, games end- theme were emitted by self-styled voices
ing in the serious symptoms of schizo- across the land. Satir,32 for example, set
plirenia.37 her tune to a Rogerian tempo-blend-
Bowen, also researching under N I M H ing optimism about self actualization
auspices, attributcd irrationality of chil- with familistic ideology. One might
dren to a family contagion. He hospital- translate the Satirian motto as, “Give
ized wliok families of schizophrenics for individuals room and they will grow!”
observation and treatment.9 Bowen Until the middle 1950s, both the child
Iicgan this project with the Fromm- guidance strand and the family-schizo-
Keichman “schizoplirenogenic motlier” plirenia branch of the family therapy
notion firmly in mind. He agreed that movement were, in Guerin’s l8 words,
the overinvestment of mothers, the sym- “mostly underground.” T h e move-
biosis they shared with their offspring, ment’s introduction to legitimacy re-
could eventuate in schizophrenia. Hos- sulted from William Menninger’s urg-
pitalized mothcrs and their “sick” chil- ing of the Group for the Advancement
tlrcn wcrc soon joined by fathers and of Psychiatry to form a committee on
siblings as Rowcn enlarged his etiologi- the family, which was assigned to con-
cal model to include thc whole family. duct a survey of family therapy research
Early in I%owen’scareer, lie concluded and practice. Under the auspices of this
that the culprit in the case of schizo- committee, several papers were pre-
10
sented describing family-schizophrenia
research at the 1957 meeting of the
American Orthopsychiatric Association.
Three months later, a panel of family
therapists, including Ackerman, Jack-
son, Bowen, and Lidz, announced their
radical ideas and reported their family
therapy efforts before an assembly of
their psychiatric peers. In the wake of
these legitimating ceremonies there fol-
lowed a flurry of events establishing im- ments there arose an expanding fem-
portant outposts of family therapy.
Among these were the initiation of a
family therapy project at the Eastern
Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute by
Boszormenyi-Nagy, in 1957; the found-
ing by Jackson, in 1959, of the Mental
Research Iqstitute at Palo Alto, where
lie was ultimately joined by Satir, Watir- have traditionally called forth weap-
lawick, Haley, and Weaklantl from the
original Dateson project; and the pub-
lication of the field’s first journal, Fam-
ily Process, in 1962.
By the early 1960s, throughout the
country the move to aid the indi-
vidual by focusing on the family had
gained great momentum. During this
first phase of family therapy, the im-
petus to save the suffering child was
prevalent, for the integrity of the fam-
ily structure had not yet endured any
serious ideological attack. In the next
phase, however, intrapsychic issues
would be largely ignored as family ther-
apists, without any stated awareness of
their purpose, would work full time to
defend against tlie dismantling of a
primary institution of modern American
life.
Phase 2:
Fighting for the Embattled Family
T h e broad social dialogue that arose
in the anti-institutional era of tlie six- orating his theory of the family as a
FAMILY THERAPY
ties was devastating to fifties familism
and establishment psychotherapy alike.
T h e countercultural challenge to the
American social and political order,
manifested first around the issues of
racial segregation and civil rights and
then as mass opposition to military in-
volvement in Vietnam, shattered the
sub,jectively experienced sanctity of
family life. Along with these move-
inist consciousness and the popularized
notion of a “generation gap.” Spurred
on by such social forces, a large seg-
ment of the therapeutic patient popu-
lation entered into gnostic orgies de-
voted to “doing their own thing.”
Cultural threats in modern America
onry from the arsenal of what BergerG
lias called our “technological tempera-
ment.” In a sense, family therapy of
the late sixties became, in word and
deed, an exercise in social engineering.
T h e “metagoverning” therapists from
Mental Research Institute designed
programs to repair tlie damaged family
system. A corps of family engineers,
armed with a media metaphor, boldly
withstood the assault of an army of
tlissen ters.
T h e pivotal moment of a shift in at-
tention from the individual to the fam-
ily group had come when one of the
Palo Alto group, Weakland, amended
the double-bind concept of the indi-
vidual child patient as victim by assert-
ing that double-binding must be viewed
interactionally.35 It was not long before
Bateson and colleagues published their
words of assent for Weakland’s circular
causal explanation of any family mem-
ber’s disorder.3
At the same time, Jackson was elab-
ADELE M. BRODKIN
subspecies of a general system. T h e fam-
ily, he held, is a system in which a
change in any one part changes the
entire system. T h e family therapist may
recalibrate the “program” in any family
that is experiencing dysfunction. Jack-
son’s earlier writings had suggested that
there is a time for intrapsychic inquiry,
as well as for extrapsychic or interper-
sonal therapeutics. But by the time of
his death, during this socially critical
era, Jackson had rejected all psycho-
analytic approaches to therapy, aban-
doned any interest in insight or tlevel-
opmental history, and adopted the sin-
gle therapeutic goal of an interactional
behavioral change through conjoint
family therapy. T h e Jacksonian thera-
pist sought to enlighten the family
about its particular systemic arrange-
ment, but the road to family self-reali-
zation was not a reflective one. Rather,
the family was forced to face u p to its
dysfunction by a therapist’s “disturbing
the system” or “relabeling” the behav-
ior of one of its members, or even by
his prescribing the symptom that most
distressed family members. Rapid inter-
actional change, rather than slowly ac-
cruing insight, was the new family ther-
apy goal. Jacksonian therapy, like the
other interactional family therapies of
the moment, addressed itself exclu-
sively to the here and the now.
HaleyID picked u p the gentler Jack-
sonian model of family interaction and
found in it a frank power struggle
among the members. Every communica-
tion, in Haley’s eyes, is a maneuver to
define the relationship in the communi-
cator’s own favor. What is more, accord-
ing to Haley, all psychopathology is a
product of the power struggle between
persons, rather than between intrapsy-
chic forces. Haley rejected any intrapsy-
II
chic interest on the part of the thera-
pist. T h e task was to fix u p the
interpersonal errors of the family sys-
tem, and the therapist did so by out-
maneuvering family members. Haley’s
ideal therapist would refine the original
Jacksonian method even further. He
would aim to upset the distressed sys-
temic family arrangement by offering
ambiguous directives, encouraging un-
usual behavior, taking and switching
sides with various contesting family
members, and relabeling behavior in
order to emphasize positive feelings of
family members for each other while
averting their hostile intentions.
Currently, Weakland, Watzlawick,
and Fisch at Mental Research Institute
and Haley, wherever he travels, all heirs
of the Palo Alto estate, comprise the
leadership of this version of family ther-
apy, now renamed “strategic therapy.”
Strategic therapy is the important ex-
ception to the proposed chronology of
the family movement, for it flourishes
even in this post-countercultural de-
cade. I n an era that allows ideas about
happiness through hedonism to domi-
nate its collective consciousness, “wife-
shucking” 36 has become normal be-
havior (and husband dumping just as
normal). It is no wonder, then, that
some staunch defenders of the family
fold are still decisive in their designs
for delivering the nuclear family from
its threatened demise.
Bowen’s family therapy career
stretches across the three phases of fam-
ily therapy. H e has moved from his
early protective position beside the in-
dividual schizophrenic child to a pres-
en t-day paradoxical individual-group
allegiance, taking a brief detour to sim-
ply “save the family” in the middle
1960s. Bowen’s foray into family ther-
12
apy had at first focused on the triad of
two parents with an adolescent child
who was in trouble. In such a gathering,
however, he found i t difficult to induce
parents to turn their attention from the
symptomatic child to a resolution of
their own marital discord, which Bowen
had determined was the root of any
family trouble. Therefore, by 1960,
Bowen had excused the children from
attending most family sessions in order
to engage couples in a pristine pro-
cedure to preserve their marital status.’?
I n 1966, he published his first major
theoretical paper,” which advocated
modifying the pathological family sys-
tem through a triangular relationship
among “the two most important family
members” and the neutral therapist.
T h e therapeutic rage for reinstitu-
tionalization in the late 1960s covered
all classes of family therapy clients. T h e
power of the black movement had made
i t clear that no class of clientele is in-
significant i n institutional rearrange-
ments. Gratuitously, i t was left mainly
to Minuchin 29 to engage in embour-
goisement of poor families. T h e mem-
bers of these families had not learned to
wait, plan, reflect or communicate de-
liberately and, most crucially, had not
yet internalized the “Parsonian Ethic”
of nuclear familism. Before the black
subculture might have a second chance
to r i p into the fabric of middle-class
values, lower-class child “troublemak-
ers” were put through an active Par-
onian family program.
T h e price of all this reasserted solidar-
ity was an apparent end to individua-
tion in family treatment. However, even
those family therapists who were im-
patient with intrapsychic inquiry were
caught u p in the contagion of “groupy
anarchism” from the counterculture
FAMILY THERAPY
therapies. Minuchin and Haley, among
others, whipped u p a kind of “encoun-
ter” with their family patients; Speck
and Attneave retribalized recalcitrant
family members with frank encounter
tactics; Satir made up open-ended mar-
athon meetings for family clients; Mac-
Gregor held intensive two-and-a-half
day “honest interactions” with family
members and his mental health staff.
Such syncretism may have been inevi-
table for that pluralistic period. Even i n
hard times, social legitimators are not
immune to the opulence of the ideolog-
ical air that they are bound to breathe.
Phase 3:
A n Era of Ambiguity
Since the collapse of certainty in the
sixties, “alternative” ideas to nuclear
family life are all around us. Each adult
confronts a choice of family life styles
that undermines any pretense of the
necessity of nuclear family living. Indi-
vidual urges are openly up against com-
munal longings, and social constraint
seems almost undone. What is real to
many people now is only uncertainty.
It is no wonder, then, that family ther-
apists are torn between loyalty to the
separate self and a mission to restore
(lie major mediating structure of mod-
ern life. Should they rush to reunite
the “disengaged” family or set free the
prisoners of the “enmeshed” one? 28
Will they promote the Parsonian pro-
gram of sex and age complementarity
or open u p an “undifferentiated family
ego mass”?’2
T h e solution for Bowen, Minuchin,
and other5 has been a further cognitive
compromise, the ingenious interweav-
ing of separateness and togetherness.
Put differently, two out of three of the
ADELE M. BRODKIN
most current renditions of the family
therapy theme are echoes of ambiguity,
defending the sacred self and protecting
the fragile family all at once. Even those
“strategic” family therapists who seem
so sure of their public priorities are
still shadowboxing with the ghosts of
an individualistic era. I n 1974, Minu-
chin made the contemporary family
therapist’s challenge explicit:
Human experience has two elements-the sense
of belonging and the sense of being separate
. . . the laboratory in which these ingredients
are mixed is the family-the matrix of iden-
tity.28 (p. 47)
I n conducting what he calls “structural
family therapy,” Minuchin reasserts the
double assignment of the family therapy
enterprise:
My therapeutic style is organized along two
parameters-how to prcscrvc iiidividualization
atid how to support mutuality.28 (p. 128)
Minuchin is very active in his work. He
borrows strategies from tacticians like
Haley, creates crises to force family sys-
tems’ restoration, to undo family “en-
meshment” or “disengagement”.
Together, “slrategic therapy,” “struc-
tural therapy,” and “Howenian ther-
apy” presently dominate the family
therapy movement. Bowen’s current
fascination with genograms and his pre-
scription for a life-time multigenera-
tional study process direct his clients
toward self-differentiation while pro-
viding ;I revitalized continuity of fam-
ily consciousness. Rowen still treats
the marital dyad alone and often sees
only one spouse at a time. In this post-
critical period, however, his goal is to
defuse the spark of urgency in the mari-
tal arrangement so that its imperfec-
tions may be more tolerable to the part-
ners. For this task, he revamps a devel-
13
opmental design from the psychiatry of
old, sending individuals back home,
geographically and reflectively, to their
families of origin. There the “undiffer-
entiated family ego mass” of each adult
must be undone. T h e Bowenian pre-
scription is, in Weakland’s words, a par-
adoxical injunction to ‘Get with it’
“
and at the same time . . . ‘Get some dis-
tance from it.’ 16
”
COMPENDIUM OF T H E
FAMILY THERAPY PARADIGM
I n all of its forms, the family therapy
enterprise has opposed the fragmenting
of individual identity and the post-
World War I1 erosion of the nuclear
family institution. It has emerged out
of the dialectic between subjective un-
certainty and social pluralism peculiar
to this period in human history, a plu-
ralism that has increasingly undermined
the family.
borrowing the phrase from
Mitscherlick, has described modern
America as a “society without a father.”
After the “death of God,” in early mod-
erni ty, bourgeois mourners had cleaved
closer to their nuclear families, anxi-
ously averting an apprehension of
meaningless. Until well into the twen-
tieth century, a silent suspension of
doubt would allow no upsets of the par-
amount reality of “natural” nuclear
family life in America, for the family
alone could preserve persons from un-
bearable anomie. It was the primary
mediating structure between the self
and social life, serving to avoid political
disaster as well as individual anguish.
Without the patriarchal family’s moral
maintenance, the collective conscience
could crumble into collective chaos that
might call forth totalitarian control.
T h e unsupported family, however,
14
could not keep its lonely vigil against
the pluralistic promises of assorted Wal-
purgisnacht from post-war America to
the present. As Durkheim 1 4 knew, even
doubt about the inevitable constraint
of the family abandons the individual
to himself, leaving him “fatherless.” It
is, therefore, no accident of history that
a reality-maintenance repair crew has
come to the rescue of the faltering fam-
ily. Family therapy was born to break
the cycle of solipsism that undermined
the urgent but already unreliable core
of the private sphere.
This therapy, a secondary institu-
tional escape hatch from imminent ano-
mie, is itself a tenuous solution, for
along with the family and the entire
psychotherapeutic network, family ther-
apy enjoys only partial public weight-
ing. What is more, i t reflects the prob-
lematic pluralism from public life. Still,
unlike its therapeutic cohorts, it cannot
threaten family solidarity by offering
competing privileged conversation to
family members who are in “treat-
ment.” With medical-style “cognitive
elite” (who have, as Parsons30 noted,
traditionally bolstered the “health of
the family”) at the head of the table,
the family has been at least implicitly
convened to bring its individually ano-
mic members back home again and to
reassert its solvency from a nearly bank-
rupt situation.
Individualistic therapies not only dis-
rupted old conversations with signifi-
cant others who were outside of the pri-
vate transference situation, but those
therapies were required to dismantle
the primary world of the patient. In
family therapy, on the other hand, all
significant others and their conversa-
tions are often brought into the exam-
FAMILY THERAPY
ining room. Even grandparents and
other available relatives may be gath-
ered together to reinterpret the “group
patient’s’’ world.
Family therapy, more than any of its
predecessors, has been arranged to
“commute along with its clientele.” 7
T h e world view of the family therapy
paradigm opposes the dichotomization
of lives into public and private spheres.
It rejects the hedonism of the newer
“anarchistic” therapies in favor of a re-
institutionalization of the stable bour-
geois home. Throughout modernity,
whenever the “lonesome business” of
authenticity6 has become too much to
bear, a demodernizing yearning for re-
vitalized communities has been realized.
T h e family therapy movement, by go-
ing home again, has unknowingly ar-
ranged a demodernizing yet remodern-
izing array of methods and models.
SOME DEMODERNIZING FACETS
OF FAMILY THERAPY
T h e very public nature of the family
therapy enterprise represents a fusion
of its social control function and its
demodernizing animus. Garfinkle,’7
S t r a ~ s s ,and
~ ~ others have portrayed
making a public issue of deviant behav-
ior as a forceful social control device.
Some families in trouble may have felt
“status forced” by public agencies to
get together in front of the clinic cam-
eras to act out their unhappiness. T h e
representatives of the public world,
armed with technological hardware,
have invested the family venture with
a new public primacy. All of this “pub-
licizing” of family troubles may be in-
terpreted as an unapprehended social
mechanism for anchoring what was pri-
vately afloat onto the macrosocial
ADELE M. BRODKIN
world. I n a nation that has always wor-
shipped its own Fourth Amendment to
the Constitution before most ideolo-
gies, only collective desperation could
allow such “invasion of privacy.” As
Goffman might say, for families in this
therapy, the jig is up. T h e performers
are required to pull the curtain and
bring their backstage performances all
the way out front.
Family therapy is also demodernizing
in its frequent deemphasis of insight as
a prerequisite for “cure.” It is often un-
like earlier modern therapeutic tech-
niques, that is, in its rejection of reason
as the clue to psychic repair. Implicit
in an often antireflective attitude, as
well as in the natural group set-up, is
an abandonment or the introspective
explorations that had been an intrinsic
part of psychoanalytically-derived treat-
ment. I n rejecting subjective explora-
tions that attest to a divided self or a
self divided from world, family therapy
displays its antagonism toward the mod-
ern schism of public and private
spheres. Even if only one person is seen
at a time, the unit of treatment in this
unique therapeutic endeavor is now
most often the group, the redemptive
“community” whose interactive ills
must be healed. I n many forms of the
family therapeutic (Rowen’s is the no-
table exception here as well as on sev-
eral other generalizations offered above),
there is at least an indifference to indi-
viduals’ pasts. As is the case for other
demodernizing therapies, what matters
is now! Participants are enjoined to
“dig” the moment. Finally, when all of
the essential characters to the primary
world drama are present, there can be
a clean, quick break with the past; no
one has to wait for the prolonged work-
15
ing through of transference cure, re-
quired by earlier ascetic therapies.
MODERNITY REVISITED
Curiously, family therapy is concom-
itantly remodernizing, for i t stubbornly
retains a traditional allegiance to the
“natural” nuclear family group. Fur-
thermore, it preserves the modern as-
sumption of the urgency of a happy
private life, away from the inevitable
“rat race.” It is imbued with progres-
sive optimism; a family treated thera-
peutically together improves its chances
to stay together. It presumes the mod-
ern American child-protective stance,
and embodies an early modern insis-
tence on the generic naturalness of nu-
clear family living. It is still individual-
istic in its own way, presuming that all
families, and especially their children,
are worth saving. Its “publicity cam-
paign” is conducted with the latest
hardware, and it enlists its legitimating
metaphors from modern technology as
well as pure science. Although it often
ignores insight for patients, the task of
its therapists is modern in its rationality
-cognitively informed and definitely
deliberative. T h e very setting of family
therapy is supremely modern. Often it
takes place in bureaucratic surround-
ings such as a hospital, university, or
incorporated clinic. While it has loos-
ened the bureaucratic binds of profes-
sional role division, it reasserts the Par-
sonian preoccupation with hierarchies
of generation and sex roles within the
f am i 1y.
Family therapy is not free of having
to contend with the cost of modern re-
flectiveness. Thus, its critics might ask,
”How natural can family life be if it re-
quires so much scrutiny to stay alive,
16
and what sort of passion or devotion re-
sults from lessons in loving?” T h e pros-
thetic nuclear family, just as the “re-
constructed personality,” can never be
its old un-self-conscious self.
Finally, family therapy appears to
confront what Berger 8 has called
. . . the fundamental question of modernity
, . , how to keep in some sort of balance the
reality of the autonomous individual and the
reality of an institutional order. (p. 90)
From its outset, the founders of family
therapy have been juggling the de-
mands of these two masters, but, as this
paper has suggested, the movement
seems to shift toward the maintenance
of whichever reality is more in doubt at
a given historical moment.
T h e pluralism that made the family
therapy movement both necessary and
possible has also made the two-fold task
of family therapists improbable, for
ideologies are not easily engineered, es-
pecially in an era abundant with alter-
natives. T h e modern myth notwith-
standing, faith and reason do not inter-
mingle with ease. Our shattered faith
in family life needs to find its own
gradual rerooting to grow again. Still,
the participants in the family therapy
endeavor, patients and psychotherapists
alike, are bound to keep their stalwart
station against the onslaughts of anomie
and social disorder. They are so so-
cially constructed.
REFERENCES
I.ACKERMAN, N . 1972. T h e growing edge of
family therapy. I n Progress i n Group antl
Family Therapy, C. Sager antl H. Kaplan,
eds. Brunner/hIazel, New York.
2. ACKERMAN, N . 1958. T h e Psychodynamics of
Family Life. Basic Books, New York.
3. BATESON, C. ET AL. 1963. Note on the double-
bind-1962. Fam. Proc. 2: 157-167.
FAMILY THERAPY
4. BELL, D. 1976. T h e Cultural Contradictions
of Capitalism. Basic Books, New York.
5 . nERcER, P. 1974. Modern identity crisis and
continuity. I n T h e Cultural Drama, W.
Dillon, ed. Smithsonian Institute Press,
Washington, D.C.
G.BERCER, r. 1973. On sincerity and authen-
ticity. Public Interest 31:81-90.
7. BERGER, P. 1965. Towards a sociological un-
derstanding of psychoanalysis. SOC.Res. 32:
26-41.
~ . B E R C E R ,P., BERGER, B. AND KELLNER, H. 1973.
T h e Homeless Kind. Random House, New
York.
9. n o w E N , hf. 1965. Family psychotherapy with
schizophrenics in the hospital and in private
practice. In Intensive Family Therapy, I.
Boszormenyi-Nagy and J. Framo, eds. Har-
per and Row, New York.
10. n o w F N . M. 1970. From couch to coach. h e -
sen tcd to Georgetown University Symposium
in Family Psychotherapy.
I ~ . R O W E N , M . 1966. T h e use of family theory
in clinical practice. Comprehens. Psychiat.
7:345-374.
12. n n W E N , hi. 1975. Family therapy after twenty
years. In .4mcrican Handbook of Psychiatry
(2nd Ed., S . Arieti, ed.), Vol. 5: Treatment,
D. Freedman and J. Dyrud, eds. Basic Books,
New York.
13. BRnnKIN, A. 1977. Redemption Through “Re-
tribalization”: .4 Sociology of Knowledge
.4nalysis of Family Therapy. Unpublished
doctoral dissertation, Rutgers University.
~ ~ . D U R K I ~ E IE. M ,1966. Suicide. Free Press, New
York.
1.5. F R A M o . .I., ed. 1972. Family Interaction: A
Dialogue Between Family Researchers and
Family Therapists. Springer, New York.
16. FROJIM-REICIIMAN, F. 1948. Notes on the de-
velopment of treatment of schizophrenics
by psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Psychia-
try 11 263-274.
17. G A R F I V K L E , 11. 1972. Conditions of successful
degradation ceremonies. In Symbolic Inter-
action, 1. hlanis antl R. hleltzer, eds. Allyn
Bacon, Boston.
18. GUERIN, r., ed. 1976. Family Therapy: The-
ory and Practice. Gardner Press, New York.
1 9 . H A L E Y , 1. 1973. Uncommon Therapy: T h e
Psychiatric Techniques of Milton H. Erick-
son. Norton, New York.
20. T\CKSON, D. 1954. Some factors influencing
the oedipus conplex. Presented to the
American Psychoanalytic Association, St.
Louis.
21. TACKSON. n., ed. 1968. Communication,
Family, and Marriage (Vol. I , Human
Communication Series). Science and Be-
havior Books, Palo Alto, Calif.
ADELE M. BRODKIN
22. JACKSON, D., ed. 1 9 6 8 . Therapy Communica-
tion and Change (Vol. 2, Human Commu-
nication Series). Science and Behavior Books,
Palo Alto, Calif.
2 3 . K U H N . T. 1 9 7 3 . T h e Structure of Scientific
Resolutions. University of Chicago Press.
Chicago.
2 4 . LEVY, D. 1 9 4 3 . Maternal Overprotection.
Columbia University Press, New York.
2 5 . LIDZ, T. 1 9 6 3 . T h e Family and Human
Adaptation. International Universities Press,
New York.
26. LIDZ, T. 1 9 7 2 . T h e influence of family studies
on the treatment of schizophrenia. In Pro-
gress in Group and Family Therapy. C.
Sager and H. Kaplan, eds. Brunner/Mazel,
New York.
2 7 . AIAHLER, hl. 1 9 5 2 . On childhood psychoses
and schizophrenia: autistic and symbiotic
infantile psychosis. In T h e Psychoanalytic
Study of the Child, R. Eissler et al, eds. In-
ternational Universities Press, New York.
2 8 . h f l N U C r i I N , s. 1 9 7 4 . Families and Family
Therapy. Harvard University Press, New
York.
For reprints: Dr. Adele M. Brodkin. Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. New Jersey Medical
School, CMHC, 100 Bergen St., Newark, N.J. 07107
17
29. MINUCHIN, s. ET. AL. 1967. Families of the
Slums. Basic Books, New York.
30. PARSONS, T. 1 9 7 0 . Social Structure and Per-
sonality. Free Press, New York.
31. rmsoNs, T. AND BALES, R. 1955. Family So-
cialization and Interaction Process. Free
Press, New York.
32. SATIR, v. 1964. Conjoint Family Therapy.
Science and Behavior Books, Palo Alto,
Calif.
33. SKOLNICK, A. 1 9 7 3 . T h e Intimate Environ-
ment: Explaining Marriage and the Family.
Little, Brown, Boston.
~ ~ . S T R A U S S A.
, 1 9 6 9 . Mirrors and Masks: T h e
Search for Identity. Sociology Press, San
Francisco.
35. WEAKLAND, J . 1 9 6 0 . T h e “double-bind’’ hy-
pothesis of schizophrenia and three party
interaction. I n T h e Etiology of Schizophre-
nia, D. ,Jackson, ed. Basic Books, New York.
3 6 . WOLFE,T. 1 9 7 6 . T h e ME decade. New York
Magazine (Aug. 23):2640.
37. W Y N N E , L. ET AL. 1 9 5 8 . Pseudo-mutuality in
the family relation of schizophrenics. Psy-
chiatry 21:205-220.
Notes for a Cultural History of Family Therapy*
The official history of family therapy de-
scribes its beginnings as a daring techni-
cal and philosophical departure from tra-
ditional individual treatment in the
1960s, inspired especially by the “system
thinking” of Gregory Bateson. This cele-
brated origin story needs to be supple-
mented with a longer and larger history of
both practice and thought about the fam-
ily, and that is the subject of this article.
The longer history goes back to the found-
ing of social work by Mary Richmond, of
pragmatism by William James, and of the
organic view of social systems intervention
by John Dewey. Seen against this back-
ground, family therapy is, among other
things, a consequence of the development
of persistent elements of American profes-
sional culture, experience, and philoso-
phy. The taking of this historical-anthro-
pological view discloses also the origins of
two other histories that have made their
contribution to the development of family
therapy: a science of observing communi-
cation processes that starts with Edward
Sapir and leads to contemporary conver-
sation analysis, and a history of mesmer-
* This article is based partly on A Different Story:
The Rise of Narrative in Psychotherapy (Beels,
2001). I will also consider—from a historical point of
view— certain issues concerning the role of theory in
the development of family therapy, which were first
raised in Newmark and Beels (1994).
† Dr. Beels is a faculty member of The Ackerman
Institute for the Family, New York City. Send cor-
respondence to 865 West End Avenue, New York,
NY 10025; e-mail: cbeels@post.harvard.edu.
67
Family Process, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2002 © FPI, Inc.
C. CHRISTIAN BEELS, M.D., M.S.†
ism in the United States that culminates
in Milton Erickson and his followers.
Fam Proc 41:67– 82, 2002
F AMILY THERAPY seems to be suffering
an identity crisis. As teachers and
developers of a distinct practice and dis-
cipline, we family therapists seem to be
losing ground, or at least losing definition.
Family therapy training institutes, whose
founding was one of the distinctive fea-
tures of the discipline, have been closing.
“Schools” of family therapy, whose differ-
ences were once the focus of our journals,
no longer appear at the top of their table
of contents, if they appear at all. Some of
us— especially the older generation who
were there at the beginning—are alarmed
at the ease with which eternal verities
such as “systems thinking” can be set
aside. And our most popular journal is no
longer named The Family Therapy Net-
worker: it is now merely Psychotherapy
Networker.
And yet, if we turn our attention from
these theoretical labels and definitions,
our work is thriving. A glance at the con-
tents of our journals and the programs of
our conferences shows that we are teach-
ing (and learning) more in collaboration
with others who do not define themselves
as family therapists: community organiz-
ers, clinicians responsible for populations
with special needs, anthropologists, social
policy experts, people responsible for
what we call “larger systems,” meaning
68 / FAMILY PROCESS
larger than the family. A look at our
longer history and our place in the larger
culture of American healing practices will
help to explain what is going on. Our
identity crisis may be the result of a nar-
row perception of how we got that identity
in the first place. The “discipline” some of
us feel we are losing was hatched in a very
special atmosphere of the middle of the
last century.
THE OFFICIAL HISTORY
Trying to reconstruct a history of family
therapy from the pages of its oldest jour-
nal, Family Process (first issue, 1962), I
am struck by its self-conscious image as a
new invention.1 One of the few explicit
histories reviewed, a chapter in Guerin’s
Family Therapy, Theory and Practice
(1976) refers to “the first twenty-five
years,” which would put the beginning of
that history in the 1950s. Another histor-
ical piece is John E. Bell’s (1967) reprint-
ing of his first account (1953) of having
imported this invention from the Tavis-
tock Institute where, as a visiting fellow,
he had heard that John Bowlby saw fam-
ily members together.
There are three independent stories of
invention referred to frequently in these
pages, all involving psychiatrists. In one,
Nathan Ackerman, a child psychoanalyst,
began seeing the families of children in
his New York practice in the late 1930s,
and taught it at Jewish Family Service
beginning in the early 1940s. In another,
Murray Bowen had a ward at the NIMH
in Maryland, where the families of schizo-
phrenic research subjects lived under the
observation of the staff, in 1956.
1
Examples from Volume 1 are the review of Ack-
erman’s “Psychodynamics of Family Life” by Martin
Grotjahn, p. 169; the review of John E. Bell’s mono-
graph, p. 171; and the citation of Bowen’s study at
NIMH, pp. 154, 156, 158. For the “breakthrough”
language, see especially the letter from Louis Paul,
p. 342.
But most important, and most emblem-
atic of the “invention” theme, is the story
of the “double blind.” The British anthro-
pologist, Gregory Bateson, had a grant to
investigate the communication of the
families of schizophrenic patients at The
Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospi-
tal, and he recruited a psychoanalyst,
Don Jackson, who had just completed a
fellowship at Chestnut Lodge, to be the
psychiatric member of his team. The oth-
ers were Jay Haley, an expert in commu-
nication, and John Weakland, an engi-
neer turned anthropologist. The “Theory
of Schizophrenia” this group proposed in
1956 (Bateson, Jackson, Haley, & Weak-
land, 1956) described the form of commu-
nication exchanged between family mem-
bers as the source of the thought disorder
in the patient. This was the prototype for
papers about the new science of cybernet-
ics—self-regulation in a social or biologi-
cal system—and its novel use in the de-
scription of family pathology, and, later
on, methods of treatment.
Jackson, Haley, and Weakland went on
to found the Mental Research Institute
(MRI) at Palo Alto, and their work over
the years perpetuated the ethos of scien-
tific invention. Their development of stra-
tegic brief therapy was an application of
systems discoveries to the technical prob-
lem of creating change efficiently, in a
single intervention if possible. This effi-
ciency was contrasted with the much
longer time taken by psychoanalysis to
deal with supposedly similar problems,
and was evidence that the family thera-
pists had discovered or invented some-
thing new and better. Although no well-
designed study ever actually compared
the effectiveness of psychoanalysis and
family therapy in well-matched cases
with measured outcomes, the myth per-
sisted among family therapists, who de-
rided analysts for using up patients’ time
and money, and often making matters
worse. We may never know the justice of
BEELS
this claim for the technical superiority of
family therapy (see Pinsof & Wynne,
1995, for a review of current effectiveness
research). But, in this history, the compe-
tition between family therapy and psy-
choanalysis is important because of the
imagery of the comparison. Though they
were fundamentally different in theory
and practice, each claimed, in its time, to
be a new scientific discovery and improve-
ment.
Psychoanalysis, which was undergoing
its parallel and independent development
from 1910 to 1950, actually fitted this im-
age of a scientific invention. It was pre-
sented as such by Freud in his famous
Clark University lectures in 1909. Psy-
choanalysis was a medical response to the
welter of competing therapies available at
the time, and as such was especially dis-
tinguished by the Boston neurologists,
who had started its propagation in Amer-
ica, as their professional property (Hale,
1971). They were an influential medical
elite, and they sponsored not only the
technique of analysis but also the whole
theoretical scheme of child development
and normal and abnormal psychology
that it entailed. By the early 1940s, be-
cause of these special claims, it had cap-
tured the attention and control of the en-
tire establishment of medical psychiatry,
both research and practice, not to men-
tion areas of social science, philosophy,
and the arts.
Thus, to most of us who were learning
psychotherapy of any kind in the middle
of the century, psychoanalysis was the
force to be reckoned with—the argument
to be answered, the invention to be im-
proved upon. We inherited from the ex-
ample of psychoanalysis, as well as from
the general ethos of medicine and psy-
chology, a glorification of the image of the
great medical innovator. Pasteur, Ehr-
lich, Koch, and others besides Freud were
culture heroes, and provided a model for
how great healing inventions came about.
Fam. Proc., Vol. 41, Spring, 2002
/ 69
The founders of family therapy were psy-
chiatrists who had been trained as (or by)
psychoanalysts, and they had inherited
an expectation for that standard of the-
ory. If their inventions were to hold up,
they needed theories of their own, derived
from a new epistemology, with enough
sweep and novelty to put them on a par
with Freud’s revelations. Batesonian sys-
tems theory, Bowenian intergenerational
theory (1966), structural theories of
Minuchin (1974) and of Selvini-Palazzoli
and her colleagues (1978) all were grand
enough to calm the anxieties of the aca-
demic disciplines that came to sponsor
family work. They spoke of social systems
and their laws of operation in the same
high scientific way Freud had spoken of
the operation of the unconscious.
The effect was to reinforce the idea that
we were engaged in something quite
new—indeed, novelty became our un-
thinking criterion of interest, since we
were putting distance between ourselves
and those incorrigible traditionalists, the
psychoanalysts. We tended to ascribe our
effectiveness to the fact that we were us-
ing a new theory, rather than to our opti-
mism, our attunement to resonant folk-
traditions, or our imaginative embracing
of alternatives. This expectation of the
technical or theoretical breakthrough col-
ored everything. Murray Bowen invented
hundred-point medical scales of differen-
tiation, a “three-generation hypothesis,”
and neologisms like “ego mass,” which
gave his ideas an aura of scientific discov-
ery. Edgar Auerswald, a brilliant and
imaginative clinician and organizer of
natural social supports, maintained that
systems theory, “a new epistemology,”
was the source of his insights, though his
kind of thinking had been building— un-
labelled as to theory—in the tradition of
imaginative social work for a long time.
The image of family therapy as a new
technique constricted our thinking. In
retrospect, one of the most interesting
70 / FAMILY PROCESS
constrictions was the way in which Haley,
at Bateson’s suggestion, interviewed Mil-
ton Erickson, and then expounded his
methods to the new breed of therapists—
especially family therapists—in 1973.
This book, Uncommon Therapy, por-
trayed Erickson as a masterful tactician
whose hypnotic devices were simply a
novel version of paradoxical power tac-
tics, following theories similar to others
that had been developed at MRI. It was
the first most of us had heard of Erickson,
and from this emphasis on power, nov-
elty, and invention, we missed the long
tradition of mesmeric and hypnotic heal-
ing that lay behind his work, to which I
will return at the end of my description of
the second history.
As a witness and participant in those
discussions in the 1960s about family
therapy as a technical improvement, I can
give my view of the effect of systems
thinking on our attitudes toward what we
were doing. Ideas such as paradoxical in-
struction, strategic therapy, solution-
based therapy and others that came out of
MRI, had the effect of shaking up our
thinking. They liberated us to look else-
where in the system for strategic moves
not directed at the symptomatic patient,
and this liberation was a great aid to in-
vention, imparting hopefulness to thera-
pist and client alike. Systems thinking
did encourage family therapists to look
for solutions to the presenting problems
in other places in society and the family
besides the part that presented the symp-
toms. On the one hand, it loosened up our
ideas about options for intervention, and
for that it deserves credit. On the other
hand, the ethos of the scientific invention
gave us an exaggerated sense of power,
and an interest in power as the name of
our game.
In sum, like surgeons after invention of
X-ray devices, we knew where to operate.
And like surgeons, we have to accept, on
later reflection, some of the downside of
our over-confidence. It is known that
Bateson himself was appalled at the uses
to which his insights were put (Bateson &
Bateson, 1987). And then, in terms of ef-
fectiveness, did Bateson’s system theory
actually improve the treatment of partic-
ular conditions? The record in the treat-
ment of schizophrenia, for example, is
negative. Whether such theories always
or usually pointed in the right direction is
a scientific, rather than historical, ques-
tion, which I take up elsewhere (Beels,
2001).
A NEW (OLDER) HISTORY
As the family therapy field today shifts
about, trying to find a comfortable new
posture in a changing world, a different
view of history may help us to find our
place. The appearance of family therapy
simultaneously in many different places
in mid-twentieth century United States is
part of a much larger story than the one I
have sketched above. Certainly it is part
of the larger story of eclectic psychother-
apy. In his book, Mind Games: American
Culture and the Birth of Psychotherapy
(1998), Eric Caplan calls for a history of
nonpsychoanalytic treatment. Respond-
ing to the preoccupation of other histori-
ans and critics with Freud studies, he be-
gins his history, not with Freud, but with
the early history of the railroads, and the
concerns of American railroad surgeons to
understand the nature and treatment of
psychological trauma following collisions,
long before anything called “psychother-
apy” was thought of. Caplan goes on to
include in his history some of the follow-
ers of mesmerism in the early nineteenth
century, as well as the broad, pragmatic
origins of American psychiatry and psy-
chology a whole generation before Freud’s
arrival. There was something going on in
the professional part of American collec-
tive thought that was already moving in
the same direction that family therapy
would eventually go. If the history of
BEELS
these ideas and practices could be traced,
we might see ourselves in a different per-
spective, and could understand some ap-
parent contradictions of the present dif-
ferently.
Social Work
To begin with the practice of seeing
families in order to help them, consider
the early history of the social work profes-
sion.2 Roy Lubove (1965) shows how par-
ish visits by ministers and deacons were
gradually organized by civic associations
into an upper-class program of “repress-
ing mendicancy” among the poor in north-
eastern cities such as Philadelphia, New
York, Boston, and Buffalo. These visits
focused on the resources of the family.
The earliest debates were about whether
the most effective approach was “alms” or
“a friend”—whether the poor benefited
from carefully rationed grants of money
or simply from contact with the inspiring
example of success and organization pro-
vided by their betters.
The career of Mary Richmond shows
how both of these paternalistic models
were discarded in favor of a new and dif-
ferent form of consultation to the families
and their resources—a consultation based
on “facts.” Richmond began as the secre-
tary and treasurer of one of those organi-
zations, and ended, after a fellowship at
the Russell Sage Foundation, as the au-
thor of Social Diagnosis (Richmond,
1917), the founding document of the social
work profession. In it, she describes a
method of assembling “facts” from visit-
2
In the successive editions of textbooks of family
therapy that have appeared under the editorship of
William Nichols since 1984, there have been de-
tailed and thoughtful introductory chapters on its
history. The earlier versions of that chapter were
very much along the lines of the official history I
have described; but the latest, Nichols & Schwartz
(1991), prompted by Bradhill & Saunders’ 1988
Handbook, acknowledges the contribution of social
work.
Fam. Proc., Vol. 41, Spring, 2002
/ 71
ing and assessing the real environment of
distressed people, most especially the
family environment. Richmond was a true
“systems” thinker, seeing the family in
interaction with many levels of commu-
nity and society around it. She also relied
on the psychiatric insights of the earliest
students of “juvenile delinquency”—Wil-
liam Healy at the Judge Baker Clinic, for
example, with its detailed medical and
social case records—to provide a complex,
multidimensionally unique assessment of
each “case.” The purpose of such work
changed from the relief of poverty and of
its contributing causes, such as alcohol-
ism, to the relief of suffering.
Reading Social Diagnosis, I am im-
pressed, first, by what an intensely em-
pirical document it is. Richmond compiled
this handbook of casework practice from
an enormous amount of experience. She
employed two assistants for a year to
search the written records of hundreds of
different agencies in five cities. This was
the beginning of more years of surveys,
conferences, questionnaires, and statisti-
cal study. Her method is based, then, on
an interest in the details of what is actu-
ally being done in the field, rather than on
moral or theoretical precepts of how
things ought to be. This is what she
means by “facts” and their investigation,
an interest that is part of the broadly
empirical tradition in American social sci-
ence that I think we encounter repeatedly
in this longer history.
Further, I am impressed by the open-
ness to complexity, to alternate explana-
tions, that Social Diagnosis recommends
to the caseworker. The worker’s job at
that time, after all, was not to do family
therapy, but to classify and identify the
problem in the case, and recommend a
solution. Within those confines, however,
Richmond recommends a strongly collab-
orative stance, an open mind, and a will-
ingness to search out the whole field of
social support before coming to a conclu-
72 / FAMILY PROCESS
sion. “What are the family’s plans and
ambitions for the future? What moral and
temperamental characteristics of each
member can be reckoned with as assets,
or must be recognized as liabilities in the
shaping of that future?” (p. 381).
Ann Hartman and Joan Laird, in the
historical introduction to their Family-
Centered Casework (1983), point out that
Richmond’s Social Diagnosis described
the family as “the case.” Richmond was
lecturing on the importance of the family
as the determinant of behavior and
thought as early as 1908. Her position on
this was later challenged by other leaders
of the field, who urged the alternative,
working in individual interviews with sin-
gle clients, hoping to bring into their prac-
tice the new ideas of individual psychol-
ogy and psychoanalysis. Thus began a
long struggle, documented by Hartman
and Laird, between family, individual,
and group or community practice (and
theory) within social work.
There are a number of later contribu-
tions by social workers to the history of
family therapy that, when assembled to-
gether, are striking in their pragmatic
and eclectic point of view. The first that
comes to mind is the contribution of early
teachers such as Virginia Satir. A social
worker with long experience with families
in private practice in Chicago, plus “nine
years on the couch” (personal communica-
tion). Satir was the first director of train-
ing at MRI. She was interested in systems
theory, but a look at her books and train-
ing tapes over the years shows her to be
eclectic, appropriating experiential, psy-
chodramatic, and other approaches, plus
a language of her own that owed much to
the Human Potential Movement of her
time, and her association with Fritz Perls
and Gestalt Therapy. I think a complete
history of family therapy would review
the origins of other early centers of train-
ing and distinguish the contributions
their social workers made to training and
practice—Braulio Montalvo in Philadel-
phia, Peggy Papp at Ackerman, Alice Cor-
nelison at Yale, and others.
A contribution that has been of partic-
ular interest to me is that of Carol Ander-
son and Gerald Hogarty (Anderson, Ho-
garty, & Reiss, 1981) to the treatment of
schizophrenia, when they were social
workers in charge of a research project on
the family aspects of that illness. It is
important to remember that the domi-
nant theories of family relations in schizo-
phrenia at the time were psychoanalytic
(Fromm-Reichmann’s schizophrenogenic
mother) and family-systems (Bateson’s
double bind, and Laing’s “mystification”),
strongly blaming the family environment
for causing the illness. These theories had
elegance of observation and sweeping lit-
erary and philosophical connections to
recommend them. They held out little
prospect for change other than liberating
the patient from the clutches of the fam-
ily. They were magnificent, but Anderson
and Hogarty were in a position to observe
that they didn’t work as a basis for help-
ing families and patients to live lives of
progressive emancipation from the ill-
ness. Instead, Anderson and Hogarty set
out to construct an eclectic practice that
combined what was becoming known of
the biology of the illness; the construction
the family members made of their own
experience; an established social work
practice of sympathetic interviewing and
joining; and an educational and multi-
family group work practice that borrowed
from cognitive psychology as well. They
then documented the effectiveness of
their eclectic method. The effective tri-
umph of their model of psychoeducational
treatment of schizophrenia over the more
glamorous and “interesting” theories is
for me a model of how scientific thinking
should work in our business.
Another example of the pragmatic res-
olution of theoretical debate by a group of
social workers is The Women’s Project.
BEELS
Here a group of four social workers, Mari-
anne Walters, Betty Carter, Peggy Papp,
and Olga Silverstein (1988)— each of
whom had been taught in earlier times by
male psychiatrists of quite different theo-
retical positions (Bowen, Ackerman, and
Minuchin)— got together to see what they
could make of their common experience as
women and therapists. The result was a
contribution to a very pragmatic feminist
family therapy.
Finally, two social workers from Aus-
tralia and New Zealand, Michael White
and David Epston, have made a signifi-
cant addition to our work without claim-
ing it as an invention. The influence their
writings and teaching have had on the
spread of narrative approaches to family
therapy, as well as to therapies in gen-
eral, began in the eminently pragmatic
environment of a part of the world where
social work practice, feminism, and com-
munity work were all more important
than psychoanalysis as models of therapy.
They started with videotapes of American
family therapists. This led to a conceptu-
alization of family work quite different
from what had gone before, even from the
American models they studied early in
their careers. They were liberated, it
seems to me, from the American need to
have a general systems theory that could
stand up to psychoanalytic theory. Each
of these three developments—psychoedu-
cation, the feminist critique, and narra-
tive— has been a departure from the for-
mal elegance of Batesonian systems
thinking.
Social Psychiatry
My own experience of family therapy
began in a very pragmatic situation. I
first encountered it on a tree-lined street
in the Bronx where, as a first-year psychi-
atric resident in 1962, I went to work at a
day hospital—an experimental alterna-
tive to hospital admission. The patients
were mostly suffering a relapse with a
Fam. Proc., Vol. 41, Spring, 2002
/ 73
recurrence of schizophrenic symptoms,
and the purpose of the day hospital was to
offer them and their families an alterna-
tive to the locked ward. The patients usu-
ally liked the idea, but in order to sell it to
the families, we had to offer them imme-
diate and strong sympathy for the dis-
tressing experiences that had led them to
the emergency room, plus hope that in
return for their trouble of getting the pa-
tient up in the morning to come to spend
the day with us, the life they and their
unfortunate family member were having
would improve. And we quickly learned to
conduct a kind of friendly, intensely in-
volved and supportive, nonblaming fam-
ily meeting that was quite different from
the more elegant and magisterial models
of the time.
Thus I entered family therapy through
the treatment of schizophrenia, as part of
the new movement of social and commu-
nity psychiatry. The following year, 1963,
President Kennedy announced federal
support for that movement as a “bold new
approach” to mental illness, embodied in
the Community Mental Health Centers
Act. As Israel Zwerling (1965) said, the
strengthening of work with the family
was one of the distinctive foundations of
community psychiatry, the others being
responsibility for patient populations
rather than individual patients, and the
preventive, anticipatory stance that re-
sulted from that responsibility. So the de-
cision to treat the severely mentally ill in
the community was one of the cultural
determinants of family therapy.
But the treatment of psychosis was only
one of the three doors that then opened
between a professional discipline and the
practice of “treating” more than one per-
son in the room. Since it was associated
with a psychiatric illness, it was the door
through which many psychiatrists en-
tered family work (Jackson, Bowen, and
Wynne, come to mind). The other two
doors—the family treatment of child/ado-
74 / FAMILY PROCESS
lescent problems and marital therapy—
had been open for a long time. Child guid-
ance clinics that worked with families,
and marriage counseling for couples, were
both part of the social work practice of the
1920s (Nichols & Schwartz, 1991), which
in turn grew out of a pragmatic under-
standing of how family organization is
one of the natural keys to social support.
The importance of families to schizophre-
nia, parents to children, and husbands
and wives to each other, led to family
therapy as a problem-solving enterprise
promoting collaboration and common fo-
cus among family members. It arose out of
evident need in many different places be-
fore, and independent of, systems theory.
I have used the word “pragmatic” to de-
scribe many of these developments, and a
theory for this kind of therapy, if it had to
have one, would be pragmatism.
William James and Pragmatism
George Santayana quipped that prag-
matism was not so much a philosophy as
an excuse for not having one. The reader
may feel that in that spirit I have been
sweeping everything into the catchall of a
history of family therapy and using “prag-
matism” as a string to bind it together. To
counter that objection I want to look into
the origins of pragmatism at the begin-
ning of the twentieth century, to disclose
there the historical connection between
looking at the practical consequences of
psychological phenomena and taking a
widely inclusive approach to social psy-
chology.
The idea begins with William James,
the founder of academic psychology in the
United States. As the professor of that
new department at Harvard, he spon-
sored its first PhD, awarded in 1878 to G.
Stanley Hall (later president of Clark
University and host to Freud’s lectures).
Of course, this social conception of mind
was not unique to James. Here is James
Jackson Putnam, his medical school
classmate, a correspondent and admirer
of Freud, and a founder of the Boston
Psychoanalytic Society, quoted by Mary
Richmond (1917) on the first page of So-
cial Diagnosis:
One of the most striking facts with regard to
the consciousness of any human being is
that it is interwoven with the lives of others.
It is in each man’s social relations that his
mental history is mainly written, and it is in
his social relations likewise that the causes
of the disorders that threaten his happiness
and his effectiveness, and the means for se-
curing his recovery, are to be mainly sought.
This was an American idea of psychol-
ogy, articulated early in the 1880s, and
clearly, by William James.3 He believed
that what is experienced as the “self” is
conditional in large part on the social the-
atre: “a man has as many social selves as
there are individuals who recognize him
and carry an image of him in their mind”
(James, 1981, pp. 281–282). There may be
“a discordant splitting, as where one is
afraid to let one set of his acquaintances
know him as he is elsewhere.” This fear is
a tribute to the power of a social self to
determine identity, an example of the fact
that the social selves are as important as
those other more individual ones, the in-
carnation in the bodily self, and the spir-
itual self that is in touch with higher and
greater things.
When he later came to write about the
spiritual self in The Varieties of Religious
Experience (1902), James scoured the
world, both the anecdotal present and the
3
Caplan gives a fascinating account of the roles
James, Hall, Putnam, Boris Sidis, Adolf Meyer, and
Morton Prince played in the founding of a remark-
ably contemporary American system of psychology/
psychiatry. They had an idea of the unconscious
based on Janet and Bernheim, quite independent of
Freud’s system. This group of two psychologists, two
neurologists, and two psychiatrists met frequently
at Prince’s house in Boston in the 1880s.
BEELS
scriptural and literary past, for instances,
examined in detail, of this mysterious
phenomenon. His method was eclectic
and empirical, his curiosity directed to-
ward effects and phenomena. In addition
to describing the transports of Sts.
Theresa and Francis and the exercises of
St. Ignatius, he looked at religion as ther-
apy—the “cure of the sick soul.” His lead-
ing example was New Thought, “the reli-
gion of healthy-mindedness,” which he de-
scribed, at the time of those lectures
(1902), as “recently poured over America,
and seems to be gathering force every
day” (p. 92).
New Thought was a philosophy and
method propagated by a network of lay
healers whose origins can be traced to
mesmerism. Its “doctrinal sources,”
James noted were various: the Gospels;
transcendentalism; Berkeleyan idealism;
spiritism— especially the idea of spirits as
seeking enlightenment and development;
popular notions of evolution; Hinduism,
with its image of the rebirth of souls. “The
leaders in this faith have had an intuitive
belief in the all-saving power of healthy-
minded attitudes as such, in the conquer-
ing efficacy of courage, hope and trust,
and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear,
worry, and all nervously precautionary
states of mind” (p. 93). To this ideological
background, New Thought added as tech-
nique “an unprecedentedly great use of
the subconscious life . . . exercise in pas-
sive relaxation, concentration and medi-
tation . . . and something like hypnotic
practice.” An important difference be-
tween New Thought mind cures and
Christian Science was the willingness of
New Thought to integrate its practice
with religion and medicine: it did not, as
Christian Science did, ask its followers to
reject their doctors and their churches.
James was actually giving his listeners
a piece of his own experience. He suffered
from long and disabling bouts of depres-
sion, and found intermittent relief in his
Fam. Proc., Vol. 41, Spring, 2002
/ 75
sessions with a specialist in “mind-cure,”
a Boston woman whose methods (but not
her name) we know from James’ corre-
spondence (Simon, 1998). At that time, the
1880s, psychotherapy was not thought of as
a professional activity requiring an aca-
demic degree. Clearly, the psychology,
psychiatry, and social work professions
were only beginning to define themselves,
let alone specify their relationship to psy-
chotherapy. James had a pragmatic ap-
proach to the professionalization of psy-
chotherapy. When his medical colleagues
in Massachusetts tried to define it as a
medical specialty in 1898, and outlaw
practices such as mind cure, he objected
strenuously. His position was: “What the
real interest of medicine requires is that
mental therapeutics should not be
stamped out, but studied and its laws as-
certained” (Caplan, 1998, p. 63).
By “mental therapeutics” he meant not
only the mind cure of New Thought.
There were other psychotherapies avail-
able in James’ Boston. The “Emmanuel
Movement” was slightly more respectable
since it was sponsored by Emmanuel
Episcopal Church. It was a combination of
education, group ritual, and pastoral
counseling (Hale, 1971). And there was
Christian Science, which James also
tried, but found unsatisfactory. What re-
ally cured his depressions, he wrote later
in life, was the continual inspiration of his
relationship with his wife, Alice (Simon,
1998, p. 282). This is a judgment that
brings him into agreement with a current
idea about marital therapy—the healing
power of an intimate relationship (Lewis,
2000).
Besides his support of and participation
in nonmedical psychotherapy, James
spent a large part of his professional en-
ergies investigating the claims of medi-
ums who appeared to be in touch with the
spirits of the dead, a serious concern of
several of his fellow psychologists at that
time. He found neither mesmeric psycho-
76 / FAMILY PROCESS
therapy nor spiritism incompatible with
pragmatism. On the contrary, his ap-
proach to lay healing practices was a
prime example of pragmatism. He saw
psychological healing, as he did his own
profession, medicine, as something that
contained a great deal of “humbug,” but
also had some obvious usefulness. If
mind-cure worked, if ghosts had mes-
sages for us, and those messages had con-
sequences, James wanted to know about
it, and never mind the theoretical contra-
dictions that might ensue. Such phenom-
ena were to be investigated empirically,
much like medical physiology, and the
boundaries of the organism under inves-
tigation were defined by pragmatic inves-
tigation—the group, the family, the per-
son, the ghostly dead, whatever suited the
project of understanding how it worked.
John Dewey:
Pragmatic Social Systems
That inclusive, social-organic view of
mind is certainly what John Dewey,
James’ most influential student, learned
from him. Dewey was, more than anyone
else, responsible for bringing it alive into
American professional and academic life.
As the founding chairman of what was
then called philosophy at the University
of Chicago, he put pragmatism into action
in the form of the empirical research ac-
tivities of the social sciences. Dewey
guided the expansion of the philosophy
department’s activities into social psy-
chology, education, anthropology, and the
analysis of communication (Faris, 1967).
His students invented the opinion poll,
and studied the anthropology of the Pol-
ish peasant in order to understand the
problems of Polish immigrants in Chi-
cago. Dewey himself started the famous
Laboratory School for working out the so-
cial conditions in which children learned.
At the conceptual heart of the depart-
ment was Dewey’s closest colleague,
George Herbert Mead, another graduate
student of James’. Mead lectured on the
indivisibly social nature of mind. His
ideas, brought together in a collection
called Mind, Self and Society (1962), cen-
tered on a picture of communication aris-
ing in the animal world as a patterned set
of signals with which animals indicate
their intentions to one another. The play
of dogs, for example, the growls, whines,
baring of teeth, tail-wagging, and bowing
to the ground, was not, as Charles Darwin
supposed, an expression of urgent “inner”
emotional states. It was rather a series of
moves in a forward-looking game of bids
for hierarchy and subordination, a pat-
terned communication sequence that con-
tained proposals and responses for what
will be the structure of the group. It was
what Bateson would have called a self-
regulating system, serving smooth group
functioning. And it was the model for the
detailed study of human communication,
of language, and gesture.
Edward Sapir:
Process of Communication
The study of those “higher” forms of
mental life—language, gesture, and the
ideation that accompanied them—was
vigorously empirical at Chicago. Out-
standing among the second generation of
social scientists there was the anthropol-
ogist and linguist (and poet and literary
critic) Edward Sapir (1968) whose spe-
cialty was the structure of Native Ameri-
can languages. He taught that language
was a social process that shaped the
forms of thought (the “Sapir-Whorf hy-
pothesis”). Sapir also formulated a lan-
guage of gestures and body movements,
“an elaborate and secret code that is writ-
ten nowhere, known by none, and under-
stood by all” (Sapir, 1968, p. 556), which
was the precursor of Scheflen and Bird-
whistell’s “context analysis” (Scheflen,
1964, 1965). This was a system of analyz-
ing the movements and gestures coordi-
nated with speech in conversations, such
BEELS
as their movies of family interviews con-
ducted by Carl Whitaker and James Ma-
lone. The most recent appearance of this
approach is “conversational analysis,” de-
veloped as a qualitative technique in the
investigation of family therapy process
(Gale & Newfield, 1992; Kogan & Gale,
1997). I emphasize this lineage from an-
thropology and linguistics because it is
one of the places where a rigorous natural
history method of observing interaction
has made an important appearance as an
analytic aid to research in family therapy.
In his own time, however, Sapir’s most
important and enduring impact on our
history was in what he taught Harry
Stack Sullivan, the American psychiatrist
who invented interpersonal psychother-
apy.4 They were close colleagues. Sullivan
the psychiatrist taught Sapir and his fel-
low anthropologists much that would be
useful in their project of linking childrear-
ing practices and ethnic character, but
Sapir taught Sullivan about the impact of
cultural categories on the formation of
psychopathology—the importance of lin-
guistic and other symbolic processes in
the shaping of normal and abnormal
thought. And through Sullivan, this no-
tion has entered the world of non-Freud-
ian psychotherapy: not only interpersonal
relationships but also cultural forms of
thought from the larger society influence
both psychopathology and its treatment.
The modern development of psychoana-
lytic thinking that has been called “inter-
subjective” originated with Sullivan.5
4
See Vol. 64(1) of Psychiatry (2001) for Sapir’s
first (1938) contribution to Sullivan’s new journal,
with four modern commentaries on their relation-
ship.
5
Writing about Sapir and Sullivan leads me to
think of my own debt to the anthropologist Vivian
Garrison and her studies of espiritismo. Part of this
history of the academic connections of family ther-
apy might be a series of pairs of anthropologists and
psychiatrists. In addition to Sapir and Sullivan,
Gregory Bateson and Don Jackson (or Jurgen
Fam. Proc., Vol. 41, Spring, 2002
/ 77
THE BEGINNING OF “FAMILY THERAPY”
If these ideas had been around for so
long in social work and psychology, and
had been introduced into psychiatry by
Sullivan in the 1930s, why did family
therapy take another 20 years to appear?
What produced the “invention” of family
therapy in the late 1950s? It was the fact
that some psychiatrists, the emblematic
therapists of that day, broke away from
the confidential individual interview that
was their profession’s gold standard of
practice. If a psychiatrist saw a family, it
was news, and it required a supporting
theory. They were emboldened by the new
community psychiatry practice of meeting
patients in their “natural” environments,
as well as their experience, in World War
II, of treating battle trauma through
brief, supportive and “group” methods. In
many centers, psychiatrists provided the
prestige, and social workers, who were
already comfortable meeting with fami-
lies, did the practical teaching.
For some in all disciplines, a new, su-
pra-professional identification as “family
therapists” became more important than
the professional degree that legitimized
their practice and determined their fees.
For many social workers this was an ad-
vance into a position of leadership in fam-
ily therapy institutes and a training re-
sponsibility that would not have been theirs
inside the boundary of their profession.
There were other social phenomena of
the 1960s that contributed to the timing
of family therapy’s emergence. The fam-
ily-centeredness of that era’s social ideals
has been well documented (Coontz, 1992).
Another example is the public confession
of private life, a fruition of what James
Ruesch) would be a second pair. Ray Birdwhistell
and Albert Scheflen would be a third. Florence
Kluckhohn, for a fourth, educated the whole Group
for the Advancement of Psychiatry (GAP) Commit-
tee on the Family in the 1960s.
78 / FAMILY PROCESS
would have called “the religion of healthy-
mindedness.” Communes, be-ins, love-ins,
marathon groups, open sexuality, and
new forms of ritual in the theater, encour-
aged Americans to think that mental
health was promoted by the open demon-
stration of feeling in an atmosphere of
“naturally” intimate group support. Fam-
ily therapists domesticated this cultural
sanction for the exposure of feelings.
The Heritage of Mesmer
We come now to the third part of the
American therapeutic culture, besides psy-
chology and social work, that had an impor-
tant cultural influence on family therapy.
Naming it is a problem, because the people
who make it up all have such different be-
liefs that they might be revolted by finding
themselves grouped together. That (lit-
erally) anomalous quality is, as we shall
see, one of its curious strengths. I will call it
mesmerism, as several historians have
done. We have already met it in James’
description of “New Thought.”
This development originated with An-
ton Mesmer, the eighteenth-century Aus-
trian physician who had his greatest in-
fluence in pre-revolutionary Paris as a
protégé of Marie Antoinette. Although
Mesmer’s ideas of animal magnetism
were discredited in his own time by no
less an authority than a scientific review
committee headed by Benjamin Franklin
and Antoine Lavoisier, his ideas and prac-
tice persisted and replicated themselves
throughout the popular psychology: of
France (Darnton, 1968), of England
(Winter, 1998), and the United States
(Fuller, 1982; Caplan, 1998) as well. This
popular mesmerism was more than a way
of experimenting with trance and other
altered states: it was a model of transper-
sonal influence or intersubjective psychol-
ogy. It was subject to a great variety of
fanciful explanations, from Mesmer’s
original “scientific” idea of magnetic at-
traction and influence between minds, to
the many spiritual and religious systems
that later became attached to it.
One explanatory system that took over
part of it was medicine. A Scottish sur-
geon, James Braid, became interested in
it in 1840 as a form of anesthesia and of
experimentation with the nervous system
(Miller, 1995). Thus medicalized, and re-
named “hypnosis,” it began to have a cer-
tain professional respectability and has
continued to be the subject of serious psy-
chological and physiological investiga-
tion. But popular mesmerism also contin-
ued to flourish and grow as an entertain-
ment and as a practice that explained or
amplified systems of folk psychology and
religious faith healing. One way it en-
tered the United States was through the
Hispanic Caribbean and Brazil (Garrison,
1982) where it was an important part of
the Latino folk-healing cult, espiritismo.
It entered into the dominant American
culture in 1832 as the teaching of a
French mesmerist, and gained, according
to Fuller and Caplan, a particularly ener-
getic following under the leadership of the
American itinerant lecturer Phineas P.
Quimby, whose students included Mary
Baker Eddy (Christian Science), and Julius
and Maretta Dresser (New Thought).
New England transcendentalism pro-
vided a particularly fertile soil for the
spread of training programs in lay ther-
apy based on the Dressers’ system, and
there were mind cure therapists, mostly
women, doing individual therapy (such as
that of James’ “doctoress”) and conduct-
ing retreats in many parts of the North-
east. One text, Hudson’s The Laws of Psy-
chic Phenomena (1893; cited in Caplan,
p. 82), sold 100,000 copies. Meyer (1980)
describes the various religious groups
that descended from this tradition, not
only Christian Science, but also Norman
Vincent Peale’s Positive Thinking, the
Dale Carnegie movement, and the Inner
Child people of our own time.
BEELS
What was the key to the American suc-
cess of the mesmeric tradition? Fuller sug-
gests that, in Europe, political, medical,
and religious spheres of life were compart-
mentalized by long historical traditions.
“By contrast, mesmerism found America
still without institutions cohesive enough to
impart order to personal and social life” (p.
15). It was a sort of freewheeling and vital
no-man’s land, untrammeled by state reli-
gion, but yearning for transcendence and
deliverance. New Thought flourished in the
educated middle-class of New England cit-
ies and towns, at the same time as revival-
tent evangelistic healing flourished among
the Protestant working- and middle-class.
As with institutions, I think, so also with
language and ideas. Perhaps the very ab-
sence of settled science and articulated the-
ory allowed the mesmeric groups to speak
in a poetic, popular, and religious vernacu-
lar, embracing popular forms of speech and
belief that professional psychotherapy has
not allowed itself until recently.
Milton Erickson:
Hypnotherapy
The person who pulled all this together
for family therapy was Milton Erickson.
His genius was to put all this spiritual
story-telling together with medical hyp-
nosis in a form that was useful in many
kinds of therapy, including working with
families. As a famous teacher, and presi-
dent of the Society of Medical Hypnotists,
he brought together the respectable and
the fanciful parts of the mesmeric tradi-
tion. Erickson noticed the importance of
rituals, stories, fantasies, and fairy tales
in the procedures of hypnotherapy. Most
important, he was interested in the mu-
tual influences between these imaginings
and group and family process. He saw
that trance was not a special physiologi-
cal state induced by a medical practitio-
ner into a passive “subject” with a mea-
surable degree of “hypnotizeability.” He
proposed instead that the hypnotist and
Fam. Proc., Vol. 41, Spring, 2002
/ 79
the subject were collaborating on a story
project together, and the collaborative
trance could include family members and
group members as well. Trance, he said,
was what we all put each other into all the
time, and it is endemic to family life, pro-
ducing both symptoms and the relief of
symptoms. This is especially well worked
out by a family therapist who was a stu-
dent of both Erickson and Minuchin—
Michelle Ritterman (1983).
Ritterman emphasizes an Ericksonian
idea even more important for the working
out of this third strain in our history of
family therapy. By concentrating on the
way in which a group, whether hypnotist
and subject, husband and wife, or a group of
family members, use local, indigenous, ver-
nacular materials to construct the meta-
phors they use in their improvisational mu-
tual hypnosis, Erickson’s students opened
the door to a new understanding of the rit-
ual, religious, and apparently magical as-
pects of therapy. In this way, the interper-
sonal experience of what is called “psycho-
therapy” in our scientific culture is like the
altered mental states common to healing
experiences in all cultures. Our next agenda
—now going on in journals such as “The
Anthropology of Consciousness” as well as
the work of psychiatrist-anthropologists
such as Arthur Kleinman—is to use anthro-
pological observation to study these phe-
nomena, perhaps to generate what James
called the laws of “mental therapeutics.”
The Anthropology of Consciousness6
As a beginning on this project, if we lay
side-by-side anthropological studies of
healing or religious practices, hypnother-
6
This is the title of a journal, published since
1993, in which hypnosis, trance states found in the
healing rituals of many cultures, and a variety of
related social and psychological phenomena, are an-
alyzed by anthropologists and members of other dis-
ciplines. William James would be at home in these
pages, and in fact is occasionally cited.
80 / FAMILY PROCESS
apy texts (such as “The Structure of
Magic” (Grinder & Bandler, 1976), and
writings on narrative therapy, the simi-
larities are striking. The narrative thera-
pists have an anthropological interest in
incorporating the vernacular beliefs—the
uniquely expressed personal histories— of
the group they are consulting with, grant-
ing them validity in their own terms.
Ericksonian hypnotherapists are study-
ing the natural history of the trance
states of their subjects, trying to be as
gentle and non-interfering as possible,
working within the language of the sub-
ject’s own mental world. The main differ-
ence between the anthropologists study-
ing a religious or ritual practice, and the
therapists doing hypnosis or family ther-
apy, is that the therapists have been
asked to make some desired change in the
phenomenon under study, to shift for ex-
ample one metaphor for a preferred one,
staying nevertheless within the indige-
nous belief system with which the family
validates its experience.
There is a place here to integrate our
understanding of family therapy, narra-
tive therapy, hypnotherapy, behavior
therapy, and perhaps others—perhaps
even psychoanalysis. Once you stop try-
ing to look for “scientifically correct” the-
ory and simply pay attention as an an-
thropologist would to sequences of events,
patterns of behavior, states of mind, and
small predictable outcomes—microsuc-
cesses in the process—you can see a way
of bringing these into a natural history,
and thence perhaps a science, of nonpsy-
choanalytic therapies. The methods of
thought and observation involved in ex-
amining these therapies are contributed
by the line of investigators running from
G. H. Mead and Sapir down through the
semioticists who inspired Margaret Mead
and Gregory Bateson to take sequential
photographs of breast-feeding and baby-
washing in different cultures. The next
generation of systematic observers is typ-
ified by Stern’s (1985) videotapes of moth-
ers and newborns, documenting “attach-
ment,” and the whole video-generation of
the 60s and 70s, watching therapy rather
than writing about it, or at least doing a
lot of watching before writing.
This anthropological point of view
would also comprehend the intersection
here with another part of American his-
tory—the construction of ideal communi-
ties: utopias, support groups, retreats,
healing cults, communes, etc. If we look at
these intentionally prosthetic groups or
communities of short or long duration, we
can see them as fictive ideal families, de-
signed to supply a missing element in our
intimate lives. This radical fringe has al-
ways developed outside the boundaries of
official approval, combining the danger of
anti-science (here Christian Science is an
infamous example) with other conditions
that promote creativity. Such research
would also carry a public health chal-
lenge: to identify the signs of danger—as,
for example, the danger of closed and ex-
clusive healing cults that exploit the vul-
nerability of isolated, traumatized young
people.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, then, we discover two
roles for science in the evaluation of ther-
apies. One is the description and mea-
surement of harm and benefit, the ulti-
mate pragmatic standard. The model for
such study is the rigorous epidemiologi-
cal, clinical trial, with good definition of
cases and comparison groups. The theory
used in this work is “experimental,” with
hypotheses meant to be challenged, in-
firmed, “falsified,” weighed against con-
traries of the comparison group, and if
found wanting, discarded. In this way we
acquire “evidence-based” therapeutics,
and identify harmful practice.
The other kind of theory—scientific in
quite a different way—is akin to narra-
tive, and qualitative work such as conver-
BEELS
sation analysis is essential to it. Its task is
not to challenge but to describe carefully
and with understanding. Thus the careful
natural-history examination of the fine
details of the process of therapy un-
cover—in the anthropological tradition—
the hidden similarities and differences in
practice that add to the official explana-
tions that healers give for their methods.
Apart from helping to settle the place of
“science” in our work, what benefits might
we expect from the exploration of a
broader cultural history of family ther-
apy? Contrasting such a history with that
of psychoanalysis might help us under-
stand their separate fates in the present,
and shed light on what can be expected of
them in the future. The origin of analysis
as the special practice of an elite with
scientific credentials helps to understand
why today there is still so much theoreti-
cal and “scientific” argument over the leg-
acy of Freud, so much effort to rescue a
continuity with his theory from the at-
tacks of philosophical and empirical crit-
ics.
Family therapy, on the other hand, ap-
pears to be drifting, without much pro-
test, into a varied stream of healing prac-
tices where its unique conceptual contri-
bution, “systems thinking,” is less and
less asserted or defended. It has even been
questioned, in some quarters, whether
“systems thinking,” is the sine qua non of
theory in family therapy (Hoffman, 1990).
History may be a way of recognizing our-
selves as participating in the larger
stream of culture I have been describing.
And looking at that history, we can see
that the coming together within family
therapy of narrative, hypnotic, educa-
tional, larger-systems interventions, as
well as our developing alliance with an-
thropology, with spirituality, and perhaps
(John Dewey would add) with political ac-
tivism—all have roots in a long American
past.
Fam. Proc., Vol. 41, Spring, 2002
/ 81
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State of the Art

THE PAL0 ALTO GROUP: DIFFICULTIES AND DIRECTIONS OF THE

INTERACTIONAL VIEW FOR HUMAN COMMUNICATION RESEARCH’

CAROL WIDER
Sun Francisco State University

During the past two decades the network of communication researchers known infor-
mally as the “Palo Alto Group” has published several hundred articles and more than 20
books on what has been variously termed the “New Communication” and the “Interac-
tional View.” The work of this group, however, has been largely neglected in human
communication research. The objectives of this essay are: (1) to summarize the theoreti-
cal and epistemological bases of the Interactional View, noting the pragmatic instances
for which this framework is invoked as explanation and justification; (2) to introduce
some of the conceptual and methodological difficulties which need be addressed in
formulating appropriate research; and (3) to suggest several general and specific di-
rections for research in human communication.

During the past two decades the network of It is, perhaps, a widely held misconception that
communication researchers known informally as the work of this group is concerned overwhelmingly
the “Palo Alto Group” has published several with communication pathologies, since both Bate-
hundred articles (many of them in their “own” son’s seminal piece, “Toward a Theory of
journal Family Process; the rest widely scattered) Schizophrenia” (Bateson, Jackson, Haley & Weak-
and more than 20 books related to what has been land, 1956), and Watzlawick’s widely-known
variously termed the “New Communication” Pragmatics appear to be grounded in a quest to
(Weakland, 1967) and the “Interactional View” unravel the mysteries of schizophrenia. In fact, the
(Watzlawick & Weakland, 1977).* While the work early work of Bateson’s 1952-1962 communication
of this group has found its way into most basic research project at the Veterans Administration
communication texts (Bochner, 1977, p. 332), it Hospital in Menlo Park, California, aimed to inves-
has been largely neglected in human communica- tigate thegeneral nature of communication in terms
tion research. One is hard pressed to find a current of levels (Weakland, 1977), and it was not until
communication text which does not cite at least 1954 when the initial grant was terminated that
Watzlawick’s 1967 Pragmatics of Human Commu- “partly for practical reasons and partly from a de-
nication, but of the 124 articles published in Human veloping tendency in that direction, it was decided
Communication Research from its inception to apply for a grant to investigate schizophrenic
through Spring 1978, only 16 reference any of the communication” (Haley, 1976a, p. 61). Bateson
work of the Palo Alto Group, and in only five of himself only recently reflected that “it was from
these cases are the references central to the essay psychiatry that we got our money, and we let our-
(Rogers & Farace, 1975; Bochner, 1976; Parks, selves be strongly and disastrously influenced by
1977; Scott, 1977; Bochner, 1978). the need to apply our science in that field” (1976, p.
xii). Further, through the years associates of the
Carol Wilder (Ph.D., Kent State University, 1974) is lecturer Palo Alto Group have maintained repeatedly that
and graduate coordinator, Department of Speech Communica- what they are proposing is ageneral view of human
tion, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA 94132. communication and that the emphasis on
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual
meeting of the International Communication Association, pathologies serves primarily to gain an understand-
Chicago, April, 1978. ing of the process by focusing upon the extremes
172 HUMAN COMMUNICATION RESEARCH / Vol. 5, No. 2, WINTER 1979
(Bateson et al., 1956, p. 261; Bateson, 1972, p.
272; Weakland, 1974, p. 271; Sluzki, Beavin, Tar-
nopolsky, & Veron, 1977, p. 221).
Further reason for our neglect may be attributed
to the fact that the very depth and expansiveness of
the approach, developed under Bateson’s theoreti-
cal and Jackson’s clinical leadership, has presented
such knotty conceptual problems and formidable
methodological challenges that it has been difficult
to create valid and workable research designs within
the prevailing epistemologies of our discipline.
Whatever the reasons for the relative oversight of
the Palo Alto Group in human communication re-
search, the present essay attempts to cut a path by:
(1) summarizing the otherwise fragmented theoreti-
cal and epistemological bases of the group, noting
the pragmatic instances for which this framework is
invoked as explanation and justification; (2) intro-
ducing some of the conceptual and methodological
difficulties which need to be addressed in formulat-
ing appropriate research; and (3) suggesting several
general and specific directions for research in
human communication.
THEORETICAL/EPISTEMOLOGICALBASES3
Presenting the view of the Palo Alto Group in a
succinct and coherent fashion is not in any way to
suggest that Bateson and his colleagues speak with
one voice. Such is far from the case. For instance,
the publication of Pragmatics of Human Communi-
cation, warmly received by the academic commu-
nity, met a cool and ambivalent reception from the
original Bateson research team who feared that the
book was premature and would hinder theoretical
development (Sluzki & Ransom, 1976, p. 190). A
full examination of the subtle and salient differences
among the group is beyond the scope of this review,
although Haley (1976a; 1976b pp. ix-x) has offered
his personal assessment of the main points of di-
vergence during the early years.4 Thus, the appa-
rently monolithic framework summarized here is
presented with strong qualification for the sake of
heuristic economy, mindful of Bateson’s admoni-
tion that “all typologies, any typologies, are mis-
leading’’ (Bateson & Goleman, 1978, p. 48).
That being said, one can assert that four main
epistemologicalhheoretical orientations emerge in
the work of the Palo Alto Group, namely: (1)
Cybernetics and General Systems Theory; (2) Rus-
sell’s Theory of Logical Types (Whitehead & Rus-
sell, 1910); (3) Galois’ mathematical Group
Theory; and (4) a “rules” orientation to communi-
cation behavior.
Cybernetics and Systems Theory
It is difficult to overestimate the effect which
cybernetics, information theory, and general sys-
tems theory have had upon Bateson’s thinking. As a
participant in the Macy Foundation Conferences-
during the course of which Weiner introduced the
term "cybernetics"-Bateson was deeply affected
by the epistemological implications of feedback and
the consequent notion of recursive process, espe-
cially vis-a-vis the linear Aristotelian (and later
Newtonian) logic and epistemics. Bateson asserted
that the difference between the Newtonian world (of
conservation and transformation of energy) and the
world of communication (of information, redun-
dancy, pattern, negentropy, etc.) was primarily that
the Newtonian world ascribed reality to objects,
excluding the context of the context-all metarela-
tionships-while communication theory examined
metarelationships to the exclusion of objects or
quantities (Bateson, 1972, p. 250; also Watzlawick
& Weakland, 1977, p. xii). Communication theory
as comprehended via cybernetics is thus argued, a la
Kuhn, to be epistemologically discontinuous from
Newtonian explanation. This controversial point is
neither trivial nor exclusively theoretical, and the
pragmatics implications of (in particular) feedback,
equifinality, redundancy, and homeostasis abound
in the therapeutic model and techniques of the Palo
Alto Group.
On the cybernetic concept of feedback rests one
of the significant therapeutic departures of the Palo
Alto Group, who express almost total disinterest in
the Freudian individualistic intrapsychic model,
which stresses the importance of personal insight
gained through exploring the past and the uncon-
scious in a one-to-one relationship with the
therapist. Rather, the focus of the Palo Alto Group
model is interactional, i.e., it considers the individ-
 Wilder
ual within the nexus of his or her important relation-
ships, most typically the interactional system of the
family (Jackson, 1965b). This is not unlike the shift
in communication research during the same period
from a speaker-centered view to a more holistic
transactional perspective. This shift of focus from
the individual to the social network (from objects to
patterns) has been likened to the shift from the earth
to the sun as the center of a relational universe: the
Copernican revolution in behavioral science
(Watzlawick & Weakland, 1977, p. 34).
Equifinality, the systems concept whereby iden-
tical final states may be reached from different ini-
tial conditions and through different developmental
pathways (von Bertalanffy, 1968, p. 132), is in-
voked as explanation and justification for one of the
most radical departures of the Palo Alto Group from
the Freudian tradition’s emphasis upon insight as a
therapeutic tool (see Jackson, 1965b;Watzlawick et
al., 1967, pp. 127-129; Weakland, 1977). Bateson
believed that much of early Freudian theory was
“upside down” in its view that the unconscious can
and should somehow be made conscious, stating
further that such a view is the product of “an almost
totally distorted epistemology” (1972, p. 136).
Bateson assumes, rather, that the unconscious is
continually manifested in the exchange of rnes-
sages, and one need go no further than behavioral
data to comprehend the necessary dimensions of
interaction.
The pragmatic consequence of this position is
that the therapeutic model of the Palo Alto Group
focuses upon what is currently observable in an
interactional system instead of why it is happening
orhow it got to be that way. If the same behavior can
spring from quite different causes, the argument
goes, then it is both more economical and more
effective to focus upon present process. By doing
so, one can significantly reduce the duration of
therapy as well as avoid promoting an individualis-
tic rather than a systems model of communication
behavior. This perspective is best exemplified at the
Mental Research Institute’s Brief Therapy Center in
Palo Alto, which operates on the fundamental pre-
mise that regardless of the origin or etiology of
human problems, such problems persist only if they
are maintained by the current and ongoing interac-
173
tional nexus. Thus, if the problem-maintaining be-
havior is changed or eliminated, the problem will be
alleviated regardless of its origins or duration
(Weakland, Fisch, Watzlawick, & Bodin, 1974).‘
Given this lack of interest in past cause and its
companion therapeutic objective of fostering in-
sight, one must come to understand the dysfunc-
tions of an interactional system through the observa-
tion of patterns made clear via redundancy in com-
munication behavior. Bateson has written that “the
essence and ruison dbtre of communication is the
creation of redundancy, meaning, pattern, predic-
tability, information, and/or the reduction of the
random by ‘restraint’” (1972, pp. 131-132). Since
systems are characterized and maintained by recur-
rent patterns of interaction among variables, iden-
tification of these recurrent sequences of problem-
maintaining (and often exacerbating) behavior be-
comes the first task. Those taking this view argue
that quite commonly the action taken to alleviate the
behavior of the other person instead aggravates it,
creating a positive feedback loop and another
“Game without End” (e.g., “The more he nags,
the more she withdraws; the more she withdraws,
the more he nags,” etc.). Thus, the observational
challenge is to identify the self-reinforcing patterns
made clear by their redundancy.
In working with disturbed families, Jackson ob-
served that sometimes they seemed to almost delib-
erately sabotage the treatment of the “identified
patient,” and even as the patient improved there
occurred, not infrequently, an alternation or sub-
stitution of illness within the family (Jackson,
1957). Thus, when Johnny stopped stealing cars,
Mary (previously the “model child”) began having
trouble in school. Jackson coined the term “family
homeostasis” to characterize this phenomenon,
suggesting that families interact on the basis of a
finite and economical set of norms derived from
relationship rules (Jackson, 1957; Jackson, 1965).
The homeostatic mechanisms operating within the
family, the means by which norms are defined and
enforced, can be seen as behaviors which delimit
the fluctuation of other behaviors along the range
where the norm is relevant, This clinically-derived
notion is not unlike the assumptions of the various
consistency theories of attitude stability and
174 HUMAN COMMUNICATION RESEARCH / Vol. 5, No. 2, WINTER 1979
change, although the focus upon a systems view of
family processes-which have been observed to be
qualitatively different from the interactional proc-
esses of ad hoc small groups (Bochner, 1976)-
gives the concept its own dimensions and distinc-
tiveness.
From the above discussion it should be clear how
indebted the Palo Alto Group is to systems theory
and terminology, invoking it for both abstract anal-
ysis and very specific therapeutic perspectives and
techniques.
Theory of Logical Types
Bateson’s initial 1952 project, funded by a re-
search grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, was
designed to investigate the nature of human com-
munication, specifically the nature and function of
paradoxical communication, as it could be under-
stood deductively through application of the Theory
of Logical Types. This theory, extrapolated by
Bateson from mathematical philosophy to human
communication behavior, remains today as the root
metaphor of the Batesonian approach (Bateson,
1978). Bateson believed strongly enough in the
power of the model to state that “insofar as be-
havioral scientists still ignore the problems of Prin-
cipia Mathernatica , they can claim approximately
sixty years of obsolescence” (1972, p. 279). It is,
however, important to note that Russell himself put
forth the doctrine tentatively, partly out of concern
with its apparent triviality (1968, p. 195), and its
epistemology has been seriously challenged by
Spencer Brown (1973), Von Foerster (1978), and
others.
The bare bones of the Theory of Types, which
deals with hierarchies in levels of abstraction, is
deceptively simple. Russell makes a distinction be-
tween classes and members of classes, the basic
postulate being that classes and members are of
different logical types: a class cannot be a member
of itself, nor can a member of the class be itself the
class. Hence, the class of ‘‘communication theo-
rists’’ is not itself a communication theorist, and the
confusion of class with member generates paradox.
Class is meta to member, the class of classes ismeta
to the class, and so forth.
Bateson became intrigued with how the Theory
of Types might illuminate the nature of paradoxical
communication while observing monkeys at play in
the San Francisco Zoo (1972, pp. 177-193). He
noted that their interactive sequences were similar
to those of combat (e.g., nipping each other), but
were clearly interpreted by both monkeys and
human observers as “not combat.” Bateson con-
cluded that the “combat” message of the bite must
be classified at the metacommunicative level by a
message that “this is play,” thus obviating a poten-
tially paradoxical message set.
The nature and function of paradox in human
communication has been discussed at length-if not
convincing precision-elsewhere (Watzlawick et
al., 1967, pp. 187-256; Bateson, 1972, pp. 177-
193; Watzlawick et al., 1974, pp. 62-73; Rohr-
baugh et al., 1977; Watzlawick, 1977, pp. 15-26).
Suffice it here to mention the classic paradox of
Epimenides of Crete who allegedly said “A11 Cre-
tans are liars.” Since the statement appears to in-
clude itself within its own scope, if it is true it is
false, and if it is false it is true.’ This is possible
because of the self-reflexiveness of the statement.
The way out of the apparent paradox is to realize
that a statement and a statement about a statement (a
“metastatement”) are of different logical types, as
member to class. Paradox differs from simple con-
tradiction because of this recursiveness. Faced with
contradictory injunctions such as adjacent road
signs reading “Stop” and “No Stopping Any
Time,” one must disobey one to obey the other, but
one can still choose. A paradoxical injunction pre-
cludes choice itself, as in the case of “Ignore this
Statement.” To obey is to disobey; to disobey is to
obey. There is no choice within the frame of the
statement, only the illusion of choice, unless one
recognizes the statement and metastatement as of
different logical types.
In Bateson’s now-familiar terminology (1968,
pp. 179-181), the important and most accessible
“levels” of human communication are the “re-
port” level (called “content” level by Watzla-
wick), which conveys digital information, and the
“command” level (called “relationship” level by
Watzlawick), which communicates (typically ana-
logically) how that information is to be taken.
 Wilder
Command classifies report and thus is metacommu-
nicative. Bateson also punningly refers to the com-
mand level of communication as the “p-function”
of message, after the cat’s “mew” of dependency
in the prelinguistic mammalian communication
world where almost all communication has to do
with labeling contexts and patterns of relationships
(1972, p. 372).
Of course the most powerful communication
construct to evolve from Bateson’s interest in logi-
cal typing has been the “double-bind’’ theory, a
special case of paradoxical injunction posited as a
necessary but not sufficient cause in the etiology of
schizophrenia and other communication patholo-
gies (Bateson et al., 1956). The “ingredients” of a
double-bind situation are proposed to be: (1) two or
more persons in an important relationship; (2) re-
peated experience (rather than a single traumatic
experience) so that the double-bind pattern becomes
an habitual expectation; (3) a primary negative in-
junction (“Don’t do this or I’ll punish you,” or
“Do this and I’ll punish you.”); (4) a secondary
injunction conflicting with the first at a more ab-
stract, commonly nonverbal level; and ( 5 ) a tertiary
negative injunction prohibiting the “victim” (a
term later revised to include both or all parties as
“bound”) from escaping the field. Further, it was
postulated that the complete set of ingredients is no
longer necessary once a person learns to perceive
the universe in double-bind patterns.
The paradigmatic double-bind case sketched by
Bateson involved a hospitalized man recovering
from an acute schizophrenic episode. When visited
by his mother, he impulsively put his arm around
her shoulder and she stiffened. When he withdrew
his arm she asked, “Don’t you love me anymore?”
When he then blushed, she said, “Dear, you must
not be so easily embarrassed and afraid of your
feelings” (Bateson et al., 1956, p. 259). Since it is
sometimes characteristic of what is termed
“schizophrenia” that one loses the ability (will?) to
metacommunicate, i.e., to understand the paradox-
ical communication by commenting upon it at an
appropriate higher level of abstraction (e.g.,
“You’re giving me mixed messages.”), the situa-
tion is binding.
More generally, the whole class of “Be Spon-
175
taneous” paradoxes (“I insist that you be indepen-
dent,” “I insist that you disobey me,” “I want you
to tell me that you love me because you want to.”)
age potentially binding, according to the theory, if
the other necessary conditions are present. They are
simply impossible to obey without disobeying, and
vice versa. Perhaps it is accurate in one sense to
distinguish between paradox and double-bind by
noting that “a paradox is what you see; a double-
bind is what you’re in.”8 By definition of the con-
struct, the parties “bound” cannot conceptualize
and resolve the paradoxical injunction in conven-
tional fashion, and communication behaviors typi-
cally associated with schizophrenia (strangely
metaphorical communication, obsessive literal-
ness, and “word salad”) may thus be understood as
an appropriate if unconventional “escape from the
field.”
More pragmatically, the Theory of Types is acti-
vated in therapeutic interventions through the use of
“therapeutic paradoxes” for “reframing” the con-
text of a troublesome situation. “Frame” as an
analytic construct functions analogously to a picture
frame by defining boundaries of context (Bateson,
1972, p. 188. See also Goffman, 1974). It is
metacommunicative in that it tells one what is and is
not to be included within a particular perceptual
realm or set of premises. Thus, a framed statement:
All statements
within this frame
are untrue
presumes to enjoin the reader from leaving the
frame-here represented concretistically-and, as
a consequence, fmm resolving the paradox. Con-
versely, metacommunicative messages define psy-
chological frames, as in the punctuation marks on a
printed page or a psychiatrist’s definition of his
“curative” role (Bateson, 1972, p. 188).
“Reframing,” in the therapeutic context, means
most abstractly “changing the emphasis from one
class membership of an object to another, equally
valid class membership, or, especially, introducing
such a new class membership into the conceptuali-
zation of all concerned” (Watzlawick et al., 1974,
p. 98). That is, a person’s construction of reality, or
at least the reality of a particular situation, is altered
176 HUMAN COMMUNICATION RESEARCH / Vol. 5, No. 2, WINTER 1979
so that the meaning attributed to “events” or
“facts” is placed into a different or expanded
“frame” which fits the facts equally well but is
presumed to be more conducive to optimal human
functioning. Reframing proceeds on the assumption
that “reality” is in large measure a manifestation of
consensual attribution. One’s definition of reality is
thus malleable, and within wide limits can be inter-
preted quite variously as it is construed in human
relationships. Following the Theory of Types, one
would say that reframing is an exercise in changing
logical typing, although it is not always clear that
changing attributed meaning must necessarily in-
volve the vertical shift of logical levels (see exam-
ples in Watzlawick et al., 1974).
Attempts at reframing are common enough in
daily conversation each time we urge another to
“try to look at it this way. . .,” but the therapeutic
interventions of the Palo Alto Group are seldom
stated so directly, sometimes taking the form of a
“therapeutic paradox.”
Therapeutic paradoxes (sometimes called
“therapeutic double-binds”) differ from the origi-
nal bind in that ‘‘the therapist is not involved in a life
and death situation himself” and thus can (presum-
ably) set up relatively benevolent binds to lead the
patient in learning the means of escaping from them
(Batesonetal., 1956, p. 263. AlsoHaley, 1963, pp.
179-191; Watzlawick et al., 1967, pp. 236-253;
Rohrbaugh et al., 1977). Watzlawick et al. claim
that second-order (reframing) change through
paradox is “undoubtedly the most powerful and
most elegant form of problem resolution known to
us” (1974, p. 114). Typical of this approach is the
use of “symptom prescription”-telling the patient
to behave as he has with regard to the presented
symptom, only trying to make it even worse, forc-
ing the paradoxical situation wherein the patient
can’t claim to lack control over the symptom if he
can succeed in exaggerating it. Thus, the eternal
pessimist, rather than being “cheered up,” is told
he is not pessimistic enough-things are really
much worse than he thinks. Likewise, the psycho-
logical headhunter who has run through many ex-
perts without improvement is told that there is prob-
ably nothing that can be done for a problem that has
baffled so many fine therapists, forcing her either to
again defy the therapist by getting better or to quit
the game entirely. The person who is afraid of
fainting in the supermarket (in which case the at-
tempted solution of the problem-staying home-
has become the problem itself) is instructed in a
form of “Be Spontaneous” paradox to go to the
market and attempt to faint immediately, an almost
impossible act. Patients who improve are instructed
to “go slow” or even to suffer a relapse-further
indication that the patient is in control of the
symptom (all examples from Watzlawick et al.,
1974). These second-order changes-r change of
change- are meta to the vicious circle system in
which the person appears to be caught. They are,
returning to the theory, interventions based upon a
different logical typing of the situation and appear
illogical or paradoxical only if seen within the con-
text of the original frame (Watzlawick et al., 1974,
pp. 77-91).
It is a long way from mathematical philosophy to
fainting agoraphobics, but regardless of the
therapeutic effectiveness (little empirical evidence
is offered), theoretical cogency, or ethical dimen-
sions of such direct paradoxical interventions, the
fact remains that Watzlawick and others invoke the
Theory of Types as the explanatory principle, while
taking great care to note the invocation of the theory
is no more than “an attempt at exemplification
through analogy” (Watzlawick et al., 1974, p. 2).
Group Theory
A companion theory to the Theory of Types
aimed at further “exemplification through anal-
ogy” is Galois’ mathematical Group Theory. Just
as the Theory of Types is used to explain how
second-order change can be accomplished by re-
framing a situation, Group Theory is presented to
explain how at the level of first-order change “the
more things change the more they remain the same”
(Watzlawick et al., 1974, pp. 2-7). It also serves to
illustrate Haley’s first law of human relations: The
more change is attempted, the more it is resisted
(Haley, 1963, p. 189). Whereas Batesonapplied the
Theory of Types a priori to the study of communica-
tion and learning behavior, Watzlawick and col-
leagues present Group Theory as an a posteriori
 Wilder
systematization of what they found upon examining
their own premises and clinical techniques. It is a
more recent formulation than Bateson’s, and less
powerful and pervasive as an explanatory meta-
phor.
Group Theory demonstrates, in mathematical
systems, how within-group changes may occur
without changing the parametric nature of the
group, given that group members have a common
denominator and the outcome of any combination of
two or more group members is itself a member of
the group. Thus, many changes are possible within
the group, but it is impossible for any member or
combination of members to place themselves out-
side of the system, or group itself (Watzlawick et
al., 1974, p. 4). Without exploring the full implica-
tions and problems of Group Theory, let it simply be
noted that the central point is that a group member
may act without making a parametric difference;
internal changes do not alter system boundaries.
This within-group change is termed first-order
change to distinguish it from the second-order
change resulting from an alteration of system
parameters, typically through a shift in logical typ-
ing. Thus, at the first level, group members are
caught in a “More of the Same” or “Game without
End” vicious circle (Watzlawick et al., 1967, pp.
232-236). They are caught in a stalemate wherein
the system cannot generate from within itself the
rules for change of its own rules (Watzlawick &
Weakland, 1977, p. 249). When spontaneous
change does not occur, this situation must be altered
by an outside intervention (typically that of the
therapist) which is meta to the self-perpetuating
system (Watzlawick et al., 1967, p. 235;
Watzlawick & Weakland, 1977, p. 249). First-
order change, then, illustrated by Group Theory,
leads to more of the same. Second-order change,
illustrated by the Theory of Types, introduces
parametric change through outside intervention.
Rules Orientation
Related to Jackson’s concept of family homeo-
stasis was his assertion that the family is a rule-
governed system, and its members act in an or-
ganized, repetitive fashion which can be abstracted
177
as the governing principles of family life (Jackson,
1965b). Watzlawick and Weakland (1977, p. 2)
later commented that it is difficult to appreciate in
retrospect how novel the concept of rules as deter-
minants of behavior was at the time Jackson first
advanced the idea in the face of the prevailing view
of needs, drives, personality traits, etc. as behavior
determinants.
A family rule is a metaphor coined by an observer
to account for observed redundancy in family in-
teraction. Rules are relationship agreements which
prescribe and limit behavior over a wide range of
content areas, organizing family interaction into a
reasonably stable system so that relatively few rules
can cover the major aspects of ongoing interper-
sonal relationships. A rule is a “format of regularity
imposed upon a complicated process by an inves-
tigator;” it is a “formula for a relationship”
(Jackson, 1965b, p. 9). Stated otherwise, arule can
be the quid pro quo of a relationship, the “some-
thing for something” bargain that is in struck in an
ongoing relationship and defines its nature
(Jackson, 1965a).
Watzlawick and Weakland go even further, sug-
gesting that it has become increasingly plausible
that “communication in the widest sense is at least
as rule-governed as natural language is determined
by its grammar and syntax” (1977, p. 59). Thus,
the possibility of developing a calculus of commu-
nication emerges as both likely and desirable
(Watzlawick et al., 1967, p. 39; Wilder, 1978, p.
43). A similar rules orientation has gained in-
creasing attention in recent interpersonal communi-
cation research (e.g., Cushman & Whiting, 1972;
Cushman & Florence, 1974; Cushman & Craig,
1976; Pearce, 1976).
Since the work of the Palo Alto Group can best be
seen as theoretically and epistemologically “in
progress,” and no claim to theoretical consistency
is made outside of the work of Bateson, it appears at
this time inappropriate to challenge a “view”
which spans the Theory of Types, Group Theory,
Systems Theory and terminology, and a rules orien-
tation to communication behavior in terms of con-
ventional criteria for theory construction. Very lim-
ited empirical evidence has been offered in support
of any of the postulates of the interactional view (see
178 HUMAN COMMUNICATION RESEARCH / Vol. 5, No. 2, WINTER 1979
Watzlawick et al., 1974; Segal, 1978 for several
examples), and thus far faith has prevailed over
conventional science. l o
RESEARCH DIFFICULTIES
While Bateson and colleagues have, without
doubt, presented a rich, novel, and provocative
conceptualization of human communication, ques-
tions remain about the viability of the view for
further exploration and research. Foremost among
the obstacles is the sheer expansiveness of the
model, a significant measure of inconsistency and
confusion in the development of several key con-
structs, and the difficulties of selecting an appropri-
ate research paradigm for rigorous and systematic
investigation.
Expansiveness
The Bateson essays collected insteps to a n Ecol-
ogy of Mind (1972), a work characterized by Band-
ler and Grinder as “simultaneously irrelevant and
profound” (1975, p. 2231, tax the intellectual dex-
terity of even the most serious reader. The scope of
Bateson’s interests is at once stimulating and frus-
trating as he mows with great confidence and deft-
ness through anthropology, animal behavior, aes-
thetics, biology, genetic theory, philosophy of sci-
ence, cybernetics, learning theory, and psychoana-
lytic theory. The dimensions of what he claims to
encompass are impressive, and he states that such
matters as widely ranging as the bilateral symmetry
of animals, the patterned arrangement of plant
leaves, the escalation of an armaments race, the
processes of courtship, the nature of play, the
grammar of a sentence, biological evolution, and
the contemporary ecological crisis “can only be
understood in terms of such an ecology of ideas as I
propose” (1972, p. xv). What Bateson presents is a
very particular way of thinking about being in and
knowing the world-a cybernetic epistemology
which in its wholeness remains both elusive and
grand.
More specifically, with regard to the interactional
view, the work of Bateson and his colleagues has
been applied far beyond the original focus on
schizophrenia to many other interpersonal commu-
nication pathologies and problems (Watzlawick et
al., 1974; Sluzki & Ransom, 1976): to alcoholism
(Bateson, 1972, p. 331), to delinquent behavior
(Ferreira, 1960), to primitive art (Bateson, 1972, p.
128), to humor (Fry, 1963), to drama (Watzlawick
et al., 1967, pp. 149-186), to film (Weakland,
1977), and to capitalist economy (Wilden, 1972;
Wilden & Wilson, 1976). Such diffuse work has
done much to illustrate the metaphorical expansive-
ness of the model but little to refine theory, as there
has been no sustained and integrated effort to mod-
ify or elaborate upon the theoretical frame in re-
sponse to the findings of individual studies.
One example of the consequence of the “grand
view” is seen in Jackson’s statement that “by
communication is meant behavior in the widest
sense” (1965b, p. 6) and in Watzlawick’s and his
colleagues’ subsequent first axiom that “one cannot
not communicate” (1967, pp. 48-51). Miller
(1977) and Scott (1977) are among those who have
questioned the wisdom and usefulness of such a
global definition of human communication. Equat-
ing communication with behavior certainly dep-
rives the concept of any distinctiveness or meaning-
ful parameters, generalizing it to the point of
uselessness, as in Whorf‘s world where everything
was blue and thus blue was perceived as nothing at
all. Despite the aesthetic appeal of Watzlawick’s
axiom, it helps little if at all in formulating systema-
tic study of communication events.
The expansiveness of Bateson’s “ecology of
mind” and the virtually unlimited scope of be-
haviors classified as “communication” by others of
the Palo Alto Group provide a language and indicate
a way of thinking about human communication
without setting the boundaries necessary for a way
of studying communication phenomena. While
something of the flavor of the interactional view is
bound to be lost in more precisely defining its terms
and more narrowly specifying its parameters, the
alternative is for the view to remain virtually invul-
nerable to systematic study and refinement.
Conceptual Confusion
In scaling the edifice of logical types, it is not
 Wilder
difficult to lose one’s footing. While the mathe-
matical origin and flavor of Russell’s theory hold
the implicit promise of rigor in systematic applica-
tion, the promise appears unfulfilled when applied
to systems and levels of communication behavior. It
is clear enough to see that the numeral “ 1 ” is not of
the same logical order as the concept “number,”
that the concept “number” is not of the same order
as the more general concept class “symbol,” and so
on. But in the observation of naturally occurring
communication phenomena, where does one draw
“class” boundaries so that it is thus possible, for
instance, to identify when paradox is generated due
to classlmember confusion and when it is not?
On another level, the interpersonal system
parameter favored by the Palo Alto Group is the
“family,” which can extend beyond the bounds of
those who live together to include those significant
others who are geographically separate. One might
easily take issue with even this sensible boundary,
arguing that socioeconomic influences on commu-
nication patterns cannot be overlooked. How useful
is it to “reframe” a family’s “metarules” for in-
teraction when the root problem is poverty or social
prejudice? How does one define the “frame” to be
manipulated at any rate? Few operational guidelines
appear to be forthcoming from the Palo Alto Group,
and one is left with the impression that intuition and
clinical experience, rather than precise operational
guidelines, are what serve to guide the demarcation
of interactional frames.
A bit of metaesoterica may serve to illustrate the
confusion which has attended the development of
several key constructs of the interactional view. The
evolution of the notions of “report” and “com-
mand” aspects of communication provides a rela-
tively clear case in point.
Bateson recollects that “this idea originated so
far as I know from Warren McCulloch, who pointed
out at one of the Macy meetings that every firing of
every neuron has both report and command aspects.
It is a report of the firing of whatever preceding
neurons caused it to fire and it is a command to fire
addressed to its successor. Every message has these
two aspects” (Bateson, 1953, 1978b).
Bateson’s first published remarks on report and
command appeared in his important 195 1 essay,
179
“Information and Codification: A Philosophical
Approach” (Ruesch & Bateson, 1968, pp. 168-
21 1; It is here that Bateson first writes from his deep
debt to the other seminal cybernetic thinkers of the
Macy Conferences, including McCulloch, Weiner,
Pitts, and Hutchinson.). “Report” and “com-
mand” are introduced into the “Information and
Codification” essay with references to Morris
(1946), Shannon and Weaver (1949), and McCul-
loch and Pitts (1943). The specific terminology of
“report” and “command” is not to be found in
these referenced works, and one is easily lead to
take the coinage of “report” and “command” as
Bateson’s.
Report and command next surface in spirit in
Watzlawick’s brief 1964 Anthology of Human
Communication (1974, pp. 3-4). Here they are
transformed into the revised terminology of “con-
tent” and “relationship” levels of communication.
The terms report and command are here missing
altogether, perhaps due to an economy measure
since the Anthology text (with tape) is essentially a
training manual which carries no presumption of
theoretical completeness.
Watzlawick et al. (1967, p. 51), in an apparent
attempt to tidy the muddle-with perhaps the re-
verse consequence-attribute report and command
to Bateson, as does Weakland elsewhere (1974).
Confusion heightens when Watzlawick et al. trans-
form these constructs almost immediately into a
discussion of the ‘‘content and relationship levels of
communication” (1967, pp. 51-54), which may or
may not be isomorphic to what Bateson, and earlier
McCulloch, had in mind.
The message here is that researchers concerned
with the conceptual inconsistencies of works related
to the interactional view-especially those found in
a close comparison of Bateson’s 1972 Steps and
Watzlawick’s 1967 Pragmatics-need not spin
their wheels in an effort to reconcile what may be
irreconcilable in the literature.
This short history of the report and command
ideas is but one illustration of the confusion which
has attended the development of some key terms.
One might also trace “metacommunication,”
“symmetry/complementarity,” “analogic/digital
communication,” or “punctuation” through the
180 HUMAN COMMUNICATION RESEARCH / Vol. 5, No. 2, WINTER 1979
literature and lore with similar results. It is not that
more workable and precise explication is beyond
reach, but rather that few attempts have been made
to refine and elaborate the conceptual metaphors
which serve as the theoretical grid of the interac-
tional view.
Methodological Problems
The orientation of the original Bateson commu-
nication project was anthropological, and the pre-
ferred approach to a problem was to observe natural
history situations with as little intrusion upon the
data as possible. Such an orientation, Haley notes,
is “antithetical to experimentation” (1977, p. 94).
Bateson’s antiexperimental bias is well-known
(e.g., Bateson, 1966; Brand, 1973), and he has
commented upon close and sustained attention to
trivial problems by stating, “if it’s not worth doing,
it’s worth doing well” (Haley, 1976a, p. 103).
Bateson regards as “heuristic error” the notion of a
deterministic relationship between independent and
dependent variables as conventionally defined in
behavioral science research, arguing that it distracts
one “from perceiving the ecology of the ideas
which together constitute the small subsystem
which I call ‘context’ ” (1972, p. 338).
Likewise, Watzlawick and Weakland cite the
‘‘inverse relation between economy and relevance’ ’
in behavioral research, noting that whereas (for
instance) the occurrence of patterns of paradoxical
communication may be highly meaningful, “their
identification may pose almost unsurmountable
conceptual and technical difficulties” (1977, p.
70). Like Bateson, they cast doubt upon the utility
of isolating, correlating, and analyzing variables
which may turn out to tell us little if anything about
communication while at the same time destroying
the complexity of the phenomenon under study
(1977, p. 55).
The poverty of the experimental paradigm in
double-bind research has been well-documented by
Abeles (1976) and Sluzki and Ransom (1976). After
a comprehensive review of double-bind studies
through 1976 (all of which called for greater con-
ceptual clarity from double-bind theorists and found
that hard evidence is either negative or irrelevant),
Abeles concludes that the experimental method is
not appropriate for examination of such a highly
abstract and complex construct, recommending in-
stead ethnographic or natural history approaches
(1976, p. 138). Given the nonisolability of the in-
teractional systems paradigm and its rejection of
lineal cause-effect determinism, it is not surprising
to find a bad fit between the double-bind theory and
conventional experimental method.
Sluzki and Ransom (1976), too, cite the problems
of operationalization and selection of a meth-
odological model in transforming a construct with
ingredients and contingencies belonging to different
logical levels. The bind of researching the bind is
that from the vantage point of double-bind theory
itself, the assumptions of the experimental method
are “fictitious” (Sluzki & Ransom, 1976, p. 160).
To isolate “independent variables” from the mul-
tilevel and interdependent double-bind “ingre-
dients” is to compromise its implicit principle of
nonsummativity . Reification of the double-bind
construct as a countable “thing” led Bateson to
remark that “a lot of people have wasted a lot of
time trying to count double-binds’’ (Sluzki & Ran-
som, 1976, p. 161), and one is apparently left with
only the hope that “I’ll know one when I see it.”
Further, if one believes in the pathogenicity of
double-bind situations, it would hardly be fitting to
expose naive experimental subjects to simulated
“binds,” if even such controlled simulation were
possible.
This is not to say that the interactional view
cannot in any sense be made operational. Sluzki and
Beavin (1977) have offered an operational defini-
tion of symmetry and complementarity in dyadic
interaction, Rogers and Farace (1975) have devel-
oped a transactional coding scheme for relational
communication in dyads, Riskin and Faunce (1970)
have developed “family interaction scales,” and
Jackson and Yalom (1966) have observed interac-
tional rules in families with an ulcerative colitis
patient, but none of these studies was experimental
in design.
Watzlawick and Weakland opt strongly for a
“rules” rather than “laws” orientation for study of
the interactional view, urging investigation into the
“grammar” of conversation-the calculus or al-
 Wilder
gorithms of communication (1977, pp. 55-56).
Bandler and Grinder have gone the farthest with this
orientation, constructing a transformational model
of the “grammar” of therapist-client communica-
tion derived from a theoretical amalgamation of
Bateson and Chomsky (Bandler & Grinder, 1975;
Grinder & Bandler, 1976). The result has pleased at
least Bateson, who wrote in his prefatory remarks to
the two volumes that “they have done something
similar to what my colleagues and I attempted fif-
teen years ago” (Bandler & Grinder, 1975, p. ix).
In a general analysis of the interactional view,
what we are presented with is an emergent theory
and epistemology, a broad and imaginative way of
looking at and languaging about human communi-
cation, which breaks and crosses the boundaries of
much conventional research without providing an
explicit mechanism for the study of itself. Implica-
tions of this view for human communication re-
search will be the subject of the following section.
RESEARCH DIRECTIONS
Turning to look at interpersonal communication
research, it is difficult to classify the interactional
view in terms of Miller’s (1978) recent state-of-
the-art taxonomy of situational, developmental
laws and rules approaches. Indeed, it seems to sub-
sume three of the four categories by stressing the
ever-crucial notion of context (the situational ap-
proach), by looking at the evolution and change of
interactional rules and norms (the developmental
approach), and by advancing a “rules” rather than a
“laws” epistemology. It is perhaps most accurate
in terms of existing classifications to characterize
the interactional view as a “systems approach,” but
even then some of its salient dimensions (e.g., the
rules orientation) may be overlooked. The interac-
tional view, at least for the present, stands best (if
shakily) on its own ground, and suggests a variety of
apparent and not-so-apparent directions for appro-
priate research in quasi- or nontherapeutic settings.
Definitional Tasks
As illustrated earlier, much of the language of the
interactional view lacks precision in the operational
sense. Following even Bateson’s wisdom that “ad-
181
vances in scientific thinking come from a combina-
tion of loose and strict thinking” and that to insist
too hard upon “operationalism” is to “lose some-
thing of the ability to think new thoughts” (1972, p.
75), it is clear that a lack of strict thinking has
impeded development of the Batesonian model far
more than a lack of creative hunches. Concepts such
as analogiddigital communication, repodcom-
mand levels, punctuation of sequences of events,
symmetrical and complementary interaction, para-
dox, reframing, and the like would be well-served
by more precise definitions which would allow sys-
tematic and reliable observation of communication
behavior. Steps in this direction have been taken
(e.g., Rogers & Farace, 1975; Sluzki & Beavin,
1977), but they are fewer and farther between than
should be. In fact, rhetorical scholars have devoted
more attention to concepts such as paradox than
have behaviorally-oriented researchers (e.g.,
Campbell, 1973; Johnstone, 1974; Tompkins,
1976; Erlich, 1977), and it could even be argued
that Black’s concept of “argumentative synthesis”
(1957, p. 156) is arhetorical analogue to the Theory
of Types or that the venerable enthymeme is the
only truly interactional construct in the history of
rhetorical and communication theory. But it is not a
matter for rhetoricians alone, and there are several
aspects of the interactional view which appear to be
compatible with current research trends in commu-
nication theory.
Compatibility With Current Trends
As indicated earlier, the experimental paradigm
has been rather thoroughly rejected by the Palo Alto
Group and in double-bind research, at least, has
been found inadequate to the task. While this is not
to say that experimental research may not be useful
and appropriate in exploring certain aspects of the
interactional view (e.g., the effect of operationally
defined symmetrical and complementary commu-
nication sequences upon the generation of interper-
sonal consensus and conflict; the effect of paradoxi-
cal communication upon message comprehension,
etc .), there are several other research orientations
which appear to be more generally applicable to
investigating the model of the Palo Alto Group.
182 HUMAN COMMUNICATION RESEARCH / Vol. 5, No. 2, WINTER 1979
Despite some recent skepticism and caution
about the utility of the rules approach in the study of
communication (Bochner, 1978; Miller, 1978), it is
strongly preferred by Watzlawick and others over
variable analysis. At first hand, one might investi-
gate the operation of conversational rules which
appear to guide most native speakers (e.g., Nof-
singer, 1975; Nofsinger, 1976). At a more funda-
mental and idiosyncratic level of organization,
Jackson’s “quid pro quo” of family relationships
could be investigated in the interaction of other
dyads and small groups. The lack of generalizability
in such situations may do little to further the funda-
mentals of behavioral science (except in the ac-
knowledgement of the nongeneralizability of com-
munication rules in some situations), but can still do
much for teaching, therapy, or even organizational
analysis. To become aware of even situationally
bound communication rules is to gain the possibility
of conforming to those which are functional and
changing those which are not. The “hidden agen-
da” of most small groups is just such a set of tacit
agreements among at least some group members as
to how communication and decision-making are to
proceed. It is perhaps the ethnomethodologists
(e.g., Garfinkel, 1967; Garfinkel & Sacks, 1970;
Sacks, 1972; Turner, 1974) who have taken the
most serious look at accounting for constitutive
processes of natural communication. Their work
should be of interest to anyone exploring the impli-
cations of a rules orientation to interpersonal com-
munication.
In attempting to break new methodological
ground, Hewes (1976) has indicated that some
properties of rules theories (such as the contingent
sequential structure of spoken acts) are compatible
with Markov modeling, and that it may be possible
to examine the rules approach from a modified
Markovian perspective which goes beyond simple
first-order chains to incorporate decision proce-
dures as antecedents to transitions in behavior and
careful specification of the state space of the chain
(Hewes, 1977; Hewes, in press). Exploring this
potential for formal modeling of communication
rules may well be the most viable alternative to the
experimental paradigm for systematic representa-
tion of communication process.
The current interest in “relational communica-
tion” (e.g., Parks, 1977; Ellis, in press) owes a
large and direct debt to the work of the Palo Alto
Group and holds the potential for advancing the
interactional perspective. If, however, we are to
accept Parks’ assertion that “complementarity and
symmetry have been suggested as the central con-
structs of a theory of relational communication’ ’
(1977, p. 372) and if the present narrow focus on
refining relational coding procedures holds, rela-
tional communication research will remain a reduc-
tionist footnote to the interactional view. With the
exception of perhaps a few terms such as symmetry
and complementarity, we are yet without even a
vocabulary to express relational constructs.
Given the prevailing research climate, of course,
one must turn to refine the interactional view by
building the bridge between behavioral data and the
presented theory, remaining true to the epis-
temological assumptions of the frame. Even if we
accept the conceptual coat racks of the Theory of
Types and Group Theory in the spirit in which they
were intended as “exemplifications by analogy,” it
is important to be able to specify the transforms and
operations whereby the critical attributes of the
paradigm and the data available through observa-
tion and the research experience can be wed. This
calls for extended epistemological argument and
innovation in the systematic observation of be-
havioral data, both of which have been lacking in
the later development of the interactional view.
Indirect Directions
In conclusion I am going to make some leaps,
believing that they are defensible ones from the
interactional view. The attention paid by Bateson,
Watzlawick, and others to paradox, confusion,
manipulation, noncontingency , and even ‘‘disin-
formation” (Watzlawick, 1977, p. 43) suggests a
very different way of looking at human communica-
tion from that which has reigned in recent wisdom.
Watzlaffiick, Weakland, and Fisch come down
very hard on those “terribles simplificateurs” who
overlook the fact that a large part of human commu-
nication takes place tacitly through the absence of
utterance and “who have jumped on the bandwagon
of communications theory and practice” and oper-
ated in a variety of therapeutic and nontherapeutic
 Wilder
settings ‘‘on the problem-engendering premise that
communication should be clear, straightforward,
direct-in a word, total.” Because of the “absurd
simplification inherent in this approach,” the re-
sults are more often “totalitarian,” rather than “to-
tal communication” (1974, p. 42). This may be an
extreme position, but to accept in any sense the
validity of the attack is to stand much of communi-
cation research on its head.
If we were to take this perspective seriously, a
popular research topic such as “self-disclosure”
would be complemented by equal attention to the
nature and function of deception (e.g., Knapp,
Hart, &Dennis, 1974), deviousness (e.g., Bowers,
Elliott, & Desmond, 1977), equivocation, deliber-
ate ambiguity, and the like. As Williams and Goss
(1975) have demonstrated, and as any academic
surely knows, there are situations in which deliber-
ate vagueness is likely to be more effective as a
communication strategy than clarity or openness,
yet the noble values of self-disclosure and clarity
predominate in much communication research and
teaching.
Similarly, from the interactional view, research
on reticence and communication apprehension
would be complemented by equal time devoted to
communication control constructs such as rules for
tact, discretion, diplomacy, subtlety, politeness,
and the like. These are not empty or literary con-
cepts: they represent the way people talk about how
they talk (koinoi metatalk), and thus are operational
terms for communicators. Certainly, as many peo-
ple have been hurt by not understanding or heeding
the communication control constructs appropriate
to a given setting as by being reticent or “highly
apprehensive,” yet we have given close and sus-
tained attention to only the latter problem. Silence is
likely to be every bit as rule-governed as talk, and
while no one would argue seriously that in all cir-
cumstances the lower the communication apprehen-
sion (e.g., McCroskey, 1977, p. 92) and the higher
the self-disclosure the better, such a directional
value is implicit in much of the research on these
topics.
To confuse what we believe should be the case
when persons communicate with what typically is
the case is to fall prey to the “Utopia Syndrome”
(Watzlawick et al., 1974, pp, 47-61), misrepresent-
183
ing the desirable for the possible or likely. Needless
to say, devoting attention to the nature of devious-
ness, vagueness, intentional paradox, and similar
strategies opens one to the charge of “manipula-
tion” and “insincerity,” a charge leveled fre-
quently at the therapeutic techniques of the Palo
Alto Group (see Watzlawick et al., 1974, p. xv;
Fisch, Watzlawick, Weakland, & Bodin, 1977),
but all communication strategies are in some sense
attempts at manipulation. The most manipulative
instructor, therapist, or researcher of all is the one
who denies this very fact under the guise of “non-
directiveness” or “openness and honesty. ”
To look at the whole picture in human communi-
cation is to keep the vision of context and recognize
the utility of all message strategies, not only those
which conform to human relations ideals as defined
by NTL, University Associates, or other harbingers
of Consciousness I11 who must share with us re-
sponsibility for the iatrogenic psychobabble of the
past decade.
Some of the news of what “works” in communi-
cation may be unpleasant or run against the political
grain of most of us. The “benevolent sabotage”
sometimes practiced by Watzlawick and colleagues
(Watzlawick et al., 1974, pp. 142-146) may strike
us at face value as ethically questionable and inde-
fensible in terms of the presented theoretical frame
(e.g., Simons, 1976). But it is shortsighted to deny
the context and complexities of communication
process--even the darker complexities-in favor of
exclusive attention to researching what is obvious
and teaching what is desirable.
Whatever the many problems of the interactional
view for theory, research, and pedagogy-not the
least of which is to resist being blinded by the
light-it offers a compelling message about human
communication and the hope that in exploring its
promise we may better comprehend the “pattern
which connects” (Bateson, 1978), slow the sac-
rifice of context at the altar of science, and spend
less time hacking our way through open doors.
NOTES
1. Dean Barnlund, Donald Ellis, Patrick Hunt, and
Malcolm Parks provided helpful feedback on an ear-
lier draft of this paper. Arthur Bochner’s informed
184 HUMAN COMMUNICATION RESEARCH / Vol. 5 , No. 2, WINTER 1979
reading and support of this project are of special note.
Conversations with Jules Riskin, Lynn Segal, Paul
Watzlawick, and John Weakland of the Mental Re-
search Institute in Palo Alto provided decisive inter-
ventions in reframing my perspective for this revi-
sion, although they are in no way responsible for its
characterization of their work. Gregory Bateson’s
most enlightening critique increased both my accu-
racy and my humility. No serious student of the
interactional view can allow the matter to rest upon
this essay or any other derivative synthesis of aspects
of Bateson. Bateson, per se, is accessible only
through his primary works.
2. See, notably, Bateson, 1958; Jackson, 1960; Fry,
1963; Haley, 1963; Haley, 1967; Watzlawick, Be-
avin, & Jackson, 1967; Jackson, 1968a; Jackson,
1968b; Ruesch & Bateson, 1968; Haley, 1971; Bate-
son, 1972; Satir, 1972; Haley, 1973; Watzlawick,
1974; Vv’atzlawick, Weakland, & Fisch, 1974; Ban-
dler & Grinder, 1975; Grinder & Bandler, 1976;
Haley, 1976; Sluzki & Ransom, 1976; Watzlawick,
1977; Watzlawick, 1978; Bateson, forthcoming.
3. Furtherreading will reveal that “theory” is used here
in other than a conventional sense. I often felt in
pursuing this piece that I was dealing with more of a
social movement-even religion-than a communi-
cation theory; it may be that communication ideology
is a more accurate term. The argument behind this
point is a lengthy one, although it might be noted that
Watzlawick and Weakland’s characterization of their
work as the “interactional view” (1977) rather than
the “interactional theory” is no mistake or over-
sight.
4. Among these many divergences were a Batesod
Haley split on the role of power and control (Haley,
1976a, 78) and an early rift between the “internal
processes wing” and the “behavioral wing” of the
original Bateson research project (Haley , 1976a,
73-74) which continues in other arenas to this day.
5. Among important influences not discussed here are
Milton Erickson’s techniques of hypnotherapy (see,
notably, Haley, 1973) and Watzlawick’s recent
(1978) interest in the relationship of bilateral asym-
metry to elements of therapeutic communication.
6. The radical behavioral stance of Brief Therapy’s
“what not why” model appears to function well as a
pragmatic operational guideline to effect rapid
change. Advocacy of a behavioral model for therapy
has also, no doubt, served an important rhetorical
function in distinguishing the interactional view from
the Freudian mentalistic model. I am presently con-
vinced, however, that claims of “epistemological
discontinuity” (e.g., Watzlawick & Weakland,
1977, xv) for any larger context (Bateson not-
withstanding) are at best hyperbolic. Paradigmatic
change seen as an evolutionary dialectical synthesis
does not necessitate throwing out the baby with the
bath water.
Von Foerster has termed Russell’s exorcism of
paradox a “castration of logic,” and would charac-
terize this statement rather as a “binary stable state”
(1978).
I owe this succinctness to Timothy Mott, Advanced
Systems Development, Xerox Corporation, Palo
Alto, CA.
The apparent preponderant balance of paradoxical
interventions presented in Change is not meant to
indicate that paradoxical prescriptions are the rule
rather than the exception in Brief Therapy. Brief
Therapy uses what works, and paradoxical prescrip-
tions are among what works, but sometimes interven-
tions are quite direct (Wilder, 1978, p. 39).
10. John Weakland has suggested that rather than con-
sidering the constructs of the interactional view as
building blocks for some monistic theory, they
might be more appropriately construed as a series of
“interventions” which reframe our own rules for
understanding communication behavior, “as we
hitch ourselves up one notch at a time out of the
mud” (1978).
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WHITEHEAD, A.N., &RUSSELL, B. Principiu mathemadca,
2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910.
WILDEN, A. System and structure: Essays in communication
and change. London: Tavistock, 1972.
WILDEN, A., &WILSON, T. The double bind: Logic, magic,
and economics. In C.E. Sluzki and D.C. Ransom (Eds.),
Double bind: The foundation of the communicational ap-
proach to the family. New York: GNne & Stratton, 1976,
263-286.
WILDER, C. From the interactional view: A conversation with
Paul Watzlawick. The Journal of Communication, 1978.28,
35-45.
WILLIAMS, M.L., & GOSS, B. Equivocation: Character in-
surance. Human Communication Research, 1975, 1, 265-
270.
The Family as Machine:
Film, Infrastructure,
and Cybernetic Kinship
in Suburban America
BERNARD DIONYSIUS GEOGHEGAN

In the 1950s an interdisciplinary team of researchers associated with

anthropologist Gregory Bateson embarked on a collective effort to
dethrone psychoanalysis with film and magnetic tape. More surpris-
ing than their mission has been its resounding success. By the end of
the decade Bateson and his colleagues around the San Francisco Bay
Area had established the rudiments of a psychotherapeutic approach
that eschewed the search for traumas buried in the individual
unconscious in favor of investigations into mental illness as the
result of interpsychic distortions among individuals interacting in
small groups. The group of particular interest to the Palo Alto Group
(as Bateson and his colleagues came to be known) was also among
the most sacred of postwar social institutions in the United States:
the nuclear family. While American popular culture and social
science were celebrating the tight-knit nuclear family as a foundation
of national strength and moral rectitude, the Palo Alto Group was
developing a portrait of the family as a kind of post-Fordist factory
for the production and management of psychic well-being. Their
claims rested on the intricate analysis of films, photographs, audio
recordings, and transcripts said to reveal hierarchies of communica-
tive codes (e.g., denotative, metalinguistic, metacommunicative)
structuring everyday interactions such as mealtimes, the bathing of
babies, and even play among animals. This notion of mental illness
springing from communicative errors gave rise to a new school of
mental health therapy that recast psychotherapists as technicians
of the family circuit and ushered in an ensemble of cameras, audio
recorders, architectures, games, and techniques available to thera-
pists for managing communications in the family. Thus, the family
as cybernetic machine was born.
The cybernetic family is perhaps the most durable artifact spun
off by cybernetics. Whereas cybernetics gradually lost credibility in
fields such as engineering, linguistics, and sociology in the course of
the 1960s, the account of the therapist-as-technician offered by the
Palo Alto Group has thrived in the mental health profession under

Grey Room 66, Winter 2017, pp. 70–101. © 2017 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 71
 the methodological banners of family therapy and brief therapy.1 Its
conceptual tenets have provided inspiration to far-flung intellectual
movements, including the antipsychiatry movement, neoliberal pro-
grams for the deinstitutionalization of mental patients, and cultural
critics’ diagnoses of schizophrenics’ scrambled communications as
symptomatic of the logical contradictions of late capitalism. Iterations
of these techniques can likely be found at the reader’s nearest
mental health clinic. Indeed, anyone who has gone through ten or
twelve sessions of cognitive behavioral therapy may count herself an
extended member of the cybernetic family.2
This article examines the production of the cybernetic family (and
the productivity of the cybernetic family) through media practices
implemented by Bateson and his associates in psychiatry, anthro-
pology, and the visual arts. While the cybernetic origins of the Palo
Alto Group are no secret, the origins and consequences of this link—
indeed, the very meaning of cybernetic in this context—remain
obscure.3 Often the conflation of Bateson’s research with the fabu-
lous techno-imaginaries of cybernetics and computing has produced
misleading portraits of the work of the Palo Alto Group as an offshoot
of high-tech digital worlds or as a commentary on the psychic
costs of living in information societies. Such accounts overshadow a
far more interesting and composite media genealogy of film, tape
recorders, photography, paper transcriptions, laboratory architec-
tures, and suburban infrastructures that produced the cybernetic
systems devised by Bateson and his associates.4 Along with the over-
shadowing of these multimedial origins, the work of Bateson’s
collaborators—such as painter and experimental filmmaker Weldon
Kees—have also disappeared from histories of the Palo Alto Group.5
The multiplicity of media and personnel present at the group’s origins
imbued its work with the reach and potentiality later actualized in
its appropriation by visual artists of the 1960s and 1970s and by the
gurus of Silicon Valley cyberculture.6
Working with previously unconsidered archival materials (largely
unpublished due to their status as medical records), this article rein-
troduces the extended network of human beings, instruments, and
media responsible for what I call the “Palo Alto Apparatus” and posits
that the remarkable endurance of the cybernetic family stems from
its robust construction as a multimedia machine. For in contrast to
most cybernetic speculation of the 1950s and 1960s, the cybernetic
family was not modeled on analogies to media and technology; rather,
it was itself a functioning media technology composed of film strips,
feedback loops, photographs, studios, audio recordings, mirrors,
mothers, fathers, children, and therapists. Within this ensemble, two
technical artifacts in particular—namely, ethnographically deployed
film and the postwar suburbs—furnished key technical affordances

72 Grey Room 66
for producing the cybernetic family. The visually rich, serially struc-
tured frames of film furnished therapists with data series suitable
for cybernetic and information analysis, while postwar American
suburbs arranged families into semiautonomous libidinal systems
suitable for technical description and modulation. In offering an
initial analysis of the production of the cybernetic family, this article
models the theoretical proposition that media history offers invalu-
able tools for understanding the production of a wide range of
cultural forms that, though remote from “mass media” as such, are
irremediably shaped by the intervention of media-technical practices,
instruments, and inscriptions.7

The Rise of “Psybernetics”

As the cast-off technologies of World War II trickled down to civilian
life in the 1940s and 1950s, state-sponsored care for the mentally
ill emerged as a popular arena for their repurposed application. MIT
mathematician Norbert Wiener blazed what would soon became a
well-worn path from schools of engineering to departments of psy-
chology.8 In a 1948 article for Scientific American that introduced
cybernetics to the American public, he defined the new field as com-
bining “under one heading the study of what in a human context is
sometimes described as thinking and in engineering is known as
control and communication,” adding that “[t]he technique of the
psychoanalyst . . . is perfectly consistent with the cybernetic point of
view.”9 Engineers and human scientists jostled for priority in realiz-
ing this consistency. The founder of information theory, engineer
Claude Shannon, devoted his private hours to writing a monograph
dedicated to the study of the informational laws that governed the
human mind, titled “Brains, Minds, Machines.”10 Computer designer
and game theorist John von Neumann felt these applications to be so
promising that he spent the final weeks of his life dictating the chapters
of The Computer and the Brain from his deathbed.11 These and other
works inspired scholars working in the mental sciences proper—for
instance, American psychologist George Miller and French psycho-
analyst Jacques Lacan—to apply cybernetics, game theory, and infor-
mation theory to the construction of machinic theories of mind.12
This gradual application of cybernetics to psychic management—
which I suggest terming psybernetics—reflected the interrelated
production of mental illness and media technologies in midcentury
America. As World War II came to an end, media technologies and
armies of mentally damaged veterans flooded civilian life.13 From the
early to the late 1940s the number of mental patients in the care of
the Veterans Administration doubled, with 60 percent of the 74,000
patients in its care in 1946 suffering from neuropsychiatric disor-
ders.14 Moreover, social scientists’ conception of fascism as psychic

Geoghegan | The Family as Machine: Film, Infrastructure, and Cybernetic Kinship in Suburban America 73
 pathology (and of democracy as resilient mental equanimity) moti-
vated a new focus on “mental health” as a suitable matter for state
investment. The National Mental Health Act of 1946 and the found-
ing of the National Institute of Mental Health in 1949 responded to
this emerging battlefront in the American psyche. Even so, the crisis
of the mentally ill seemed to grow inexorably. By the mid-1950s the
number of mental health patients in the United States had peaked at
half a million, with mental patients filling 50 percent of all hospital
beds nationwide, as much as 10 percent of some states’ entire annual
budgets going toward mental health care, and the American Psychiatric
Association predicting billions of additional dollars would be needed
to confront the growing mental health crisis.15
This postwar demand for mental health care mapped onto—and
was in a sense given form by—a tempest of progressive and reactionary
political forces allied in their skepticism about state-run mental
health care. A spate of journalistic exposés of asylums in the late
1940s—such as the devastating multipage layout “Bedlam 1946” that
appeared in LIFE in May 1946 and Albert Deutsch’s 1947 book The
Shame of the States—revealed abominable conditions prevailing in
many asylums, which often warehoused hundreds of patients soused
in their own filth for years and years on end.16 In the decade that
followed, a flurry of studies on mental hospitals, such as Erving
Goffman’s Asylums (composed under the aegis of the National Institute
of Mental Health), attributed symptoms of mental illnesses to the
deleterious effects of institutionalization itself.17 This politically pro-
gressive opprobrium directed at institutionalized mental health care
found a corollary on the political right, where groups such as the
John Birch Society and the Daughters of the American Revolution
attributed the growth in mental hospitals to communist plots imple-
mented by psychiatrists of Jewish and European extraction (allega-
tions investigated in 1948 by Congress’s House Un-American Activities
Committee).18 These two movements set the stage for a politically broad
critique of institutionalized mental health care.
Left- and right-wing criticisms of psychiatry from this period
comported with a wider mutation underway in twentieth-century
psychiatry. Throughout the nineteenth and the first half of the twen-
tieth centuries, the dominant settings of interwar mental health care
in the West, such as psychoanalytic sofas and urban asylums, had
relied on a model of psychic containment aimed at producing an
autonomous and rational self. That ebbing epoch of medical (as well
as industrial and political) discipline had depended on constraint,
expertise, and the confessional reform of individual bodies.19
Psybernetics, however, devised workable alternatives to institutional
enclosure based on new etiologies and an interpsychic conception
of self.

74 Grey Room 66
 The leading architect for the psybernetic redistribution of mental
illness was Bateson and his extended network of colleagues. Rejecting
enclosure (i.e., the asylum) and abandoning the goal of producing
a self-contained autonomous psyche, they identified families, com-
munities, domestic spaces, and nonverbal communication as compo-
nents of a decentralized matrix that produced—and was capable of
resolving—mental illness. In doing so, they proposed the substitu-
tion of the old system of experts and asylums with a new system of
technicians and suburban homes.

The Palo Alto Apparatus

An outline of the Palo Alto approach to psychotherapy appeared in
the 1956 essay “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia,” coauthored
by Bateson and his Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital
colleagues Don D. Jackson, Jay Haley, and John Weakland.20 Later
characterized by Haley as “a preliminary report which summarized
the common agreement of the research team on the broad outlines of
a communication theory of the origin and nature of schizophrenia,”
the paper argued that mental illness springs from communicative
contradictions in the family, which the authors termed “double
binds.”21 As an example of the double bind, the authors cited the case
of a schizophrenic patient whose mother verbally demanded affection
from her son but physically withdrew when he embraced her. Bateson
and his team claimed schizophrenic symptoms—such as a confusion
between literal and metaphorical levels of communication—were
not inherently pathological but, on the contrary, provided a tactical
(and rational) resolution of double binds. Where gesture and speech
conflicted, or affective and discursive levels of communication clashed,
the schizophrenic produced a mash-up of interpretive frames that rec-
onciled competing levels of meaning. From this analytical perspective,
the best method for curing schizophrenia was to engineer a change
in the familial patterns of communication responsible for its genesis.
The double-bind hypothesis depended on two strategic appara-
tuses of cybernetic communication. First, the hypothesis rested upon
on a proposed isomorphism between families and media-technical
systems (such as telegraphy), which was produced by a technodis-
cursive apparatus comprising media technologies and key conceptual
arenas, such as the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, that translated
media-technical knowledge into the social sciences. On the basis
of this exchange Jackson could claim, in the knowledge that game
theory and computing machinery furnished an implicit framework
for rendering such a claim intelligible, that “the family is a rule-
governed system” characterized by a “patterning of behaviors [that]
can be abstracted as a governing principle of family life.”22 What made
this exchange an apparatus (dispositif )—that is, a heterogeneous

Geoghegan | The Family as Machine: Film, Infrastructure, and Cybernetic Kinship in Suburban America 75

Top: John Weakland (far right)
conducting a structured inter-
view at home with members
of a family, including the son
(second from right), labeled
schizophrenic, 1957. Frame
enlargement. Faces have
been concealed to protect
the identities of the subjects.
Courtesy Don D. Jackson
Archive, University of Louisiana
at Monroe.
Bottom: John Weakland (back
to camera) conducting a struc-
tured interview with members
of a family in a purpose-built
interview room, with a one-way
mirror to conceal the camera
and observing therapists, at the
Mental Research Institute, Palo
Alto, 1959. Frame enlargement.
What appears to be a micro-
phone hangs overhead and
what appears to be a fireplace
is installed behind the family.
Faces have been concealed
to protect the identities of
the subjects. Courtesy Don D.
Jackson Archive, University of
Louisiana at Monroe.
76 Grey Room 66
system responding to an urgent political need—was psybernetics’
inscription in the postwar health crisis, as well as cybernetics’ emer-
gence through the patronage of technocratic institutions, including
the Rockefeller Foundation and the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation
(sponsors of the Palo Alto Group from 1952 to 1954 and 1955 to 1962
respectively).23 These and other private foundations embraced cyber-
netics as a purportedly neutral scientific tool for resolving social and
political problems.24 The notion of the family as a technoscientific
system gained traction within this network of private foundations
supporting market-friendly technological solutions to social prob-
lems. Domestic discontent became a problem of engineering improved
communication, not in wires but in people. This combination of dis-
course, machinery, and strategy constituted the first apparatus of
cybernetic communication.
Second, the double-bind hypothesis itself modeled the construc-
tion of a new technodiscursive apparatus of communication for
capturing and defining mental illness in terms of “characteristic
sequential patterns” within the family.25 From the mid-1950s through
the early 1960s, members of the Palo Alto Group devised an array of
media-technical systems to capture and analyze these patterns. Their
most notable system was the structured interview, a cultural-technical
assemblage of cameras, microphones, architectural design, scripts,
and games to aid therapists in “scanning for patterns” in families.26
Most often this system was used in interviews of families with a
member labeled “schizophrenic.” In its
simplest form the structured interview con-
sisted of standardized questions posed by
a family therapist. These questions gov-
erned (or “structured”) topics of discus-
sion, the likely order of family members’
responses, and the presence or priority of
particular family members (or the thera-
pist) during discussion. The paradigmatic
structured interview distributed the family
in a horseshoe shape around a circular
table, family members facing inward, with
the therapist and movie camera positioned
at the opening end of the horseshoe.
Although occasionally performed at home,
structured interviews typically took place
in a purpose-built room that included a
table, chairs, a fireplace, and a one-way
mirror that concealed the camera and
observing therapists.27
The structured interview redistributed
the site of diagnosis away from the supposedly traumatized, uncon-
scious interior of an individual patient to a series of binding
patterns in family interactions that would be disclosed by recording
media.28 The interview unfolded as a series of questions and tasks
presented by the therapist to the family. Responding to these
demands required collective, coordinated activities executed in a
fixed period of time. One iteration of the structured interview asked
family members, individually and in isolation, what they believed
the main problem was in the family. Afterward they would be
brought together in a room, informed of unnamed discrepancies
among their individual accounts, and challenged to reach a collec-
tive conclusion about the true nature of the problem. As they nego-
tiated among themselves, a therapist observed and the camera
documented from behind the one-way mirror in hopes of revealing
double-binding processes in action. “[T]his task,” a member of the
Palo Alto Group explained, “is an adaptation of the game-theoretical
model of the Prisoners’ Dilemma where, as is known, direct com-
munication is made impossible, a decision involving all concerned
has to be reached and the decision is dependent upon the amount Photograph taken from behind
the one-way mirror of an
of trust each partner is prepared to invest in the others.”29 In these interview room at the Mental
and others tasks it was “not so much the content of their final deci- Research Institute, Palo Alto.
sion which has been found to be revealing . . . but whether or not a Captioned as “Schizophrenia
patient Ida Friedberg (end of
decision is reached within the time limits, and the manner in which table) and parents in a Palo
it was accomplished.”30 Therapists recorded, transcribed, and Alto therapy session. Ida, 35,
minutely analyzed these transactions for evidence of interpsychic recently was released from a
mental hospital. Her parents
double binding. give high praise to the new
The media setup organized both family performance and scien- treatment.” From Milton
tific observation in these experiments. Therapists called patients’ Silverman and Margaret
Silverman, “Psychiatry inside
attention to the recording apparatus to achieve a range of goals, the Family Circle,” Saturday
including policing quarrels, compelling the faithful performance Evening Post, 28 July 1962.
of tasks, and identifying the therapist as a
coparticipant rather than an arbiter (the ther-
apists, no less than family members, were sub-
ordinate to the impartial record of the film).31
This last point encouraged family members
to focus on immanent interactions among one
another rather than turn to the therapist as an
external authority. This regulation of partici-
pants’ performance redounded on the thera-
pists themselves, who found in celluloid
and magnetic tape an objective record that
short-circuited the temptation to psychoana-
lytic interpretation. “The ultimate verification
of typical family patterns,” group member
Haley explained, “would seem to be possible

Geoghegan | The Family as Machine: Film, Infrastructure, and Cybernetic Kinship in Suburban America 77

Diagram of an apparatus
designed to standardize and
quantify patterns of interaction
in family members in order to
compare the patterns of
“normal” families with those
of families with a child labeled
schizophrenic, ca. 1962. The
names on the outside (Child/
Mother/Father) designate the
assigned seating place of said
family member. Partitions divide
the members, while buttons
on the surface of the tabletop
labeled son, husband, wife, etc.,
could be pressed to ally the
seated person with an adjacent
person. Additional buttons
embedded in the partition and
connected to a bulb permit sig-
naling to the adjacent person
to request an alliance. A square
mechanical counter toward the
center of each partition tracks
points scored through success-
ful alliance. From Jay Haley,
“Family Experiments: A New
Type of Experimentation,”
Family Processes 1 (1962).
78 Grey Room 66
only if the family is placed in some experimental situation where the
responses can be recorded by some other means than the quick eye
of an investigator.”32 In this way family members and therapists
became part of a single ensemble regulated by the strategic interven-
tion of a media apparatus.
The coordinating power of the apparatus reached its apex in an
experimental setup for tracking patterns of family cooperation and
competition, devised in partnership with Alexander Bavelas of
MIT’s Group Networks Laboratory. A simple conceit organized the
setup. Psychotherapists instructed members of three-person families
to play a simple game, wherein family members had three rounds of
two minutes each to win points for forming “coalitions” with one
another. These pairs were exclusive—only two people could be in a
coalition at a time—and to win the game, a family member had to
strategically shift back and forth between coalitions with different
family members. For example, if mother formed coalitions only with
son and vice versa (i.e., mother and son never engaging father), then
no one would win the game because mother and son would have the
same number of points and father none. This design of the game
imposed a formal pattern on cooperation and competition within
families and, its designers hoped, would allow for scientific com-
parisons of characteristic patterns of coalitions between pathologi-
cal and nonpathological families.
The game complicated matters by not allowing speaking during
three of the four rounds and only brief speech in the fourth round.
Instead, play and alliance building took place by means of an exper-
imental apparatus that structured interactions around a series of
binary selections (not unlike the vacuum tubes of a computer that
reduced complex equations to series of steps governed by a circuit
that was either on or off). This apparatus seated three-member fami-
lies at a table divided into three cubby-like partitions. The walls of
the cubby obstructed family members’ lines of sight, preventing
visual signaling among one other. Instead, communication took
place by means of switches. Each
partition had two buttons, indi-
vidually labeled to designate the
kin member in the adjacent parti-
tion (mother, father, daughter, or
son). When family members from
adjacent cubbies simultaneously
pressed the buttons designating
each other, they formed a coalition
and were awarded a point. Each
cubby had its own mechanical
counter that tracked points won.
Two additional buttons allowed members to activate lights in the
adjacent cubby, signaling an invitation to form a coalition. An “event
recorder” in the adjacent “control room” kept a master record of
all interactions for later analysis and comparison across families.
Apparatuses such as these facilitated a formalist analysis of family
interactions. More important, they performatively reconstituted the
family into a rule-bound system governed by elementary operations
of relay and exchange.
These programming techniques stripped away conversational
semantics to reveal elementary patterns of interaction suitable for
formal description and mathematical analysis. In contrast to psy-
choanalysis, which would have read repetitions, gestures, stutters,
and cross talk in terms of the depths and obfuscations of the psyche,
the Palo Alto Group treated these elements as depthless codes
governing the binding of a communicative network. Psychoanalytic
depth and repression thus gave way to cybernetic surface and pat-
tern, which could be empirically captured in a material surface of
celluloid and magnetic tape. Indeed, staff members sometimes
divided up the different family members’ spoken lines like roles and
acted them out with one another, because if mental illnesses resided
in patterns of interaction, then even “normal” subjects—so the logic
went—might slip into psychically aberrant roles.33
These methodologies had a peculiarly centrifugal effect on mental
illness. No longer inscribed in the flesh, mental disturbances became
ambulatory—traveling from body to body, without a center, the prop-
erty of ongoing interactions rather than internal states. This shift of
locale corresponded to modifications in documentation and treat-
ment. Recording media gave illness a durable existence in material
traces outside the body; illness no longer resided in tissues of grey
matter but rather in informatic patterns and traces. By means of
recording, these traces could be sped up, slowed down, cut into
pieces, redistributed across distances long and short, and circulated
for analysis through professional journals. In time, these results
could be returned to the patient, on occasion even directly; for
instance, through an encounter with words and images played back
to him or her. But more often the therapists themselves synthesized
these elements and applied their lessons to the family, thereby com-
pleting the circuit of communications, with therapists themselves
becoming the final segment of the feedback loop that reconstituted
the family as a cybernetic system.

Gestural Spacing
The Palo Alto Apparatus emerged from a series of filmic and photo-
graphic investigations on nonverbal communication that Bateson
conducted from 1949 to 1955 in collaboration with Kees and

Geoghegan | The Family as Machine: Film, Infrastructure, and Cybernetic Kinship in Suburban America 79
 psychiatrist Jurgen Ruesch.34 Bateson had flirted with mental health
research since the 1930s, when the Committee for Research in
Dementia Praecox provided him and his then-wife Margaret Mead
with funding to study causes of the supposedly low incidence of
schizophrenia among Balinese tribes.35 When their marriage broke
up in the late 1940s, Bateson decamped for California, where he
secured an appointment working with Ruesch, a non-Freudian analyst
of Swiss extraction, at the Langley Porter Clinic in San Francisco.
Bateson brought to this work two decisive interests. His burgeoning
interest in communication theory, based on his participation in iter-
ations of the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics (as they later came
to be known) since 1946, came to organize much of their work.
Bateson’s interest complemented Ruesch’s own growing interest in
communicative theories of mental health. In addition, the “culture
and personality” school of anthropology, with which Bateson became
associated through Mead, had developed an account of personality
as the result of values and practices inculcated by the family in child
rearing. This latter perspective would inform how Bateson and his
colleagues defined communicative processes in the family.
Ruesch and Bateson’s coauthored 1951 monograph Communication:
The Social Matrix of Psychiatry established the rudiments of a cyber-
netic approach founded on the premise that “almost all phenomena
included under the traditional heading of psychopathology are dis-
turbances of communication.”36 The presumption that mental illness
developed in communication demanded a turn away from the
expressions of the solitary disturbed individual in favor of an analy-
sis of interactions between mentally ill patients and the people
around them, including their families and therapists. Ruesch and
Bateson turned to Kees to develop modes of documentation capable
of empirically documenting these interactions. An accomplished
painter and poet, Kees had succeeded Clement Greenberg as the art
critic for The Nation and was an emerging figure in the postwar
experimental film scene taking root in the Bay Area. Like Bateson
and Ruesch, he was a transplant to the area, having come to San
Francisco to escape the East Coast, where he felt stifled by the nascent
New York School of Painting, with which he was identified.
Kees infused his colleagues’ films and writings with an aesthetic
acuity and, rather than seeing the job as just a means to a paycheck,
appeared to have a genuine investment in the prospect of a reformed
approach to psychotherapy. His wife spent time at Langley Porter
Clinic as a patient, and Kees suffered from his own bouts with depres-
sion, culminating in his presumed suicide from the Golden Gate
Bridge, in 1955. His poem “The Clinic,” dedicated to Bateson but
apparently written before he joined the Langley Porter team, offers a
grim portrait of the scenes of electroconvulsive therapy of the period:

80 Grey Room 66
 When the doctors turn the current on.
The ceiling fries. Waves shimmer from the floor
Where hell spreads thin between the bars.
And then a switch snaps off and it is over
For another day. Close up. Go home.
Calcium chloride, a milligram
Or so, needled into the brain, close to
The infundibulum. Sometimes we sleep for weeks.37
The brooding horror of electrical and chemical intervention evoked
in “The Clinic” hints at the unease Kees, Bateson, and Ruesch shared
for mainstream psychiatry of the period. This acutely felt and inti-
mate investment in the problems of the psychologically unwell
seemed to drive Kees’s efforts as he redirected the experimental
modes of representations honed in poetry, criticism, filmmaking,
and painting toward a reimagination of the psyche itself, as inscribed
in aesthetic flows available for capture and modification through
cinematic reels and photographic rolls.38
One of their major works from this period, the educational film
Communication and Interaction in Three Families (1952), outlines
the trio’s cybernetic approach to the study of the family. A narrator
describes the film as an effort to document what the narrator terms
“small repetitive patterns . . . whose cumulative effect contributes to
character formation.”39 The film, ethnographic in character, docu-
mented nearly imperceptible patterns of gesture and interaction in
the family which, following the culture-and-personality school’s
thinking, they credited with forming individual character. Other
activities filmed during this period included schizophrenic patients
reading Finnegans Wake, “mute mongoloids” interacting in group
settings, suburban mothers spending time at home with mentally ill The Nature of Play: Part 1, River
children, and seeing-eye dogs undergoing training.40 Bateson attrib- Otters, dir. Gregory Bateson
uted the double-bind thesis to films shot in this period at the San and Weldon Kees, 1954. Frame
enlargement of river otters
Francisco Zoo, where he claimed to have found nonverbal cues that stimulated to play by the direc-
allowed the animals to distinguish between fighting and playing.41 tors. From Bateson EPPI Films,
Bateson, Ruesch, and Kees purposed to undertake a cybernetic in the Bateson Collection at
the Don D. Jackson Archive,
analysis of these interactions as revealed in microdetail by celluloid. University of Louisiana at
According to Ruesch and Kees, Monroe, accessed spring 2015.
Reproduced with the permis-
few are trained to look steadily and searchingly at the visual sion of the Bateson Idea Group.
world and really to see what passes
before the eyes. The nature of action
is inherently transitory. . . . [However,
t]he highly consequential act of
putting a “frame” around a person or
group or an object concentrates and
emphasizes, and there are not many

Geoghegan | The Family as Machine: Film, Infrastructure, and Cybernetic Kinship in Suburban America 81

Hand-Mouth Coordination,
dir. Jurgen Ruesch, Gregory
Bateson, and Weldon Kees,
ca. 1952. Frame enlargements.
Below, top to bottom: Toddler
regards spoon as mother
regards son; son regards cam-
era as cameraman (Kees) films
son. Opposite, top to bottom:
toddler regards camera as
cameraman (Kees) regards
toddler; shot by Kees of
Bateson filming a wider shot
of the whole family. Faces have
been concealed to protect the
identities of the subjects.
Video copy of original 16 mm
film courtesy James Reidel and
Henning Engelke. Reproduced
with the permission of the
Bateson Idea Group.
82 Grey Room 66
films that deal honestly and directly with real events—films
that permit us to look at human beings as they actually are.42
The notion that minutiae of movement revealed by film could illu-
minate imperceptible psychic realities had appeared widely in the
film theory of the first half of the twentieth century. In the 1930s Walter
Benjamin had developed a memorable theory of the optical uncon-
scious that subverted the Freudian emphasis on language over move-
ment and physiology.43 However, the concept of cybernetic patterns
introduced a powerful framework for rendering this imperceptible
reality legible for therapeutic ends. For Bateson and his colleagues,
uncovering such patterns was the first step in reforming a prevailing
psychiatric gaze dominated by Freudian theories of trauma and
depth. “We made a film in ’49 at Langley-Porter Clinic,” Bateson later
recalled, “of the fact that the minor patterns of interchange in a fam-
ily are the major sources of mental illness. And nobody in ’49 could
look at that film; the [medical] professionals just could not see it.”44
At stake for Bateson were two competing analytics: psychoanalytic
hermeneutics that sought out traces of traumatic repression in dis-
guised forms (malapropisms, rebus-like dream figures, and bungled
actions) versus cybernetic behaviorism that treated discrete com-
municative traces, captured by recording media, as elements in sto-
chastic systems of recursive communication.
Their 1951 Hand-Mouth Coordination: Excerpts from the Feeding
Routine of a One-Year-Old Boy (a preliminary study to Three Families)
documents the emerging features of a cybernetic observation rooted
in celluloid, including gestural patterning, recursive communica-
tions, and a blurring of the distinction between
system and observer.45 It also displays the enduring
residues of psychoanalytic themes in the emerging
therapeutic modes. Shot by Bateson and Kees in the
suburbs of San Francisco with two portable Bell and
Howell 16 mm cameras, the silent film documents in
excruciating detail interactions among a mother and
her four children, with particular attention paid to
the feeding of the toddler in its high chair.46 Kees’s
careful editing turns this ordinary domestic scene
into a cybernetic system of gestures and gazes trav-
eling among mother, children, and cameramen.47
Feeding time at the kitchen table becomes an almost
obscene display of orifices as relays: hands summon
what mouths swallow, while gazes travel from
mother to toddler to brother and back in a constant
feedback loop. Drawn into this circuit are the
cameramen and their cameras, whose apertures—
objects of fascination for the children and of mild
distress for a self-conscious mother—become channels for transmit-
ting cybernetic signals.
The gestural spacing enabled by Hand-Mouth Coordination dis-
located the protocinematic episteme that informed late-nineteenth-
century science (and lingered on in mid-twentieth-century sciences).48
As noted by film scholar Linda Williams, among others, in the latter
half of the nineteenth century, antecedents of the moving image had
invested scientific knowledge of the living body with distinctly
industrial properties of mechanism, minuteness, and seriality, as in
the running men of Eadweard Muybridge and the hysterical women
documented at Jean-Martin Charcot’s Hôpital de la Salpêtrière.49
Joined to this seriality was an objectivity born of isolating objects
from their social settings and erasing all traces of the documenting
instruments. Scientists enveloped the individual body in an elabo-
rate architecture of what Noam Elcott terms “artificial darkness,” by
which the lively social body became a series of isolated linear trans-
formations.50 From the nineteenth-century culture of moving images,
Bateson and his colleagues inherited a desire to isolate and expose
the aberrant body in unprecedented detail. Small details of move-
ment became durable documents for close examination. Moreover,
as at the Salpêtrière, the Palo Alto films and tapes served a trinity of
museological, pedagogical, and analytical purposes—that is, as an
archive of aberrancy, as illustrations for instructional purposes, and
as instruments of observation.51
However, for the spatial procedures of seriality, isolation, and
enclosure that governed the late-nineteenth-century protocinematic
regime, Bateson and his colleagues substituted a distinctly cyber-
netic logic of recursivity, interaction, and expanding
networks. They turned to film and audio to delineate
patterns that did not inhere in a particular body or
space but disclosed themselves in circulation among
multiple bodies that were tethered to recording
instruments. Objective scientific authority gave way
to an involvement and complicity demonstrated by
the camera and its operators’ appearance in the films.
In Bateson and his colleagues’ films, roving cameras
and ordinary kitchen lights dispelled artificial dark-
ness and traced an ontology of interrelatedness irre-
ducible to any single body. Whereas Charcot sought
to extract the mentally ill from their families and
thereby build a stronger psyche in the safe confines
of a clinic, affiliates of the Palo Alto Group con-
densed and magnified the family circuit to produce
an ecological account of mental health. As one prac-
titioner of these methods later noted,

Geoghegan | The Family as Machine: Film, Infrastructure, and Cybernetic Kinship in Suburban America 83
 Family therapy will take over psychiatry in one or two decades,
because it is about man in context. It is a therapy that belongs
to our century, while individual therapy belongs to the nine-
teenth century. . . . Family therapy is to psychiatry what Pinter
is to theatre and ecology is to natural science.52

Infrastructural Spacing
As if impelled by the centrifugal motion drawing mental illness out
of the individual body into a widening gyre of associations, the doc-
umentary films of Bateson, Kees, and Ruesch quit the clinic to tour
suburban living rooms and kitchens. This turn toward the suburbs
participated in a wider effort to assign the nuclear family and the
suburban home with the task of ordering postwar social life—what
historian Ellen Herman characterizes as “an insistent [postwar]
ideology of patriarchal domesticity [that] simultaneously returned
civilian jobs to male veterans and sequestered women and children
in a familial bubble.”53 In the course of the late 1940s and early 1950s
the postwar suburb, in tandem with an expanding network of veter-
ans’ hospitals and mental health services, emerged as a mainstay in
the societal infrastructures charged with overcoming the social dis-
locations of the Great Depression and World War II, and also acting
as a dynamic buffer guarding against the kinds of brittle mentalities
seen as having facilitated the rise of fascism in Europe.
From this perspective, the Palo Alto Apparatus joined an ensem-
ble of media-technical forms and flows—including television, sub-
urban developments, highways, and new architectural forms such as
the picture window—bringing the white middle class to the suburbs.
It allowed regimes of geographic spatialization, as well as economic
and ethnic segregation, that served as the phantasmatic foundations
of a new variety of family-centered postwar domesticity. Moreover,
family therapy’s emphasis on the home as the site for nurturing per-
sonality and the role of “the schizophrenogenic mother” in produc-
ing mental illness aligned it with a coterie of postwar technologies
of gender that produced the home as a site of feminine care and
semipublic “workplaces” as a site of masculine labor.54
The ethnographic tendency in the documentary films shot by
Bateson and his colleagues inflects them with a certain ideological
undecidability; they are at once exemplifications of the postwar
ideal and self-consciously distantiated documents of its historically
specific, pathological contingencies. In effect, the films—which
included mothers caring for their children, parents dining with chil-
dren in the kitchen, and scenes of the family receiving neighbors
in the family room—offered ethnographies of the mentalities (and
relative resiliencies) peculiar to the architecture and infrastructure
of postwar suburban sprawl.55 Ultimately, a specific ideological

84 Grey Room 66
stance on the contents of the films is ceded to a cybernetic formalism
substituting spatial expanse for critical and historical depths. In this
way, the early films shot by Bateson, Ruesch, and Kees took part in
producing what Mark Poster describes as “a horizontal theory that
illuminated the surface expanse of the patient’s family life.”56 The
sprawling space of the suburbs became constitutive of the horizon-
tal surface of a new theoretical paradigm.
Three Families traces this suburban topos and its role in the
medial production of racialized, gendered, and class differentiation.
Consisting mostly of ethnographic documentation of families at home,
it evokes the postwar fascination with the nuclear family as a basic
unit of national strength and health; however, it may equally be read as
a document of the role played by social science and suburban infra-
structures in fabricating that family.57 This making-of-the-family
involved an ingenious incorporation of postwar California’s sprawling
suburban infrastructures into the emerging theoretical frameworks of
family therapy. The network of highways, electrical grids, and broad-
casting systems that facilitated the manufacture of a racially and
economically segregated suburban utopia (i.e., the idea rather than
the actuality of such a place), produced family structures suitable for
description as semiautonomous and self-contained cybernetic sys-
tems.58 Unlike the extended families identified with neighborhoods
labeled “urban” and “ethnic,” the suburban families of Menlo Park
and Palo Alto permitted easy delineation as free-standing, semiau-
tonomous systems. In effect, the infrastructural spacing of postwar
America produced economies of psychic circulation that came to
define the family as a social system. Architecture and infrastructure
entered into the technological constitution of the cybernetic family.
Communication and Interaction performs this intertwining of
gestural, infrastructural, psychic, and ethnic ecologies. “This film
was made in San Francisco during the year of 1951,” a narrator
intones over opening scenes of the city center, “and deals with three
West Coast middle class families whom we shall call the Hoffmans,
the Peters, and the Bergs.” Scenes of the city center that open the film
give way to a car ride as the two cameramen, Bateson and Kees,
travel via highway to a suburban enclave. Skyscrapers and urban
projects give way to freestanding homes accessible by motorway and
automobile. With the leaving behind of the city, the film—and
indeed family therapy itself—is en route to an inventory of modes of
living sustained by the suburbs. This passage from city center to sub-
urb models the changing workplaces of Bateson and his colleagues,
as their work started at San Francisco’s urban Langley Porter Clinic
in the late 1940s but then increasingly centered on family therapy
conducted in suburban Palo Alto and Menlo Park in the 1950s. This
cinematic passage also theatricalizes the migration of the postwar

Geoghegan | The Family as Machine: Film, Infrastructure, and Cybernetic Kinship in Suburban America 85

Top: Bathing Babies in Three
Cultures, dir. Margaret Mead
and Gregory Bateson, 1954.
Washing a Balinese baby in the
open air and in the company of
neighbors. Frame enlargement.
Bottom: Communication and
Interaction in Three Families,
dir. Jurgen Ruesch, Gregory
Bateson, and Weldon Kees,
1952. Washing a baby in the
enclosed space of the postwar
American suburbs. Frame
enlargement. Reproduced with
the permission of the Bateson
Idea Group.
86 Grey Room 66
American family itself, as ideals of the white suburban enclave took
hold of the postwar cultural imaginary.
Three Families, like the later work of the Palo Alto Group, ambiva-
lently recognizes the contingency of ethnic, racial, and gendered
codes it documents. On the one hand, a voice-over announces that
the film will concentrate on the analysis of families of “Anglo-Saxon”
and “German-Jewish” descent. This detail is again in keeping with
the methods of the culture-and-personality school of anthropology,
which identified personality traits with national and ethnic inculca-
tion. In Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry, the Swiss
Ruesch and the English Bateson underscored the peculiarly
American qualities of the families and mentalities they described.59
However, this historically contingent family formation and its
belonging to a specific phase of the built world slides into unmarked
universalism as images of a painted nativity scene of Mary, Joseph,
and Jesus accompany the narration:
The film was shot in the belief that in a careful record of what
some mothers and children do, it might be possible to observe
the various means of communication which the children learn
through every detail of the mother’s action. But the actions of
parents are also responses to how they perceive the children.
The family thus becomes a unit.
The result is a historicization of ethnic grouping and practices
enveloped by a universalization of an ethnically unmarked, hetero-
normative (and Christian) nuclear family as a transhistorical build-
ing block of society.60
Juxtaposing the families’ bathing, dressing, and playing in Three
Families with movies Bateson and Mead shot in
Bali in the 1930s brings into relief the specificity
of architecture as a factor in these descriptions
of the family.61 Whereas the ethnographic films
of mothers bathing their children in Bali unfold
beneath the open sky and in an unenclosed
space that allows acquaintances to peer in,
enabling an almost seamless cutting-together of
footage that features neighboring mothers and
children from across the tribe, the suburban
scenes of the Hoffmans, Peters, and Bergs
develop in the closed space of a suburban bath-
room, where only mother, children, and camera-
men enter into the ecology of communication
and interaction. The freestanding suburban
home and its media of walls, doors, and stair-
wells circumscribe association, strictly regulat-
ing who enters and who leaves and imposing a sharp delimitation
between each family
Complementing the half hour of calm, domestic scenes that rep-
resent the so-called normal families featured in Three Families are
hours of never-released medical footage of “abnormal” families, shot
in hopes of documenting and diagnosing the production of mental
illness. There the walls of the family home—presented as neutral
and inoffensive in Three Families—are disclosed as agents in the
often malignant configuration of libidinal economies. In filmed one-
on-one sessions between the therapist and the mother of one Palo
Alto family (who had sought treatment after seeing a public screen-
ing of Communication and Interaction in Three Families), the
distraught woman complains of the unendurable loneliness she
experiences at home, recounting the pain caused by long absences of
her husband and son from the house and declaring, “I’d like to throw
rocks through the window . . . [and] tear the walls down.”62 Paired
with this agonizing isolation are its unsettling disruptions: she
reports distressing phone calls from her husband, visits from an
intrusive neighbor, and the overbearing presence of Bateson and his
cameraman as incidents unsettling domesticity. Suburban Palo Alto
provides a topos for the distribution of this existential dread, and the
nuclear family a circuit for its articulation.

Cybernetic Aesthetics
The gestural and infrastructural spacing in the films of Bateson and
his associates culminated in a cybernetic aesthetics born of the
wartime instruments and techniques that circulated in postwar
America. In broad strokes, the cybernetic aesthetic consisted of an
amalgamation of human and machine perception in recursive and
mathematically patterned series. The cybernetic aesthetic repur-
posed the functional patterns of mathematics as objects for aesthetic
reflection in their own right. Though most easily characterized by
the introduction of wartime communications technologies (such as
radar, oscilloscopes, and information-theoretical methods of analysis)
into artistic production, social-scientific investigation into human
perception and organization arguably played the more decisive role
in its constitution.
This cybernetic aesthetics emerged from a hybridization of engi-
neering and social scientific innovation produced by the mobiliza-
tion of engineers and social scientists in joint endeavors during
World War II. In wartime, engineers applied cryptography, oper-
ations research, analog and digital computers, servomechanisms, and
radar to the mathematical recognition of patterns that exceeded
native human perceptual and cognitive faculties. Phenomena such
as missile and plane trajectories and strings of words and sounds

Geoghegan | The Family as Machine: Film, Infrastructure, and Cybernetic Kinship in Suburban America 87

Hy Hirsh. Divertissement
Rococo, 1951. Frame enlarge-
ments from 16 mm color film
with sound, produced with
an oscilloscope. Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Film Archive, Hollywood, CA.
Reproduced with the permis-
sion of Angeline Pike.
88 Grey Room 66
transmitted across long distances became mathematically governed
series, grids, and probabilities accessible by machine-aided inter-
vention. Social scientists such as Kurt Lewin, Alexander Bavelas,
and J.J. Gibson, meanwhile, devised psychological theories and
training films capable of integrating human and machinic percep-
tion. After the war the experiments of artists and social scientists
alike repurposed this knowledge for aesthetic ends.63
Characteristics of cybernetic aesthetics emerged in fields of
conceptual labor and in flows of experimental practice opened up
through the dissemination of wartime technologies in the civilian
sphere. At the conceptual level, Three Families explicitly locates
itself within the postwar technoscientific field of conceptual labors
reorganizing knowledge according to cybernetics. Shots of Shannon
and Warren Weaver’s The Mathematical Theory of Communication,
Wiener’s Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal
and the Machine, and Gibson’s The Perception of the Visual World
invite the viewer into an informational ontology wherein proto-
algorithmic processes govern language, industry, human-machine
systems, biology, and vision.64 These works provided analytical
methods that rendered Three Communications intelligible as an
effort to map out human interaction as communicative patterns. At
the same time, the film endeavored to inscribe itself within this
field—not as popularization but as a conceptual peer to take part in
the interdisciplinary field of communications wherein concepts
from engineering, social science, and other fields circu-
late. An additional shot of Bateson and Ruesch’s own
Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry
announces the filmmakers’ intention to place mental
health squarely along the axis of interdisciplinary infor-
mational sciences.
The first frames of Three Families, which feature the
phrase “Kinesis presents,” provide clues to the flows of
experimental practice to which the film belonged.
Founded around 1951, Kinesis, Inc., distributed experi-
mental films to festivals and college campuses. The
company’s distribution not only of Three Families but
also of experimental animations such as Divertissement
Rococo (1952) by Hy Hirsh and Caravan (1952) by Jordan
Belson located it squarely in San Francisco’s avant-
garde art scene (much traveled by Bateson and Kees)
that blurred the lines between scientific and artistic
experiment through the repurposing of wartime tech-
nologies.65 Divertissement Rococo employed an oscillo-
scope and optical printer of Hirsh’s own construction to
produce a symphony of abstract patterns and shapes
generated by mathematical ratios. Kinesis, Inc., advertised the film
as “an amazing display of completely controlled colors, lines and
shapes,” crediting it with “translating music into light and color.”66
Belson would later incorporate Hirsh’s work with the oscilloscope
into his own work, most notably combining it with electronic music
at the Vortex V concerts. This experimental scene rested upon the
postwar proliferation of magnetic tape, oscilloscopes, and other elec-
tronics enabled by surplus and refashioned cast-off war technolo-
gies. This appropriation of wartime technologies is perhaps best
known from the films of John Whitney, an artist whose 1946 appear-
ance in the San Francisco Museum of Art’s landmark Art and
Cinema exhibition directly informed the film practice of Hirsh and
Belson.67 Whitney recalls making his oscilloscope-driven films by
purchasing “mechanical junk excreted from army depots across the
country . . . [including] antiaircraft specialized analog ballistic prob-
lem solver computers dating back to World War II.”68 As discussed
by Zabet Patterson, technologies devised to render the chaos of
wartime combat into orderly, predictable patterns thus became the
means for an aesthetic retraining of civilian perceptual apparatuses.
In the case of Three Families, however, what transformed vision
was not a discrete media technology like the oscilloscope, but rather
a media-technical amalgamation of cybernetics, information theory,
and the federally funded veterans’ hospital combined within a sin-
gle apparatus of therapeutic visions. At first glance, the scenes of
families in Three Families may look quite different from the experi-
mental films of Hirsh and Whitney. The former offers an almost
quaint representation of American families at home, while the films
of Hirsh and Whitney were composed entirely of abstract forms gen-
Communication and Interaction
erated by the informational properties of oscilloscope and computers. in Three Families, dir. Jurgen
However, the observational techniques of Three Families turned the Ruesch, Gregory Bateson, and
observer away from the figural bodies of parents and children and Weldon Kees, 1952. Frame
enlargement. Example of “small
toward abstract informational patterns of “communication” and repetitive patterns” to instruct
“interaction.” As the narrator of the film explains, “the film is not a viewers on what to look for in
record of dramatic events but of small repetitive patterns. These the films of families interacting
at home. Reproduced with
repeated patterns whose cumulative effect contributes to character the permission of the Bateson
formation are implicit statements about human relations.” Thus, Idea Group.
while the film presents what may be
construed as charming domestic
scenes, it is not, in fact, a depiction
of mothers bathing and dressing
children, nor is it even a portrayal
of families; instead, it is the presen-
tation of a particular apparatus
of communication—namely, the
American family—transmitting its

Geoghegan | The Family as Machine: Film, Infrastructure, and Cybernetic Kinship in Suburban America 89
 signals via small repetitive patterns of exchange.
The cybernetic eye that transformed sentimental scenes of domes-
tic family life into a spectacle of surface, signal, and noise laid the
foundations for the informatic approach to family therapy. Bateson’s
cybernetic cinema bracketed out meaning and intentionality to
showcase the depthless relay of technical signals. “Every expressive
movement, action sequence, or word is,” the narrator explains,
“among other things, a message telling the receiver how to interpret
other messages. It is in fact a message about communication.” So it
is across all the films produced by the Palo Alto Group. The meta-
communicative signals of “approaches and leavetakings” (as Kees
and Ruesch titled one 1955 film) replaced the existential depth of
welcoming and departing. Likewise, in Hand-Mouth Coordination,
stereotypically Freudian oral fixations of a baby and mother com-
peting over the insertion of spoon into a mouth are transformed into
an exemplary trial of cybernetic targeting based on real-time coordi-
nation of hand and eye to reach the destination.69 This cybernetic
aesthetics recomposed the nuclear family as a primary node for con-
figuring the relay of signals and for regulating the production of the
psychic self alongside its traffic with the outside world. Sustaining
this analytical determination was the suburban home that config-
ured the available channels for interaction. Scenes of neighbors
approaching and leaving by side doors and of cars delivering and
evacuating persons unfurl as patterns demanding informatic parsing
by scientists and their cameras—at least until the arrival of antici-
pated computing machines capable of reducing this vast visual labor
to a simple matter of zeroes and ones.

The Bastards of the Cybernetic Family

This centrifugal motion—whereby the site of communication shifts
from semantic content to embedded patterns of communications—
allowed family therapy as a field to divorce itself from the textual
hermeneutics and inner mentalities favored by psychoanalysis and
to become a formal science of observing and ultimately engineering
adaptive systems of communication in the family.70 After the 1955
suicide of Kees and the nonrenewal of a Rockefeller Foundation
grant, Bateson refocused his efforts around the suburban Palo Alto
Veterans Administration Hospital. Together with Jackson, Haley,
Weakland, and William Fry, he developed means for making the
suburban family at home in interview rooms outfitted with audio
recorders, film cameras, and one-way mirrors. This collaboration
adapted media techniques forged with Ruesch and Kees in the late
1940s and early 1950s into the cybernetic system of inscription,
analysis, and therapeutic feedback that came to dominate family
therapy and define the Palo Alto Group. By 1962 (the year Bateson

90 Grey Room 66
left the Palo Alto Group), the early experiment was becoming a rec-
ognized method, with efforts to reproduce their work taking root in
experimental clinics across the United States.
However, even more influential than the Palo Alto Apparatus was
its unanticipated offspring on the political left and right. Cybernetic
therapy seemed to offer solutions to right-wing, left-wing, and tech-
nocratic agendas for mental health reform. The notion that the
private nuclear family—rather than governments or society—was the
proper custodian of mental health met with broad approval in Cold
War America, which held up the private family as a counterforce to
communist collectivism. From the right, Ronald Reagan’s first major
political speech, the 1961 long-playing record Ronald Reagan Speaks
Out against Socialized Medicine, provided an ideological outline for
attacks on state-funded, institutionalized health care. Reagan opposed
the well-being of the family and private industry to the supposed
threats posed by social security. Reagan instructed an imagined wife
and mother to think of the freedoms their sons and husbands would
lose if their own professions became subject to government regula-
tion. His address found a receptive audience in California, where the
work of the Palo Alto Group had already sown seeds of doubt about
large state-run mental health care facilities and turned the public’s
attention to fathers, mothers, and the local community.
From the political left, antipsychiatrists including Thomas Szasz,
David Cooper, and R.D. Laing found in the double-bind hypothesis
support for their argument that mental illness constituted resistance
to an oppressive society. Seizing upon the Palo Alto Group’s 1950s
and 1960s studies of schizophrenia as a map of group-based dys-
functions, first Laing and later French philosopher Gilles Deleuze
and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari wrote conceptual elegies to the
schizophrenic’s ability to lay bare the paradoxes gripping capitalist American Medical Association.
Ronald Reagan Speaks Out
society. The conceptual legacy of this work resounded in the echelons against Socialized Medicine,
of postmodern theory, where the likes of Jean Baudrillard and Fredric 1961. Cover of LP record.
Jameson embraced the critical diagnosis
of schizophrenia as a register of conflict
in communicative capitalism.
Often lost on the later disciples of
Deleuze and Guattari was the intimate
relation of this work to the media-tech-
nical refashioning of psychic manage-
ment. As Guattari once recalled, “[m]y
first work as a psychotherapist was with
a schizophrenic, using a tape recorder,”
attesting to the more mundane clinical
circumstances of Palo Alto–inflected
therapy in which his celebrated attack

Geoghegan | The Family as Machine: Film, Infrastructure, and Cybernetic Kinship in Suburban America 91
 with Deleuze on psychoanalysis, Anti-Oedipus, took form.71 Seemingly
lost on the advocates of anti-Oedipal schizoanalysis themselves was
their complicity with the emerging neoliberalization of health care.
In an ironic alliance, these two movements laid ideological founda-
tions in the United States for a broad-based movement to devolve
health care, first from urban asylums to the community clinics of the
1960s and later to the privately run flophouses of 1970s deinstitu-
tionalization.72 So it was that the radical proponents of “schizo cul-
ture” and “schizoanalysis” found themselves metaphorically standing
outsides the gates of empty asylums, demanding the inmates be
set free.
Moreover, the proposition that modest technical adjustments
could resolve long-standing mental illnesses exerted broad appeal in
a nation whose demands for mental health care in the latter half of
the twentieth century displayed no limits. In 1967, Bateson’s former
colleagues and students in Palo Alto established the Brief Therapy
Center, which adapted the lessons of family therapy for the treatment
of patients identified as suffering from a dearth of “time, money,
intelligence, persistence, and verbal sophistication.”73 Dubbed by
critics “therapy in the age of Reaganomics” and “Reagapeutics,” brief
therapy sought to identify and modify at the individual level observ-
able systems of feedback identified as systemic logical distortion
responsible for mental illness.74 In lieu of the vast machinery of
cameras, transcriptions, mirrors, and microphones, brief therapy
returned to the simple cybernetic system of therapist, notebook, and
patient. In doctrinaire form it afforded no more than ten or twelve
sessions of intensive work in which to identify and adjust aberrations
in communications. By taking funds formerly directed to institu-
tionalization and psychoanalysis and earmarking them for brief
therapy and its spinoffs (e.g., cognitive behavioral therapy), health
maintenance organizations (HMOs) and state health care systems
thereby became the principle apparatus for disseminating stripped-
down cybernetics to the salaried masses.75

Media History as Cybernetic Kinship

The history of the cybernetic family and its media-technical fash-
ioning extends but also complicates our understanding of the role
played by media in the remaking of domestic life after World War II.
For some time now it has been a pillar of cultural history that after
World War II electronic media, particularly television, provided
technical support for fashioning the suburban home into a semi-
autonomous privatized space (what Raymond Williams termed “mobile
privatization”) with profound implications for the production of a
“separable family.”76 Media historian Lynn Spigel demonstrates how,
in the 1940s and 1950s, “white middle-class concepts of gender,

92 Grey Room 66
class, and generational difference” shaped the social construction of
television as technology for the management of this historically spe-
cific regime of family life.77 In this way Spigel and other feminist
historians have shown how historically specific fantasies about the
family bore down on the constitution of media technologies.78
The history of the cybernetic family reveals that the inverse is also
true; that is, that historically specific fantasies about technology, and
technology itself, bore down on the reconstitution of the American
family. This reconstitution was not enacted by a rudimentary tech-
nological determinism whereby the arrival of electronic media in the
home simply compelled new forms of private association. Instead,
as the history of the cybernetic family shows, it came about indi-
rectly, as new modes of knowledge and analysis born of wartime
technologies reformed social science and other institutions for the
management of postwar life. As this process of cybernetic reform
unfolded, it intermingled with a wider range technical forms such as
architecture, infrastructure, and educational film.
The manufacture of the cybernetic family may serve as an allegory
for the task of the media historian. Insofar as the cybernetic family
belongs to a chapter of media history, it suggests the latter is about
more than reconstructions of specific media (e.g., radio, television,
film, computing) and their interactions with, or constitution through,
a predefined social context. Neither cybernetics, film, nor social con-
struction provides a basis on its own for the production of cybernetic
families. Rather, the cybernetic family came into being through the
manufacture of kinships—that is, through the forging of affiliations,
exchanges, and alliances that are not genetic but genealogical in
character, and which are composed as much of instruments and
inscriptions as by humans and their cultural practices.79 This strate-
gic configuration of elements—rather than a medium or a techno-
logical invention—allowed for the production of the cybernetic
family as well as the forging of a new apparatus for the psychic
management of its members. The history of that family suggests the
proper subject of media history is not so much “media,” “industries,”
“economy,” or “social forces” as the strategic configuration of these
heterogeneous elements into a self-reproducing apparatus.80 In this
sense, those living today under the sway of managed health care may
find themselves to be extended members of a cybernetic family, pop-
ulated with machines, data, policies, and pictures whose multifari-
ous composition falls squarely within the mandate of the media
historian.

Geoghegan | The Family as Machine: Film, Infrastructure, and Cybernetic Kinship in Suburban America 93
 Notes
This article is dedicated to Lynn Spigel. I presented earlier versions of this work at
Stanford University and the Humboldt University of Berlin in 2015, and I thank the
members of those audiences for their constructive feedback, particularly Philip
Felsch and the students of his colloquium, and attendees of the Techniques of
Mediation workshop at Stanford University (especially Løchlann Jain and Hans
Ulrich Gumbrecht), as well as hosts Miyako Inoue, Tom Mullaney, Fred Turner, and
Jennifer Hsieh. Conversations with psychiatrists George Heninger, Joel Kovel, and
Alexandra Correll provided valuable insights into clinical concerns bearing on
the present study. Thanks are also due to Lisa Åkervall, Paul Michael Kurtz, and the
editors (and reviewers) of Grey Room for their incisive suggestions; conversations
with Henning Engelke, Orit Halpern, Minette Hillyer, and Rob Mitchell also
informed this essay. Engelke, James Reidel, and Seth Watter shared essential media
artifacts from their personal archives with me. Wendel Ray, director of the Don
D. Jackson Archive and of the Gregory Bateson Collection (both located at the
University of Louisiana at Monroe) together with Nora Bateson and Philip Guddemi
of the Bateson Idea Group, granted access to the archival materials that made pos-
sible the conception of this paper. Rebecca Ora aided with transcriptions of films
held at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The Pacific Film Archive provided
helpful documentation relating to Kinesis, Inc. A grant from the IKKM of Weimar,
Germany, supported research, travel, and the writing of this paper.

1. On the decline of cybernetics, see Ronald R. Kline, The Cybernetics Moment:

Or Why We Term Our Age the Information Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2015), 179–201.
2. Members of the Palo Alto Group founded the methods of brief therapy in the
late 1960s. For a seminal text on its establishment, see John H. Weakland et al.,
“Brief Therapy: Focused Problem Resolution,” Family Process 13, no. 2 (1974):
141–68. For indications of the links between cognitive behavioral therapy and brief
therapy, see Lata K. McGinn and William C. Sanderson, “What Allows Cognitive
Behavioral Therapy to Be Brief: Overview, Efficacy, and Crucial Factors Facilitating
Brief Treatment,” Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice 8, no. 1 (March 2001):
23–37. For seminal accounts of schizophrenia and postmodern capitalism, see Jean
Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” in The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on
Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (New York: The New Press, 1983), 126–34; and
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 1–54.
3. For a concise history of cybernetics in family therapy, see Deborah Weinstein,
The Pathological Family: Postwar America and the Rise of Family Therapy (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 47–81. While one is hard-pressed to find over-
sights in Weinstein’s seminal work, the present article dwells on media archaeol-
ogy at some variance from that work’s focus. On the influence of cybernetics,
information theory, and communications theory in the Palo Alto Group more gen-
erally, see Carol Wilder, “The Palo Alto Group: Difficulties and Directions of the
Interactional View for Human Communication Research,” Communication Research
5, no. 2 (Winter 1979): 171–86.
4. The present article intervenes amid (and builds upon) a renaissance of interest
in Bateson, film, and cybernetics, broadly construed. On Bateson’s work as a
forerunner of video therapy, see Peter Sachs Collopy, “The Revolution Will Be
Videotaped: Marking a Technology of Consciousness in the Long 1960s” (Ph.D.

94 Grey Room 66
diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2015). On the pedagogic and civic aims of
Bateson’s activities in visual media, see Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround:
Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 39–76; and Minette Hillyer, “Camera
Documents Made at Home: Visual Culture and the Question of America,” Film
History 27, no. 4 (2015): 46–75. On links between Bateson’s early career in Bali and
his later work (e.g., with dolphins), see Orit Halpern, “Schizophrenic Techniques:
Cybernetics, the Human Sciences, and the Double Bind,” Scholar and Feminist
Online 10, no. 3 (Summer 2012).
5. The major exception to this trend are Henning Engelke’s writings on Kees and
his collaborators, which have inspired my own work immensely. See, for example,
Henning Engelke, “Filmisches Wissen und der Geist des Kalten Krieges: Kybernetische
Modelle bei Gregory Bateson und Weldon Kees,” in Wissensraum Film, ed. Irina
Gradinari, Dorit Müller, and Johannes Pause (Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2014),
225–41.
6. On the appropriation of Bateson’s work by experimental artists of the 1960s
and 1970s, see Eric de Bruyn, “Topological Pathways of Post-Minimalism,” Grey Room,
no. 25 (Fall 2006): 32–63; William Kaizen, “Steps to an Ecology of Communication:
Radical Software, Dan Graham, and the Legacy of Gregory Bateson,” Art Journal 67,
no. 3 (2008): 86–106; Paul Ryan and Roy Skodnick, “Radical Software and the
Legacy of Gregory Bateson,” Art Journal 68, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 111–13; and Carolyn
L. Kane, “The Tragedy of Radical Subjectivity: From Radical Software to Proprietary
Subjects,” Leonardo 47, no. 5 (2014): 480–87. Stewart Brand acted as the bridge
between Bateson and the burgeoning cyberculture. See Fred Turner, From
Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the
Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
7. These cultural forms are shaped by cultural techniques (Kulturtechniken). See
Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, “After Kittler: On the Cultural Techniques of Recent
German Media Theory,” Theory, Culture and Society 30, no. 6 (November 2013):
66–82.
8. On cybernetics and the sciences of mind, see Lily Kay, “From Logical Neurons
to Poetic Embodiments of Mind: Warren S. McCulloch’s Project in Neuroscience,”
Science in Context 14, no. 15 (2001): 591–614; and Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic
Brain: Sketches of Another Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
9. Norbert Wiener, “Cybernetics,” Scientific American 179 (1948): 14, 17.
10. Claude E. Shannon, “Brains, Minds, Machines” [unpublished manuscript], in
box 13, folder 3, Claude E. Shannon Papers, U.S. Library of Congress. This manuscript
is also known as “Brains and Machines.”
11. John von Neumann, The Computer and the Brain (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2000).
12. On cybernetics in the work of Miller and the field of cognitive psychology,
see Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in
Cold War America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 209–38. On Lacan and cyber-
netics, see Ronan Le Roux, “Psychanalyse et cybernétique: Les machines de Lacan,”
L’évolution psychiatrique 72 (2007): 346–69.
13. On the widespread transfer of wartime technologies to the civilian sector,
especially after World War II, see Jennifer S. Light, From Warfare to Welfare:
Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2003). For a classic media-theoretical account of this
transfer, see Friedrich A. Kittler, “Rock Music: A Misuse of Military Equipment,” in

Geoghegan | The Family as Machine: Film, Infrastructure, and Cybernetic Kinship in Suburban America 95
 The Truth of the Technological World: Essays on the Genealogy of Presence, trans.
Erik Butler (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 152–64.
14. Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the
Age of Experts (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995),
242–43.
15. See Marvin Karno and Donald A. Schwartz, Community Mental Health:
Reflections and Explorations (Flushing, NY: Spectrum Publications, 1974), 22–23;
and Joseph Halpern, The Myths of Deinstitutionalization: Policies for the Mentally
Disabled (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1980), 1–5.
16. See Albert Maisel, “Bedlam 1946,” LIFE 20, no. 18 (6 May 1946): 102–18; and
Albert Deutsch, The Shame of the States (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948).
17. For example, Alfred H. Stanton and Morris S. Schwartz, The Mental Hospital:
A Study of Institutional Participation in Psychiatric Illness and Treatment (New
York: Basic Books, 1954); and Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social
Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1961).
18. E. Fuller Torrey, American Psychosis: How the Federal Government Destroyed
the Mental Illness Treatment System (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 75.
19. The landmark account of the transition from disciplinary containment to
informational control is James Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and
Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1986). A synoptic outline of this transition may be found in Gilles Deleuze,
“Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter 1992): 3–7.
20. Gregory Bateson et al., “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia,” Behavioral
Science 1, no. 4 (1956): 251–64.
21. Jay Haley, “Development of a Theory: A History of a Research Project,” in
Double Bind: The Foundation of the Communicational Approach to the Family, ed.
Carlos E. Sluski and Donald C. Ransom (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1976), 69.
22. Don D. Jackson, “The Study of the Family,” Family Process 4 (1965).
23. On the definition of a dispositif, see Michel Foucault, “The Confession of the
Flesh,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, ed. Colin
Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 194–96. On cybernetics as an appara-
tus, see Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, “From Information Theory to French
Theory: Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss, and the Cybernetic Apparatus,” Critical Inquiry 38,
no. 1 (2011): 96–126.
24. See Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, “The Cybernetic Apparatus: Media,
Liberalism, and the Reform of the Human Sciences” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern
University, Evanston, Illinois, 2012).
25. Geoghegan, “The Cybernetic Apparatus,” 69–70.
26. Although initially devised for interviewing families with a schizophrenic
member (Weinstein, 67–68), it was later adapted to a therapeutic tool for general
use. For an account of the latter, see Paul Watzlawick, “A Structured Family
Interview,” Family Process 5, no. 2 (September 1966). The phrase “scanning for
patterns” comes from Watzlawick’s article.
27. Although I am surmising the presence of the fireplace based on my exami-
nation of films, I have not been able to confirm this detail with participants.
28. All examples in this paragraph are drawn from Watzlawick, “A Structured
Family Interview.”
29. Watzlawick, “A Structured Family Interview.”
30. Watzlawick, “A Structured Family Interview.”
31. Don D. Jackson, “The Eternal Triangle: An Interview with Don D. Jackson,

96 Grey Room 66
M.D.,” in Techniques of Family Therapy, ed. Jay Haley and L. Hoffman (New York:
Basic Books, 1967), 175–76. Other details related in this paragraph are drawn from
Jay Haley, “Family Experiments: A New Type of Experimentation,” Family Process
1 (1962).
32. Haley, “Family Experiments.”
33. Scenes of this performance may be found in Samuel Moffat, “Area
Psychiatrists Study New Schizophrenia Theory,” Palo Alto Times, 7 May 1958, 2nd
sec.; and in the Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute (EPPI) films in the
Bateson Collection at the Don D. Jackson Archive, University of Louisiana at
Monroe (hereinafter “Jackson Archive”).
34. Accounts of the Ruesch, Kees, and Bateson films appear in a diverse array of
books. The closest thing to a comprehensive account of their work can be found
(interspersed with other information) in James Reidel, Vanished Act: The Life and
Art of Weldon Kees (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 239–348. Unless
otherwise noted, I have drawn my accounts of their work together from Reidel’s text.
35. See Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, Balinese Character: A Photographic
Analysis (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1962); and Gerald Sullivan,
Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Highland Bali (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1999), 5.
36. Jurgen Ruesch, “Values, Communication, and Culture: An Introduction,” in
Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (New York: W.W. Norton, 1951), 6.
37. Weldon Kees, The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees, ed. Donald Justice
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975), 130.
38. This thrust is particularly clear in the visually stunning monograph
Nonverbal Communication, coauthored by Kees and Ruesch but largely photographed
by the former. See Jurgen Ruesch and Weldon Kees, Nonverbal Communication
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956).
39. Communication and Interaction in Three Families, dir. Jurgen Ruesch, Gregory
Bateson, and Weldon Kees (Kinesis, Inc.: 1952), 16 mm sound film, approx. 75 min.
40. At least one history of the Palo Alto Group, written by member Jay Haley in
1961 (but not published until 1976), lists the films prepared by Bateson, Kees, and
Ruesch as the primary data gathered in the first year of the project. Haley writes,
“The data that first year were diverse and included the following: a study of otters
playing, a study of training of guide dogs for the blind, an analysis of a popular mov-
ing picture, a filming of Mongoloid children in a group, analysis of humor and a
ventriloquist and puppet, and the utterance of a schizophrenic patient when a pro-
ject member began to interview him early that year.” See Haley, “Development of a
Theory: A History of a Research Project,” 62. Uncut footage of the otters and dog
training films may be found in the Bateson holdings in the Jackson Archive. The
films of “Mongoloid” children and of the ventriloquist appear to be lost. Uncut
footage of a patient/subject known as Doris at home and ethnographic films of other
families are also in the Jackson Archive. Additional films, tape recordings, and tran-
scripts of Bateson and his colleagues (sometimes in dialogue with patients or with
one another and in at least one instance appearing on broadcast television), as well
as footage from other settings and featuring other persons, including psychoanalyst
John Rosen working with patients, are held in the Jackson Archive. The canonical
film of Doris, GB-SU-005 (discussed at length by Seth Watter in this issue of Grey
Room), may be found at the University of Chicago Digital Media Archive.
Additional (and perhaps alternate) copies may be located in the Human Studies
Film Archives at the Smithsonian. Final versions of Communication and Interaction

Geoghegan | The Family as Machine: Film, Infrastructure, and Cybernetic Kinship in Suburban America 97
 in Three Families and The Nature of Play: Part 1, River Otters may be found in the
Bateson archives at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I received a copy of
Hand-Mouth Coordination from James Reidel (via Henning Engelke) as well as a
copy of Approaches and Leavetakings by Ruesch and Kees. A brief (perhaps incom-
plete) listing of the films completed by Bateson, Ruesch, and Kees appears in
Ruesch and Kees, 200.
41. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books,
1972), x, 179. See also Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, “Editor’s Introduction: What
Bound the Double Bind?” and Gregory Bateson and Weldon Kees, “The Nature of
Play: Part 1, River Otters,” in this issue of Grey Room.
42. Ruesch and Kees, 11–12.
43. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility [First Version],” trans. Michael W. Jennings, Grey Room, no. 39
(Spring 2010): 30; and discussion thereof in Miriam Hansen, “Benjamin and
Cinema: Not a One-Way Street,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 313–19.
Note that Hansen refers to the versions of this essay composed in 1935 and 1936.
The Grey Room text translates the 1935 version.
44. Stewart Brand and Gregory Bateson, II Cybernetic Frontiers (New York:
Random House, 1974), 29.
45. Hand-Mouth Coordination, dir. Gregory Bateson and Weldon Kees, 1951, 16
mm, black-and-white, approx. 10 min., in personal collection of James Reidel, with
assistance from Henning Engelke.
46. Reidel, 240.
47. This reflexive turn, which is cybernetic in character, anticipates the rise of
video therapy (and video art) and its mechanisms of feedback. See Collopy, “The
Revolution Will Be Videotaped.” This also reflects a broader trend of film from the
period to draw the psychiatrist into the scene of illness, as if by way of implication.
See W.J.T. Mitchell, Seeing Madness, Insanity, Media, and Visual Culture (Berlin:
Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2012).
48. In this instance the term protocinematic does not indicate a primitive form
of moving-image culture that realizes itself in cinema; rather, it refers to a nontele-
ological path in the refinement of knowledge of life by the moving image that is
recounted in Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the “Frenzy of the
Visible” (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989).
49. Williams, 34–57. On hysterics at the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, see also Georges
Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography
of the Salpêtrière (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 83–279. On Marey, see Noam M.
Elcott, Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2016), 17–46.
50. Elcott, Artificial Darkness.
51. Didi-Huberman, 30.
52. Salvador Minuchin, quoted in Janet Malcolm, “The One-Way Mirror,” New
Yorker, 15 May 1978, 83.
53. Herman, 240.
54. In the course of the 1960s this gendering of family therapy became less
marked, as double binding came to be understood as a reciprocal process of mutual
binding between two or more actors rather than a unilateral process imposed by one
individual on another, such as mother and child.
55. On the intertwining of infrastructures, media, and the mentalities character-
istic of suburbanization, see Margaret Morse, Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and

98 Grey Room 66
Cyberculture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 99–124.
56. Mark Poster, Critical Theory of the Family (New York: Seabury Press, 1988), 112.
57. On the role of psychotherapy in producing new kinds of families in postwar
America and the Palo Alto Group specifically, see Weinstein, The Pathological
Family.
58. On this ideal of the suburb and its medial facilitation, see Lynn Spigel, “The
Suburban Home Companion: Television and the Neighborhood Ideal in Postwar
America,” in Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1992), 185–217.
59. See, for example, Jurgen Ruesch, “Communication and American Values:
A Psychological Approach,” in Communication, 94–134.
60. In the course of the 1950s, members of the Palo Alto Group came to encode
this universalism in abstract formal descriptions and diagrams that characterize
libidinal economies of “the family.”
61. For an overview of scenes shot in Bali and the United States, see Margaret
Mead and Gregory Bateson, Bathing Babies in Three Cultures (1951; Pennsylvania
State University Audio-Visual Services, DVD, 2008). On the broader medial context
and political stakes of these investigations, see Turner, The Democratic Surround,
39–76.
62. Partial transcript and notes available as Kantor [Jacob Robert Kantor?], Henry
Brosin et al., “Film” [transcription with session notes], 28 July 1956, in box 18, Ray
L. Birdwhistell Papers, Folklore Archives, Penn Museum, Philadelphia. Film of the
therapy session is available as “Reels 1–4,” Bateson EPPI Films [DVD], in Jackson
Archive.
63. See, for example, the comments on recording, the fruits of wartime advances
in research and technology, and family analysis in Kurt Lewin, “Frontiers in Group
Dynamics: Concept, Method and Reality in Social Science; Social Equilibria and
Social Change,” Human Relations 1, no. 1 (June 1947): 5–41. Bateson knew Lewin
personally, and his work was cited by members of the Palo Alto Group. Bavelas part-
nered with the Palo Alto Group in the design of the alliance-building experimental
apparatus. Gibbons, who directed the Motion Picture Research Unit in the Aviation
Psychology Program, is cited in Communication and Interaction in Three Families.
64. See Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of
Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949); Norbert Wiener,
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948); and J.J. Gibson, The Perception of the Visual
World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950).
65. Zabet Patterson, “From the Gun Controller to the Mandala: The Cybernetic
Cinema of John and James Whitney,” Grey Room, no. 36 (Summer 2009): 36–57. On
the place of Bateson and Kees (and their films) in the San Francisco art scene, see
Henning Engelke, The Art That Never Was: Experimentalfilm in den USA, 1940–1960
(Marburg: Schüren Verlag, 2017), esp. ch. 7.
66. Quotation excerpted from a flyer reprinted in Steve Anker, Kathy Geritz, and
Steve Seid, eds., Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay
Area, 1945–2000 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010), 87.
67. Tom Sito, Moving Innovation: A History of Computer Animation (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2013), 19–21.
68. Patterson, 37.
69. For the work on “approaches and leavetakings,” see the film by Ruesch and
Kees, Approaches and Leavetakings (Langley Porter Clinic, 1955); and the brief

Geoghegan | The Family as Machine: Film, Infrastructure, and Cybernetic Kinship in Suburban America 99
 photo series in Ruesch and Kees, 84. On hand-mouth coordination, see the film by
Bateson and Kees, Hand-Mouth Coordination, and the brief comments in Ruesch
and Kees, 16. Compare, for example, Bateson’s fixation of oral and anal themes in
the film in Bateson, “Cultural and Thematic Analysis of Fictional Films,” Transactions
of the New York Academy of Sciences 5 (1943): 72–78, with the cybernetic and
informatic narrations of his 1950s films and writings. The earliest example of a
cybernetic problem discussed in the scientific literature by Wiener was the deliv-
ery of water to the mouth (which in the published literature stood in as a substitute
for their classified work on the anti-artillery gunners’ aiming at targets). See Arturo
Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow, “Behavior, Purpose, Teleology,”
Philosophy of Science 1 (January 1943): 20–21.
70. This movement arguably culminates in the rise of video therapy and certain
styles of video art. See Collopy, “The Revolution Will Be Videotaped.”
71. Catherine Backès-Clément, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, “Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari on Anti-Oedipus,” in Negotiations, 1972–1990 (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 15. For a penetrating outline of the alliance
between antipsychiatry and neoliberalism, see Peter Sedgwick, PsychoPolitics
(London: Pluto Press, 1982).
72. For the broad outlines of this shift (including notes on how progressive aims
became elements in reactionary economic policies), see Torrey, 177–311.
73. Weakland et al., 141–68.
74. Daniel Goleman, “Deadlines for Change: Therapy in the Age of Reaganomics,”
Psychology Today, August 1981, 60–69; and Paul R. Good, “Brief Therapy in the Age
of Reagapeutics,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 57, no. 1 (January 1987):
6–11.
75. On the role of the Palo Alto Group in founding and disseminating brief
therapy (as well as the important contributions by other psychotherapists such as
Milton Erickson), see Coert F. Visser, “The Origin of the Solution-Focused
Approach,” International Journal of Solution-Focused Practices 1, no. 1 (2013):
10–17. On the economizing measures of managed health care as an engine for the
growth of brief therapy, see Steven Stern, “Managed Care, Brief Therapy, and
Therapeutic Integrity,” Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training 30, no.
1 (1993): 162–75; and David A. Shapiro et al., “Time Is of the Essence: A Selective
Review of the Fall and Rise of Brief Therapy Research,” Psychology and
Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice 76 (2003): 211–16. Shapiro et al. priv-
ilege an alternate genealogy of brief therapy that extends from Franz Alexander and
Thomas Morton French to David H. Malan and Peter Sifneos.
76. See Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New
York: Routledge, 2003), 20–21. In these pages Williams notes the late-nineteenth-
century and interwar origins of this cultural model.
77. Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar
America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 186.
78. See, for example, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies
of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic
Books, 1983); Margaret Morse, “An Ontology of Everyday Distraction: The Freeway,
the Mall and Television,” in Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, ed.
Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 193–221; Mimi
White, Tele-advising: Therapeutic Discourse in American Television (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1992); and Beatriz Colomina, Domesticity at
War (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007).

100 Grey Room 66

 79. Donna Haraway has mapped the prospects of such a kinship—its necessity
and impossibility, its implication in the gendered and racialized technologies of
oppression, and the fantastic possibility of transvaluing (if not quite transcending)
its limits—throughout her work. See, for example, Donna Haraway, “Cyborgs to
Companion Species: Reconfiguring Kinship in Technoscience,” in The Haraway
Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004), 295–320.
80. As Francesco Casetti writes of media-technological change, “what counts is
not so much its material conditions as its configuration.” Francesco Casetti, The
Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2015), 31. Understanding these configurations in terms of self-
reproducing systems entails a superimposition of this thesis onto a theory of media
systems as recursive systems of production such as that proposed by Bernhard
Siegert in Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the
Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015).

Geoghegan | The Family as Machine: Film, Infrastructure, and Cybernetic Kinship in Suburban America 101
 Second-Order Cybernetics

From Information to Cognition:

The Systems Counterculture,
Heinz von Foerster’s Pedagogy,
and Second-Order Cybernetics
Bruce Clarke • Texas Tech University • brunoclarke/at/gmail.com
HISTORICAL CONCEPTS IN Second-Order Cybernetics

> Context • In this empirical and conceptual paper on the historical, philosophical, and epistemological backgrounds
of second-order cybernetics, the emergence of a significant pedagogical component to Heinz von Foerster’s work dur-
ing the last years of the Biological Computer Laboratory is placed against the backdrop of social and intellectual move-
ments on the American landscape. > Problem • Previous discussion in this regard has focused largely on the student
radicalism of the later 1960s. A wider-angled view of the American intellectual counterculture is needed. However,
this historical nexus is complicated and more often dismissed than brought into clear focus. > Method • This essay as-
sembles a historical sequence of archival materials for critical analysis, linked to a conceptual argument eliciting from
those materials the second-order cybernetic concepts of observation, recursion, and paradox. > Results • In this period,
von Foerster found the “positive of the negative” in the social and intellectual unrest of that moment and cultivated
those insights for the broader constitution of a new cognitive orientation. > Implications • As a successful student
of his own continuing course on heuristics, von Foerster left the academic mainstream to ally his constructivist epis-
temology with the systems counterculture. > Key words • Heinz von Foerster, American counterculture, Biological
Computer Laboratory, heuristics, pedagogy, cognition.

Introduction Catalog, and von Foerster’s turn from an ear- was an attempt at radically interdisciplinary in-

In the first decade of the Biological Com-

lier theoretical base in information theory
toward the cognitive and observer-centered (Scott 2011: 1149–1150)
”
quiry in a period of social upheaval on campus.

puter Laboratory (BCL), its director, Heinz
von Foerster, taught few organized classes.
His career in the university classroom begins
196 in earnest in the fall of 1968 with a three-se-
mester sequence titled “Heuristics,” and con-
tinues until the BCL closes in the spring of
1974, at the conclusion of the two-semester
sequence “Cybernetics of Cybernetics.” In
recent years, a number of accounts have been
published discussing these unprecedented
and certainly unduplicated team-taught,
student-driven, interdisciplinary, and cross-
level courses (Umpleby 2007; Martin 2007;
Hutchinson 2008; Foerster & Broecker 2010;
Scott 2011). This paper will explore lines of
relation between the sudden emergence of
a sustained university-pedagogical compo-
nent to the work of the BCL and two other
concurrent trends: the growing importance
of cybernetics and systems theory within the
intellectual wing of the American counter-
culture, as documented by the Whole Earth
orientations that came to be called second-
order cybernetics. That all of these move-
ments coincide at the end of the 1960s is not
coincidental. Rather, they epitomize a larger
trend in that era connecting cybernetic con-
cepts to alternative philosophies and life-
styles as well as to a range of postmodern
scientific formations.
A recent article in Kybernetes discusses
the origins and workings of the Heuris-
tics courses. It locates their prime driver in
the ferment of late-1960s campus protests
aligned with the anti-Vietnam War move-
ment:
“bertDuring the Fall of 1968, von Foerster and Her-
Brün offered an experimental interdisciplin-
ary course that fed off the energy of the campus
uprisings that were taking place in the USA. Their
experimental heuristics course marked a depar-
ture for the Biological Computer Laboratory
(BCL) into the realm of pedagogy… The course
The campus ferment occurring at that
precise moment is certainly a crucial part of
the history at hand. However, the continu-
ation and longevity of von Foerster’s peda-
gogical initiatives prompt a further consid-
eration. Even after the campus upheavals
over the Vietnam War begin to recede in
the early 1970s, von Foerster’s courses go
through three more iterations over another
five years. In addition, all four of them yield
a collectively-authored student-produced
publication: the Whole University Catalogue
in 1969, the Ecological Source Book in 1970,
Metagames in 1972, and most famously, at
523 pages, Cybernetics of Cybernetics in 1974.
To explain the persistence of these teaching
projects as well as the varying tenors of their
communal productions, we will need to look
beyond the student radicalism of the later
1960s, as manifested at the University of Il-
linois, and take a wider-angled view of the

CONSTRUCTIVIST FOUNDATIONs vol. 7, N°3

 Second-Order Cybernetics
From Information to Cognition Bruce Clarke

American intellectual counterculture as that
also persisted beyond the late 1960s. Within
that larger context, the courses coming out
of the BCL may be seen to join von Foerster’s
laboratory to what I will call “the systems
counterculture.”
To be sure, the historical nexus I mean
to cover with this phrase is vexed. It is risky
to generalize about it. It is hard to bring into
clear focus because it splinters into so many
pieces. But in assessing the most significant
and productive outcomes of the interplay
between cybernetic discourses and practices
and the intellectual legacies of the 1960s, it
helps to keep at the center of one’s attention
von Foerster’s unique professional position
and cultural location. Not doing so hampers
an otherwise important contribution to this
is not well taken. There are more ways to be
worldly than the material construction of cy-
bernetic gizmos. What is the elaboration of
cybernetic theories through writing, speak-
ing, conversing, editing, publishing, and
teaching if not a “domain of worldly prac-
tice” that becomes novel to the extent that
the content of the discourse is innovative?
Pickering continues:
“perhaps
The other is that I do not understand it (or have
failed to get some key points). I am re-
minded of the idea common to early cybernetics
that closed loops of neurons might be entailed in
memory, and I can see how that works, but I can-
not see how reentrant loops connect to any idea of
”
consciousness that I can grasp. (ibid: 458)

discussion, Andrew Pickering’s The Cyber- “Reentrant loops” is a weak formula-

netic Brain: Sketches of another Future. Pick-
ering notes that “the sixties were the heyday
of cybernetics, the period when this margin-
al and antidisciplinary field made its greatest
inroads into general awareness,” and that, as
a result, his book “might have been the place
for an extended examination of the coun-
terculture.” (Pickering 2010: 12) Instead, he
writes a book with valuable historical and
archival work about British cybernetics. But
in its theoretical dimension, Pickering tries
to reinvent the cybernetic wheel for “an-
other future.” Unfortunately, in that attempt
he discards too much of its actual past. His
substantial treatments of the British-born
cyberneticists W. Ross Ashby, Gregory Bate-
son, Stafford Beer, and Gordon Pask margin-
alize second-order cybernetics by reducing
von Foerster’s major role as their colleague,
collaborator, and frequent benefactor to not
much more than a footnote.
In one footnote, Pickering mentions
Beer’s “acknowledgement of inspiration
from Heinz von Foerster. Beer, Pask, and von
Foerster were among the leading contribu-
tors to the development of a cybernetic the-
ory of consciousness” (Pickering 2010: 457).
Pickering goes on to give “two reasons for
not going further into the cybernetic analy-
sis of consciousness. One is that it seems to
me largely theoretical, rather than connect-
ing to novel domains of worldly practice”
(ibid: 457–458). One reason to take an inter-
est in the BCL pedagogy I will be discussing
here is that it is nothing if not such a novel
worldly domain. But Pickering’s larger point
tion for the discourse of recursive cognition
as that comes out in the work of Maturana
and von Foerster, through the discourse of
reentry in George Spencer-Brown, and in
the discourse of autopoiesis in Maturana and
Francisco Varela. This is indeed a radical as
well as novel set of discourses that has set off
all manner of worldly consequences. This es-
say extends Robert Scott (2011) in the effort
to understand better how von Foerster’s BCL
pedagogy made an important contribution
to the emergence of second-order cybernet-
ics. Perhaps more understanding of the his-
torical development of von Foerster’s BCL
pedagogy can assist as well in conceptual
comprehension of second-order cybernetics.
At the least, the systems counterculture that
the BCL becomes in its final years is indis-
pensable for its cultivation.
The systems counterculture
By “the systems counterculture,” I mean
to denote a loosely collegial group of seminal
scientific thinkers whose particular develop-
ments of cybernetic ideas and practices lead
them beyond mainstream doctrines and
institutions. The systems counterculture’s
broad cultural effect has been to detoxify the
notion of “system” of its military, industrial,
and corporate connotations of command
and control and to redeploy it in the pursuit
of holistic ideals and ecological values. In
the United States, this disparate cybernetic
reformation coalesces in the later 1960s and
Figure 1: The outside front cover of the
Spring 1970 number of the Whole Earth
Catalog (Brand 1970).
remains well-defined throughout the 1970s.
In the first rank of the systems countercul-
ture I place Buckminster Fuller, Gregory
Bateson, Heinz von Foerster, Humberto
Maturana, Gordon Pask, Francisco Varela,
Lynn Margulis, and James Lovelock. In the
work of such figures, a broadly shared body
of systems theories shuttles between the nat-
ural and engineering sciences, and migrates
from there to new residences in the social 197
sciences, humanities, and literary and plas-
tic arts. Through multifarious mediations,
it infiltrates both high academic theory and
popular culture. It enters alternative loca-
tions and venues where maverick collabo-
rations become possible and idiosyncratic
appropriations can be assembled and tested.
Major waves of the systems counterculture
are publically registered with the arrival of
the first Whole Earth Catalog in 1968 and
with its periodical continuation, CoEvolution
Quarterly, in the 1970s (Figure 1).
When the Heuristics courses began,
however, the BCL was not quite yet a locus of
the systems counterculture. By the time they
ended, sixteen months later, it was. In the fall
of 1968, the BCL was as yet a mainstream if
idiosyncratic scientific research center, well-

http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/journal/7/3/196.clarke

HISTORICAL CONCEPTS IN Second-Order Cybernetics
198
funded by military contracts and in a posi-
tion to venture the Heuristics project as a
cybernetic experiment in its own right. This
is how von Foerster presents it at the end
of 1969 in the preface to the Whole Univer-
sity Catalogue: “Initiated by a small group
of concerned and curious student[s], Her-
bert Brün…, and later Dr. Humberto Mat-
urana… joined me in what we all consider
to be still a fascinating experiment” (Foerster
1969: 1). A year later, in a program review for
the university administration, von Foerster
positions the Heuristics courses in relation
to the prior work of the BCL as a continu-
ation of research into cognitive problems of
learning and teaching. Von Foerster suggests
that the recent student uprisings have laid
those problems especially bare:
“ In anticipation of the urgency to solve these
problems this group initiated several years ago a
series of inter-disciplinary research programs in
cognition (e.g. ‘Theory and Application of Com-
putational Principles in Cognitive Systems’ (1966);
‘Analysis and Synthesis of Cognitive Processes and
Systems’ (1968); ‘Cognitive Memory: A Computer
Oriented Epistemological Approach to Informa-
tion Storage and Retrieval’ (1967); etc.) which
during these years have harvested a considerable
”
body of knowledge. (Foerster & Brün 1970: 3)
Von Foerster refers here to a theoreti-
cal interest in cognitive problems that had
been gathering in his own work for several
years prior to the student rebellions in the
spring of 1968. One traces these conceptual
upheavals in his papers of the later 1960s, as
his interest goes increasingly toward the re-
cursive workings of cognitive operations. For
instance, in the 1969 paper “What is Memo-
ry that It May Have Hindsight and Foresight
as Well?” (reprinted in Foerster 2003), von
Foerster expresses impatience over superfi-
cial evocations of informatics with a critique
of storage-and-retrieval metaphors applied
to the study of the mental faculty of memory:
“thatBooks, tapes, micro-fiches or other documents
are retrieved… only when looked upon by a
human mind, may yield the desired ‘information.’
By confusing vehicles for potential information
with information, one puts the problem of cogni-
tion nicely into one’s blind spot of intellectual vi-
sion, and the problem conveniently disappears.
(Foerster 2003: 103; see also: 201)
” ist formulation of cognition. Von Foerster’s
CONSTRUCTIVIST FOUNDATIONs vol. 7, N°3
And in an era of pervasive personal
and social reexamination, the “problem of
cognition” also reads as an indirect expres-
sion for constrictions of institutional vision,
for instance, misapplications of informatics
through narrow-minded mechanistic atti-
tudes in scientific concepts as well as in aca-
demic policies.
In an interview with Albert Müller and
Karl H. Müller, Humberto Maturana under-
scores cognition as the central concern of his
own BCL research. Asked what he may have
contributed to von Foerster’s thinking, he re-
marks that he
“way…came in a moment to the BCL in which my
of facing the questions about cognition in the
domain of biology made a difference: introduc-
ing the observer as an active participant in the
generation of understanding and in the process
of explaining the observer. That was my concern:
explaining the observer, not merely claiming, the
2007: 39)
”
observer is there, but explaining it. (Maturana
Maturana goes on to recollect what he
took to be a watershed moment in his inter-
actions with von Foerster and the BCL, the
crossing of a threshold separating a control-
theoretical informational cybernetics from
its coming cognitive reformation within
second-order cybernetics:
“I putWhen I came back in 1968 for a longer time…
my emphasis on circularity, on the observer
participating, on the distinction by an observer…
[Von Foerster] was still speaking in those days
about information and information in the envi-
ronment. I remember that during one of my first
lectures in Illinois I said: ‘Information does not
exist, it is a useless notion in biology… because
biological systems do not operate in these terms, it
is a useful notion for design for understanding sys-
tems that are very well specified, you may describe
relations in these terms but living systems do not
”
operate in those terms.’ (Maturana 2007: 45)
The “problem of cognition” brings the
“human mind” back into play for a newer
cybernetics not content to rely on models of
informatic reception drawn from metaphor-
ical extensions of transmission apparatuses,
but instead ready to approach a constructiv-
cognitive turn reaches full statement and
maximum compression in the final remarks
of “Thoughts and Notes on Cognition,” first
published in 1970 in tandem with Maturana’s
“Neurophysiology of Cognition” (1970). As
we will remark later, “Neurophysiology of
Cognition” will be reprinted in 1972 as part
of the student-produced BCL publication
Metagames. Addressed directly to the for-
mulation Maturana recalls regarding “infor-
mation in the environment,” “Thoughts and
Notes on Cognition” revokes the ontological
credentials of the information concept. In-
formation here is no longer the freestanding
transmitted input to a receiving apparatus
– a neuron or whatever – but the outcome
of self-referential system processes that are
cognitive in the first instance:
“that5.6is Cognitive processes create descriptions of,
information, about the environment.
6 The environment contains no information. The
”
environment is as it is. (Foerster 1970b: 47)
In other words, in these early stirrings
of second-order formulations, information
is no longer granted system-external being.
Rather, it becomes the system-internal out-
come of a self-referential cognitive process,
which process may then go on to attribute
its construction to its environment. If this
reversal of cognitive attitude is somewhat
less of a radical gesture in the present mo-
ment, nonetheless, it remains a widely dis-
puted repudiation of objectivistic truisms in
favor of what we would now call a form of
epistemological constructivism. In 1970, it
was a non-stop ticket departing the scientific
mainstream for the systems counterculture.
Heuristics as cognitive
self-organization
“Heuristics,” the preface to the Whole
University Catalogue, may be examined for
what it reveals in hindsight about the move-
ment of von Foerster’s thinking at this time.
Ostensibly, his preface expounds how that
concept applies to the design and aims of
the Heuristics courses and justifies the open-
ended and self-organizing nature of their
group pedagogy. But one could also read it
as marking the shift from an informatic to a
cognitive orientation. “Heuristics” consists
largely of a lexical exercise in the closure of
 Second-Order Cybernetics
semantic reference, from which a philo-
sophical moral is then drawn. Von Foerster
cites two dictionary definitions of heuristic,
with the observation that both dictionaries
“know only of the adjective.” “Heuristic” is
defined variously as “helping to discover
or learn” and “Designating the educational
method in which the student is allowed or
encouraged to learn independently through
his own investigation.” The Indo-European
root of the term is then cross-listed to the
dictionary entry for eureka, Greek for “I
have found (it),” famously attributed to
Archimedes. He notes that the American
Heritage Dictionary entry for “eureka” then
refers the reader once again to the Indo-Eu-
ropean root wer-. Von Foerster comments:
“lexical
With this referral back to –wer closure of the
search for ‘heuristic’ has been achieved,
but left to us is to discover, to find, (to invent?),
or to learn the meaning of the words ‘discover,’
‘find,’ ‘invent’ and ‘learn,’ which all describe
those enigmatic processes by which knowledge is
”
acquired. (Foerster 1969: 1)
Von Foerster excavates from this circular
etymological tour a self-referring process by
which one learns how to learn. Although the
dictionary definitions of heuristic are per-
fectly well-formed clusters of semantic infor-
mation – strings of linguistic signifiers suit-
able for coding and transmission to storage
media and facilities to await decoding and
retrieval – nonetheless, such information,
in and of itself, does nothing “until looked
upon by a human mind.” The circularity of
lexical reference is a mere matter of the link-
age of informatic structures. In contrast, the
self-referential recursion of cognition – such
as that entailed by learning and understand-
ing the meanings not just of words but of the
processes they signify – is a complex sys-
temic operation. Von Foerster then invents
a noun, “plural in form, used with a singular
verb,” to name this complex, the manifold
of processes for “The study of the as yet
unknown processes by which knowledge is
acquired,” heuristics. Although the latest on-
line edition of the Oxford English Dictionary
as of November 2011 lists usages preceding
von Foerster’s course as variants of a singular
noun, the plural noun is still not listed in its
own right. However, the Wikipedia entry in
English on heuristic indicates that the plural
From Information to Cognition Bruce Clarke
form heuristics is now the more common us-
age. It may be that von Foerster had a signifi-
cant hand in popularizing this newer usage.
In any event, in good later BCL parlance, the
heuristics of the Heuristics courses would be
the discovery of discovery.
The Whole Earth Catalog
and the Whole University
Catalogue
Von Foerster’s cognitive turns and at-
tention to self-referential closures announce
the coming of second-order cybernetics as a
deliberately non-informatic systems theory
to be aligned with the theory of autopoi-
esis as directed at nondesigned or natural
systems. The BCL is cultivating these epis-
temologically radical systems theories con-
currently with von Foerster’s radical peda-
gogical experiments (see Müller 2007). They
share a late-’60s ambiance, a confrontational
attitude against constituted scientific and
academic authorities and methods. Concur-
rently, the BCL comes under what proves
to be terminal pressure from the Mansfield
Amendment’s destruction of its military
funding prospects (Umpleby 2003).
“wereDuring the final four years of the BCL, there
only two successful grants that listed von
Foerster as the principal investigator: an air force
grant in 1970 to support ‘direct access intelli-
gence systems’ and a small non-military grant
in 1973 to support von Foerster’s final college
course, which produced the book Cybernetics of
”
Cybernetics (1974). (Scott 2011: 1154–1155)
However, the source of the modest ci-
vilian grant making the large size and con-
siderable production values of that volume
possible is not negligible. It is the Point
Foundation, the non-profit organization
headed by Stewart Brand, creator and editor
of the Whole Earth Catalog.Brand set up the
Point Foundation to disburse the consider-
able profits generated by the mass distribu-
tion of the Last Whole Earth Catalog of 1971
(Turner 2006: 120). Like its BCL predeces-
sor, the Whole University Catalogue, Cyber-
netics of Cybernetics is also a deliberate hom-
age to this central document of the systems
counterculture. Elsewhere I have described
the Whole Earth Catalog and its subsequent
http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/journal/7/3/196.clarke
publications as “the virtual house organ on
the world stage for the popular discussion
of the breadth of cybernetic complexities”
(Clarke 2009b: 300). In fact, the connec-
tion between Brand and von Foerster is
highly significant for the further unfolding
of second-order cybernetics and for the
great post-BCL phase of his career. The May
1974 appearance of Cybernetics of Cybernet-
ics coincides closely with the first number of
CoEvolution Quarterly, the journal Brand
began about three years after the Last Whole
Earth Catalog, to which von Foerster would
contribute a handful of items (Clarke 2009b:
300–302). The Whole Earth Catalog may
have been a product of “U.S. hippie culture”
(Müller 2008: 62), but it is now recognized
as a considerable cultural phenomenon and
historical resource edited with high intel-
ligence and filled with mostly impeccable
and invaluable content across a range of sci-
entific, technical, and social topics. (Turner
2006; Kirk 2007; Clarke 2011) Each of its
successively larger iterations begins with a
section titled “Whole Systems,” centered on
but not limited to the work of the systems
thinker Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the
geodesic dome and peripatetic academic
much in vogue in the American counter-
culture. In CoEvolution Quarterly, Gregory
Bateson takes over this central role in Stew-
art Brand’s intellectual universe (Clarke
2011: 267–282).
First published concurrently, as it hap-
pened, with the first semester of the Heu-
ristics courses, the Whole Earth Catalog has
cogent treatments of cybernetic pioneers 199
such as Norbert Wiener, Ludwig von Berta-
lanffy, Ross Ashby, and Warren McCulloch.
One year later, in the fall of 1969, the cap-
stone project for the otherwise open-ended
activities of the Heuristics courses is the cre-
ation of a Whole University Catalogue. This
was neither frivolous nor merely faddish.
Von Foerster would have vetted the integri-
ty of the Whole Earth Catalog as a source of
cybernetic and other high-level intellectual
content in the midst of and despite an other-
wise radical relation to mainstream Ameri-
can academic as well as social institutions.
As von Foerster declares in its preface, the
Whole University Catalogue is a “tangible re-
sult of one class project… stimulated by the
superb Whole Earth Catalogue” (Foerster
1969: 1). In Spring 1970, it publishes von
 Foerster’s substantial review of George Spen-
cer-Brown’s Laws of Form (Foerster 1970a).
The Whole University Catalogue is
“ceptions
conceived as a vehicle for expressing ones per-
of a special world, the Cosmos and the
Chaos of our University.… Unedited, as the ex-
pressions were delivered in words or pictures,
they are reproduced here to be contemplated by
the onlooker who may see what he can learn from
”
them. (Foerster 1969: 1).
Like the page count of the Whole Earth
Catalog’s successive editions going from 40
HISTORICAL CONCEPTS IN Second-Order Cybernetics
to over 500, over its three semesters enroll-
ment in the Heuristics courses balloons:
“The number of students of all ranks and
fields who first participated was 23, in Spring
[1969] it became 52, and in this semester
this number grew to 156” (Foerster 1969: 1).
Drawn from students in cross-listed classes
in the departments of Electrical Engineer-
ing and English, much of the content of the
Whole University Catalogue is entirely inof-
fensive and unremarkable, reminiscent here
and there of an undergraduate literary mag-
azine or a college yearbook. For instance,
page 7 is devoted to “The Overall Oneness of
Experience,” with nine photographs of trees
accompanied by quotations ranging from
Milton to James Dickey, while page 25 inter-
sperses a free-verse poem, “Once a Pawn of
Time,” with photographs of university scenes
and line drawings in the manner of Peter
Max and Yellow Submarine. Pages 36–37 of-
200
fer a “Guide to T. G. I. F. spots” with thumb-
nail reviews of restaurants and beer joints.
And closely modeled on the Whole Earth
Catalog, pages 60–61 have a handful of short
book notices featuring works in the BCL
orbit, such as the essay collection Purposive
Systems, Ross Ashby’s Design for a Brain and
Introduction to Cybernetics, and Warren Mc-
Culloch’s Embodiments of Mind.
However, unlike the Whole Earth Cata-
log, which identifies its contributors, and
unlike traditional college publications, the
point of which is to give out individual cre-
ative credits like so many gold stars, no piece
or article of the Whole University Catalogue
is by-lined. Instead, the preface gives the
participating students’ names en masse over
the sole signature of von Foerster. This qua-
si-communitarian approach may be a sort of
late-60s group signature. But the rationale
CONSTRUCTIVIST FOUNDATIONs vol. 7, N°3
for it likely goes beyond that. To his signa-
ture he appends a note: “I assume full re-
sponsibility for the form and all the content
of this Catalogue. All inquiries, written or by
telephone, about particular projects exhib-
ited in this Catalogue should be addressed
to me” (Foerster 1969: 1). Von Foerster is
shielding his students’ individual identities.
As well he might, for taken as a whole,
this Catalogue is remarkably funky. One
could certainly question the wisdom, if not
the spirit, of von Foerster’s letting it play
out as far as it does. Page 14 gives a photo-
graphic account of anti-Vietnam War protest
on campus and elsewhere, written from the
point of view of striking students and com-
plete with a political cartoon of then-sitting
President Richard Nixon hogtied to the rails
of an impending Moratorium on War train.
Page 30 presents a lengthy sophomoric rant
under the title “Fuck the Foreign Language
Requirement.” Pages 48–49 provide, suitable
for clipping and posting on walls, a center-
fold of Margaret Mead advocating before the
U.S. Senate for the legalization of marijuana.
On page 90 a well-written article titled “Fuck
the System” taps the undercurrent of politi-
cal anger transmuted into absurd theater by
the Yippies – the flamboyant acid-fueled,
mock-political Youth International Party.
“Fuck the System” lauds New York City’s in-
famous Mad Bomber George Matesky in the
midst of snippets from Abbie Hoffman’s Yip-
pie manifesto Revolution for the Hell of It and
Jerry Farber’s The Student as Nigger.
Most damning in the eyes of the uni-
versity and the Illinois legislature is surely
the most concerted and unified sequence
in the entire publication, essentially, the cli-
max at the top of its narrative arc – “Drugs
and the University or The Whole?” It pur-
ports to offer hard documentation of the
drug culture on campus along with advice
on how to elude the campus and local au-
thorities. Lengthy descriptions of various
illegal substances are accompanied by in-
structions in their use. A frightening image
of a homemade set of works for mainlin-
ing drugs is set off against schematics for a
bricking machine to process harvested pot
for transport. Some of its details are outra-
geous spoofs, such as an inset photograph
of a youth stooped over a trash receptacle
– like something out of Thomas Pynchon’s
The Crying of Lot 49 – with the caption,
“The drug user picks up his dope which is
left in pre-arranged pick-up spots on cam-
pus.” Similarly laughable is, on the following
page, the photograph of a student – his eyes
barred as in some 1950s porno mag – with
the alarming caption, “The needle aids in
injecting cafeteria food with drugs, facilitat-
ing the dosing of unsuspecting individuals.”
These shocking vignettes are student satires,
Yippie theater to freak out any squares who
might stumble across them.
But such subtleties are lost upon von
Foerster’s scandalized administrators when
the complaints begin to land on their desks.
The following May, Illinois state senator G.
William Horsley introduces a resolution
that duly creates a special joint committee to
investigate “campus disorders.” It is deemed
that the Whole University Catalogue is such a
disorder. On 18 September 1970, von Foer-
ster testifies before the Horsley committee.
The next day his campus newspaper covers
the hearings with a page of photographs.
One is captioned “Legislator inspects ex-
cerpts from von Foerster’s ‘The Whole Uni-
versity Catalogue.’” In that picture it is open
to the article “Fuck the System.” Opposite is
a picture of von Foerster seated before a mi-
crophone testifying in his students’ and his
own defense (Daily Illini 1970). A Spring-
field newspaper covers the hearings under
the headline “‘Radical Teachers Present Tes-
timony.” The portion of the article devoted
to von Foerster reads in full:
“yearsHeinz Von Foerster, a physics professor for 21
at the U. of I., testified concerning a publica-
tion which was written and distributed by mem-
bers of one of his classes.
Included in the publication were such items as
how to: Conduct a riot, cheat the telephone com-
pany, cheat on rent to the landlord, find Marijuana
in Champaign County, make narcotics for your-
self, shoot dope, inject drugs into the food supply
at a cafeteria and cheat parking meters.
Von Foerster said ‘more good than harm’ comes
from the publication. After dickering with com-
mittee chairman G. William Horsley, R-Spring-
field, about his right to speak on the subject before
being asked questions, Von Foerster explained the
purpose of the class is “to find solutions to prob-
lems with constraints. ‘If you want to regulate a
system you must understand it,’ he said. ‘Students
are concerned with the deep problems of society.’
(Illinois State Register 1970)
”
 Second-Order Cybernetics
From Information to Cognition Bruce Clarke

The internal Heuristics report (Foerster

& Brün 1970), dated 3 October, two weeks
after this public testimony, couches research
at the BCL in the same terms. It is applied
cybernetics, systems theory in search of solu-
tions to social and pedagogical deficiencies.

From Ecological Source Book

to Metagames
It would seem that in the semester im-
mediately following the Heuristics courses
and the distribution of the Whole University
Catalogue, von Foerster momentarily sets
aside the experimental flair if not the holis-
tic aims of the systems counterculture. The
Whole Earth Catalog’s models of cybernetic
holism found the next major phase of their
expression in Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology
of Mind, published in 1972. Von Foerster’s
course in “Engineering Ecology,” conducted
in the spring of 1970 without a cross-listed
humanities component, was in broad con-
ceptual resonance with such nascent ecophi-
losophy, but it does not appear to have been
a vigorous experimental vehicle. To tell from
its mostly sober and earnest student-gener-
ated publication, Ecological Source Book,
his pedagogy retreated for a while from the
production of innovative or edgy class proj-
ects. That may have been what this particu-
lar collection of students wanted for their
project and/or what its professor needed at
the moment. The preface of the Ecological
Source Book indicates that while the course
proceeded to some degree in open-ended
heuristic fashion, it was now more firmly
guided by the course’s nominal topic and
its instructor’s holistic motivations. Its ap-
proach was “to develop first the conceptual
framework in which a totality can be con-
ceived and then to let the search for spe-
cifics fall where they appear to be needed”
(Foerster 1970c: i). Still, compared to either
the Whole Earth Catalog or the Whole Uni-
versity Catalogue, with a few exceptions the
Ecological Source Book looks very much like
a traditional textbook. Once again, no in-
dividual credit is given for its contents. But
here this circumstance comes across not as a
countercultural gesture but as a pretense of
impersonal objectivity. The Ecological Source
Book does not playfully explode in multiple
directions. In an academically proper but
Figure 2: The outside cover of Metagames.
plodding fashion, it gathers itself up into an
orderly sequence.
However, von Foerster does not aban-
don his experimental teaching initiatives.
His subsequent activities would argue in-
stead that he determines to step all the way
into the role of “radical teacher” that has
now been scripted for him. His edgy peda-
gogy pauses only in order to broaden its
philosophical base before leaping forward
once more into the vanguard, as he throws
in his lot with the systems counterculture
with a vengeance. Robert Scott (2011: 1153–
1154) has summarized the key event here:
“vonInFoerster
the summer of 1971, Ivan Illich and Heinz
arranged a series of meetings at the
Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cu-
ernavaca, Mexico with Herbert Brün, Humberto
Maturana, Gordon Pask, and students. The dis-
cussions reflected Illich’s recently published De-
schooling Society, as well as Brün and von Foer-
ster’s reflections on heuristics, Maturana’s recently
proposed theory of ‘autopoiesis,’ and Pask’s inter-
jections from his nascent ‘conversation theory.’
The meetings with Illich appear to mark a turn-
ing point in von Foerster’s thinking about educa-
”
tion.
Austrian émigré Ivan Illich was not a
cyberneticist but a charismatic social critic
and seminal advocate for radical educational
reform. His Mexican retreat center and call
for “counterfoil institutions” made him an
active sponsor of and major philosopher for
the American intellectual counterculture. In
the early 1970s he brought systems thinkers
into his orbit at CIDOC (see Foerster 1971;
Varela 2009: 72). “The seminar in Cuer- 201
navaca amplified the shifts in von Foerster’s
thinking, in his drift away from first-order
engineering problems and toward issues of
observation itself, looking at language and
society” (Scott 2011: 1154).
With the writing of the Mansfield
Amendment on the wall, in the last three
years of its run, the BCL resolves itself into
a virtual counterfoil institution, its research
project the design of alternative pedagogies
to test second-order cybernetics’ forays into
cognitive and epistemological issues. The
professor of biophysics at its head no longer
dabbles but dives headlong into metaphys-
ics, a development or Nachträglichkeit of Vi-
ennese culture waiting to happen ever since
the young von Foerster fell under the spell
of Wittgenstein, “Uncle Ludwig” (see Clarke

http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/journal/7/3/196.clarke

HISTORICAL CONCEPTS IN Second-Order Cybernetics
202
Figure 3: Co-observers.
& Hansen 2009: 27–28). The fruits of these
radical reorientations are amply document-
ed in the 1972 student publication of the
BCL. It has the explosive playfulness of the
Whole University Catalogue without its ex-
traneous anarchism, the coherent purpose-
fulness of the Ecological Source Book without
its needless regimentation. Its entire cover
leaps out at its viewer, boldly focused on the
eyes of an observer. On the front cover, one
eye hovers above a title that declaims the
discovery of cognitive possibilities through
the observation of play – Metagames: Games
of Psychological, Political, Sociological, and
Epistemological Significance. It brilliantly
models the advent of second-order cyber-
netics’ attention to the observation of obser-
vation as a pedagogical device (Figure 2).
Most of Metagames consists of the
products of classroom projects, a series of
increasingly complicated board games ap-
proached as playful machines for reality-
construction. Altogether, the content of
Metagames draws out the constructedness of
cognition through meta-tactics based on the
staging of co-observers (Figure 3). It gives
CONSTRUCTIVIST FOUNDATIONs vol. 7, N°3
the explicit theorization of this approach to
“the observer” in its reprint of Maturana’s
“Neurophysiology of Cognition”:
“interactions)
For the observer an entity is an entity (a unit of
when he can describe it. To describe
is to enumerate the actual or potential interac-
tions and relations of the described entity. Ac-
cordingly, the observer can describe an entity only
if there is at least one other entity from which he
can distinguish it and with which he can observe
it to interact or relate, even if this is the observer
himself, and which serves as a reference for the
”
description. (Maturana 1970: 4; reprinted in
Foerster 1972: 29)
Unlike its predecessors’ openings, which
state only the professor’s overview, the inside
front cover of Metagames introduces multi-
ple observations of the course that produced
it. Over and against von Foerster’s usual
signature and statement stand the signature
and copyright claim of an individual student
spokesperson, Steven Sloan, who describes
and documents a classroom technique of
co-observation: “This class endeavored not
only to concentrate on what was said but
also the observable processes by which the
content was generated. Scribes took notes
on the content and meta-scribes took notes
on the accompanying interpersonal interac-
tions.” In sample portions alongside Sloan’s
statement, a scribe observes exterior class-
room events, while a metascribe observes its
own and others’ observational moods and
attitudes regarding the “object matter” of the
same events:
“After a few remarks byScribe
the Chairman, Sandy pro-
posed the creation of ‘game box’ as the class proj-
ect, since most of the groups seemed to have an
interest in this general area. HVF then announced
his coming trip to Europe, and explained the
timetable that was passed out to the class…
Metascribe
Almost forgot to start writing. Chairman mum-
bled a few notes about the directories he handed
out, then led into Sandy Baron’s presentation on
creating a ‘box’ of ‘goodies’ at the end of the se-
mester. Many possibilities. New room. Very old-
fashioned and comfortable, in 218 Ceramics En-
gineering Building. The class is quiet and relaxed.
”
Sandy turns the floor over to Heinz. (cited on
the inside front cover of Foerster 1972)
The text of the metascribe is lengthier
because the inclusion of self-observation
renders its discourse more complex. The
meta-point of this second-order game, of
course, is that the “objective” account of the
scribe is no more, the “subjective” account of
the metascribe no less, “true” than the other.
The outcome of this exercise is to suspend
the entire notion of an objectively true ac-
count by embedding any account in a feed-
back loop of accounts upon accounts. The
recursion of observation opens up a play
space for the unfolding of creative conversa-
tions.
The first page is titled “What game is
reality?” This implicit preface expounds
the universal metaphor of the play space of
Metagames:
“at least
Now, what game is reality? First, there must be
two players who want to play it. They cre-
ate a large board with lots of objects on it which
they agree to call ‘The World.’ Then they put
themselves on this board and invent a set of rules
for the objects. These rules they agree to call ‘The
 Second-Order Cybernetics
From Information to Cognition Bruce Clarke

Laws of Nature.’ If, during the game, it turns out

that the rules they applied in creating the objects
don’t jibe with the rules they invented to play with
the objects, they either ignore these objects or
change ‘The Laws of Nature.’ ”
In other words, Metagames is a meta-
phor for as well as a meta-observation upon
the doing of science. Von Foerster signs
“What game is reality?” not with a by-line
but with an image of “the gentleman in the
bowler hat,” the well-known figure, drawn
by Gordon Pask, that first shows up in 1960
in “Self-Organizing Systems and their Envi-
ronments” (Foerster 2003: 1–19; see Clarke
2009a: 43–46). What appeared in that es-
say to be a parenthetical side remark – “it
may be interesting to note that reality ap-
pears as a consistent reference frame for at
least two observers” (Foerster 2003: 4) – has
now become, as the passage just cited from
“Neurophysiology of Cognition” confirms,
a canonical proposition in the emergence
of second-order cybernetics. Likewise, the
gentleman with the bowler hat makes return
appearances – here and a year later in “On
Constructing a Reality” – as von Foerster’s
abiding icon for the co-construction of re-
ality out of a conversation among mutually
enclosed consciousnesses (see Müller 2008;
Clarke 2009a: 51–58). In this role it pops
up throughout Metagames to provide visual Figure 4: Visual association of “self-reference” in Metagames.
continuity.
However, the primary content of
Metagames is made to be scissored into bits
– board games along with their game pieces,
scorecards, tokens, and other ludic para- of epistemological communication. It con- a fascinating text whose title would appear 203
phernalia. To leave no unoccupied space sists of four scholarly articles: in addition to (from its bold font) to be “self-reference”
on its pages, the obverse sides of the game the reprint of Maturana’s “Neurophysiology (Figure 4). Once again, there is no by-line
boards and pieces are decorated with as- of Cognition,” there is an untitled reprint of for this lay-out, so one can only speculate
sorted Wittgenstein quotations and what ap- a Gordon Pask essay on self-organization in whether von Foerster himself is the author
pear to be Rorschach blots. I will leave it to technological and social systems, to which or just the instigator of this set of plays upon
other commentators to retrieve those games the documentation appends the title “My the paradoxes of self-reference. I will assume
and characterize their play. However, as we Prediction for 1984” and the date 1962; run- that he is indeed its author. Perhaps this too
have already noted, interspersed with this ning upside down with reverse pagination is a metagame to indicate the meta-dialec-
is scholarly content from the BCL research beside the Maturana article is Herbert Brün’s tical character of second-order conceptual
shop. This is the first time that professorial “Technology and the Composer”; and at the formations. On one side of the eye of the
content has entered one of the student-pro- end of the magazine, its closing statement, is observer is a series of negations, either lexi-
duced magazines from von Foerster’s cours- von Foerster’s “Perception of the Future and cal or propositional. On the other side is a
es. In this way Metagames sets the stage for the Future of Perception.” contrasting series of positive statements or
the full-fledged scholarly documentation I will touch briefly on two more sections phrases. What one can now observe in com-
project to be enacted two years later by Cy- of Metagames. After the last of the board paring them is that negativity is self-correct-
bernetics of Cybernetics. Here such content game content, page 83 duplicates the image ing, whereas positivity is self-amplifying.
provides conceptual scaffoldings for the cog- of the eye on the cover, framed now to form But this is much more that a first-order cy-
nitive exploration of game play as a species a kind of asymmetrical vessel surrounded by bernetic lesson in feedback mechanisms.

http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/journal/7/3/196.clarke
HISTORICAL CONCEPTS IN Second-Order Cybernetics
Figure 5: The photography of photography 1.
For instance, take the three paradoxical
propositions on the top left of the figure:
“ThatThisgovernment
statement is false.
is best which governs not at all.
There are no absolutes.”
204 In each case, when referred back to them-
selves, these propositions correct their own
overstatements by suggesting their positive
counterparts. “This statement is false” per-
forms the very truth of its own falsity: “This
statement is true.” “That government is best
which governs not at all” performs its own
nullification, just as its positive counterpart
properly posits the self-referential nature of
the concept of legality: “Law must govern
law.” “There are no absolutes” unfolds a posi-
tive form of its own absolutism: “All theories
of language are language.” The introduction
of the self-function – so long interdicted and
occluded by the blind spot of the Enlighten-
ment – allows aberration to work itself out,
to get itself back on a positive course. “Self-
destruction” unfolded as the “destruction of
destruction” yields “continuity,” “self-denial”
CONSTRUCTIVIST FOUNDATIONs vol. 7, N°3
Figure 6: The photography of photography 2.
unfolded yields “acceptance,” and “self-nega-
tion” unfolded yields “assertion.” And hav-
ing come so far, “self-assertion” compounds
itself in the “assertion of assertion.” In the
self-correcting dynamics demonstrated on
this page of Metagames, von Foerster turns
Hegel’s implicitly paradoxical “power of
the negative” into the explicitly paradoxical
“positive of the negative.” The self-acknowl-
edgment of paradox makes all the difference.
It seems to me that this page encapsulates the
abiding promise of second-order cybernetics
to inspire the overcoming of epistemologi-
cal impasses. The neocybernetic guidance
of such second-order metaphysics joins di-
rectly to the wider aspirations of the systems
counterculture as a scientistic mode of spiri-
tual reformation.
Immediately following this quite magi-
cal page of Metagames is the self-reference of
the publication’s composite brain trust. Pag-
es 84–85 present a portfolio of photographs
from the classroom where Electrical En-
gineering 272 and 490 and Biophysics 491
have been combined. A suite of photographs
sweeps across the airy high-ceilinged room,
showing its bright windows and its professor
mingling amidst an animated throng of stu-
dents. A few details from this page capture
the gist of the co-observational methods and
meta-dynamics going on. A series of student
photographs show students taking photo-
graphs. A young woman is first the object of
another’s photograph and then, at the same
time, photographed taking a photograph of
her photographer (Figure 5). Down again
goes the subject/object distinction. Adjacent
to that image is another depiction of the ob-
servation of observation, a shot of one pho-
tographer being photographed by a second
photographer (Figure 6). Adjacent to that is
a shot of the same two photographers, re-
vealing now that the first is taking a picture
of von Foerster. The next page shows von
Foerster in dialogue with Pask at the black-
board, with Maturana smiling from a stu-
dent desk chair (Figure 7). Beneath that, two
stationary photographs assemble the class
on opposite sides of the room (Figure 8).
Finally, two last photographs: empty seats,
then an empty floor, like the multiple bows
and then exit of a cast at the end of a play.
 Second-Order Cybernetics
Figure 7: Maturana in a student desk chair.
Conclusion
To restate the key philosophical issue I
have ventured to extract from these playful-
ly oblique materials: behind the dialectical
power of the negative as codified in Hegel’s
preface to The Phenomenology of Mind,
there is the more basic power and produc-
tivity of the paradoxical. Rather than dis-
card his insights into the “positive of the
negative,” von Foerster seeks the means
to learn from and teach them. Although it
got him into hot water, such a conviction
regarding the positive of the negative may
have been one rationale for his refusal to
censor what others deemed to be the ob-
jectionable content of the Whole Univer-
sity Catalogue. Welcoming the positivity of
paradox must have been, in a sense, a phase
in his conversion to constructivism, for
which, in the end, the previous mainstream
career of the BCL had to be sacrificed.
The play of paradox teaches that, just
as all observation is self-referential in the
first instance, all things are self-positing
within their own “domain of interactions.”
And to that extent, there is no negativity
except that which we construct through
the power of language to produce negative
constructions. For when pressed back upon
their own premises, negations will negate
From Information to Cognition Bruce Clarke
Figure 8: The class.
themselves and bring the one that posits
them back, not to where they started pre-
cisely, but to an enhanced view on the posi-
tivity of what may be constructed. Just as
the environment contains no information,
either positive or negative, nature knows
no negation. We may agree with Spinoza
that “all determination is negation,” but
nonetheless, the environment contains no
determination. Such information-creating
distinctions are self-wrought upon the
flux of some observer’s description. In the
metagame of reality, the world is the game
board and its objects are tokens for (eigen)
behaviors – that is, for the recursive co-
constructions of co-observing systems and
their environments.
Viewed against the prehistory I have
told in this article, Cybernetics of Cybernet-
ics, the student mega-publication subvened
by the Point Foundation and published in
the spring of 1974, appears as the compre-
hensive final compendium of the cybernet-
ic contexts and collegial co-productions of
the BCL. It seems likely that von Foerster
already knew he was bringing his organized
research operation to a close. Cybernetics
of Cybernetics marks the formal initiation
of second-order cybernetics as an all-out
mobilization of the power of paradox and
of its gentle handmaiden, self-reference.
http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/journal/7/3/196.clarke
It marks the sublation or transcending of
Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics of communi-
cation and control through “the control of
control and the communication of commu-
nication.” It remedies the blindness of the
supposed objectivity of the cybernetics of
observed systems with the observation of
observation, the participation of observa-
tion in the construction of its own objects.
Collectively bootstrapped from his last
university course, this final student vol-
ume would indicate that von Foerster was
a successful student of his own continuing 205
course on heuristics. Over the previous six
years, he has learned how to discover, to in-
vent, and to teach the second cybernetics
that lay implicit but unrecognized behind
the first cybernetics. It is a comprehensive
shift from a communicational and com-
putational informatics to a new cognitive
ecology of biological, dialogical, and socio-
logical processes. This is not the informatic
process of self-organization from noise he
celebrates a decade earlier (Foerster 2003:
11–14). It is self-complexification from a
heuristic dialogue self-applied to his own
scientific and professional life. What he can
do now, more so than before, and what he
will do for the rest of his intellectual career,
is to make explicit the difference that sec-
ond-order cybernetics makes.
 { BRUCE CLARKE
is Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Literature and Science in the Department of
English at Texas Tech University. His research focuses on 19th- and 20th-century
literature and science, with special interests in systems theory and narrative theory.
He edits the book series Meaning Systems, published by Fordham University Press.
In 2010–11 he was Senior Fellow at the International Research Institute for Cultural
Technologies and Media Philosophy, Bauhaus-University Weimar. His publications
include Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics
(2001), Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems (2008), and the edited
collections Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays in Second-Order Systems
Theory (2009), and the Routledge Companion to Literature and Science (2010).
HISTORICAL CONCEPTS IN Second-Order Cybernetics

Acknowledgements
Without Albert Müller’s generosity and
guidance this essay could not have been
written. Thanks as well for invaluable assis-
tance to Paul Schroeder, Jamie Hutchinson,
Karl H. Muller, Stuart Umpleby, and Alex-
ander Riegler. An earlier version of this pa-
per was delivered at the Heinz von Foerster
Congress, Vienna, Austria, November 2011.
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An unfinished revolution? Heinz von
Foerster and the Biological Computer
Laboratory/BCL 1958–1976. Echoraum,
Vienna: 77–87.
Varela F. J. (2009) The early days of autopoiesis.
In: Clarke B. & Hansen M. B. N. (eds.)
Emergence and embodiment. New essays in
second-order systems theory. Duke Univer-
sity Press: Durham: 62–76.
Received: 3 January 2012
Accepted: 6 April 2012

{ OF RELATED INTEREST EMERGENCE AND EMBODIMENT

The book Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory edited by
Bruce Clarke and Mark Hanson is a collection of essays on second-order cybernetics that draws
together ideas related to self-organization, autopoiesis, organizational closure, self-reference,
and neurophenomenology. For an extended review see Peter Cariani’s “On the Importance of Being
Emergent” in Constructivist Foundations 5(2): 86–91, available at http://www.univie.ac.at/
constructivism/journal/5/2/086.cariani
Duke University Press, Durham, 2009. ISBN 978-0-6223-4600-5. 296 pages.
207

{ OF RELATED INTEREST AN UNFINISHED REVOLUTION?

This book provides a two-fold access to Heinz von Foerster’s legacy and his work at the
Biological Computer Laboratory, the institution he founded and directed at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1958 to 1976. See Stefano Franchi’s Review
“Blunting the Edge of Second-Order Cybernetics” in Constructivist Foundations 3(1):
53–54, available at http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/journal/3/1/053.franchi
Echoraum, Vienna, 2007. ISBN 978-3-901941-12-2. 512 pages.

http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/journal/7/3/196.clarke
 The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/0368-492X.htm

von Foerster’s
Heinz von Foerster’s heuristics heuristics course
course
A factor in the development of second-order
cybernetics in the United States 1149
Robert Scott
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA

Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the heuristics course co-taught by Heinz von
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Foerster, Herbert Brün, and Humberto Maturana (1968-1969) influenced cybernetic research in the USA.
Design/methodology/approach – The author accessed the archived material from three sources:
the Herbert Brün Library, the University of Illinois Library, and the Biological Computer Laboratory
(BCL) and interpreted these materials in light of the cybernetics literature, and the publications of the
American Society for Cybernetics (ASC).
Findings – The heuristics course had major consequences in von Foerster’s evolving critique of
education, and in Brün’s work towards founding a School for Designing a Society. von Foerster radically
reoriented the BCL toward unconventional course proposals. He also began to critique objectivity and
positivism, shifting the foundations of cybernetics and proposing a meta-cybernetics. The year that
von Foerster retired, the BCL and the ASC ceased to function. When the ASC returned in the 1980s it took
on new emphases, including education and design. It appears von Foerster was pivotal in the shift of
emphasis.
Originality/value – The findings add new dimensions to the story of the decline of the BCL in the
1970s, and the re-emergence of the ASC in the 1980s with new emphases (such as design) that are not
traditionally found in scientific research.
Keywords United States of America, Cybernetics, Composition, Constructivism, Design, Desire,
Heuristics, Language
Paper type Case study

1. Introduction
Why did the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) develop a cybernetics of art,
design, learning and conversation? These subjects are linked to the earlier core subjects
of cybernetics: self-regulating systems that use complex equipment such as computers,
nervous systems, and language. Early cyberneticians provided a mathematical
foundation upon which feedback machines could be built to carry out objectives
selected by human observers, such as moving closer to a source of heat, reducing noise
in a signal channel, or controlling the temperature of a room. They designed machines
and learned from each other’s work, and at some point the designing and learning
became subjects in and of themselves. This paper focuses on this shift in focus.
I submit that the heuristics course taught at the University of Illinois in the late 1960s
was a contributing factor in the evolution of these new emphases for cybernetics[1].
During the Fall of 1968, Heinz von Foerster and Herbert Brün offered an experimental Kybernetes
Vol. 40 No. 7/8, 2011
pp. 1149-1158
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Michael Gaiuranos provided the author with conversation about cybernetics and writing during 0368-492X
the preparation of this manuscript. DOI 10.1108/03684921111160377
 K interdisciplinary course that fed off the energy of the campus uprisings that were taking
40,7/8 place in the USA. Their experimental heuristics course marked a departure for the
Biological Computer Laboratory (BCL) into the realm of pedagogy. In the following
sections, I attempt to show how this experimental course reoriented the paths of the
von Foerster and Brün, while they contributed to the changing paths of the BCL and
the ASC. First, some background is necessary.
1150
2. A brief history of the BCL
The work of the BCL is worthy of an article of its own, if not a book (Hutchinson, 2008;
Müller and Müller, 2007). It was founded by Heinz von Foerster in 1958 as a laboratory
for cybernetic research in the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois. From
1958 to 1968, BCL research focused on issues of electrical circuitry and sensory
perception, looking for parallels between the two that could inform one another. During
the first decade, there was no teaching or pedagogy associated with the BCL outside of
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Illinois’ engineering curriculum.

By contrast, several unorthodox college courses were organized during the final six
years of the BCL, which paralleled a shift in research priorities. During the early 1960s,
almost all BCL funding came from federal agencies (e.g. National Institute of Health,
Office of Naval Research, and the US Air Force) and most funding went toward
cybernetics research in circuitry, neurophysiology, and language (BCL, 1975, pp. 3-6).
After 1968, the BCL produced markedly different research proposals, including a project
to construct a notation system for choreography of dance, an exploration of
epistemology and decision making, and a textbook on second-order cybernetics. One
point of departure for this second phase of the BCL was a course entitled “heuristics”.

3. The heuristics courses, Fall 1968-Spring 1970

Heinz von Foerster and Herbert Brün, a Professor of Music, offered “heuristics” as an
engineering course with graduate and undergraduate sections, and a cross-listing in the
English Department in 1969 (Table I). Students enrolled from several colleges, but
mainly the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; the Fall 1968 course roster lists only
one undergraduate with a declared major in engineering, out of 49 class participants[2].
“Heuristics”, as von Foerster used the term, referred to “the teaching and learning of the
faculty to perceive and to discover” or “the development of cognitive processes” and
problem solving in general[3]. The course was an attempt at radically interdisciplinary
inquiry in a period of social upheaval on campus[4].
Recently, von Foerster has a reputation as a radical educator, but early records of the
heuristics course suggest that he initiated the course with moderate views on education.

Course listing Fall 1968 Spring 1969 Fall 1969

Graduate students 21 21 9
Undergraduate students 15 36 119
Table I. Auditors (not enrolled) 13 ? ?
Some statistics on Total enrollment 49 57 128
student enrollment
in the heuristics course Note: Based on the final course rosters, accessed in the Herbert Brün Library in Urbana, Illinois
 His attitude toward the social movements that were shaping campus life at Illinois may von Foerster’s
be glimpsed in his brief “note on causes of campus disorder” from the heuristics heuristics course
course[4]. The text attempts to avoid taking sides, while describing the disruption of
“business as usual” on campus as a problem that could be addressed by the heuristics
course. Student unrest at Illinois has been documented (Williamson, 2003) though it was
scarcely mentioned in the BCL report on the heuristics course (von Foerster and Brün,
1970). While the 1968 heuristics course was organized to engage the problems of the 1151
university, von Foerster and Brün seemed hesitant to implicate the system in which they
were participating and observing in their 1970 report.
The heuristics course was to include discussions of human cognition, with texts
selected by the instructors, as well as copious input from the students who were to
organize discussions, groups, and documented responses. A summary of the Fall 1968
course shows that during the first meeting on September 17, 1968, the students were
given the assignment to write a paper under the title “Right or wrong, my desires”
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(von Foerster and Brün, 1970, p. 20). The first two meetings of the course were in fact led
by a graduate student, followed by a third meeting in which von Foerster tried to give a
lecture on logic that was rejected by many of the students (von Foerster and Brün, 1970,
p. 20).
Some power was given to the students to form groups to research problems, plus a
“creativity group” that was sort of a wild card – it presented on what it deemed to be
creative action, and later several “desire paper groups” were formed out of themes
distilled from the students’ desire papers. The Fall 1968 class produced four such
groups, with the following themes: “1. Power, love. 2. Communicate, understand.
3. Security, freedom, fulfillment. First two may produce a paradox. 4. [. . .] Could not find
a common desire” (von Foerster and Brün, 1970, p. 24). In other words, the groups focused
on love, understanding, and security, with the fourth group locked in disagreement, thus
reproducing the 1960s clichés of peace, love, understanding, and uncertainty.

4. Herbert Brün’s response: anticommunication

Perhaps in response to the predictable quality of the desire paper themes, Herbert Brün
formulated his concept of “anticommunication” for the Spring 1969 heuristics course
(von Foerster and Brün, 1970, p. 18). This was Brün’s proposal that if one wants to
communicate something new, one has to first concern oneself with generating a way of
speaking that does not communicate the old. The “anti-” of anticommunication was
meant in the sense of “on the other side” rather than in the sense of “against”
communication.
Brün’s concept of anticommunication meant acting as a composer or designer of
language. In terms of Brün’s re-formulation of information theory (Brün, 1970),
anticommunicative constructions would be more “chaotic” than communicative ones.
Anticommunication would not have a predefined communicative value or role in the
linguistic system. Brün (1986) argued that it was necessary to anticommunicate if one
was to generate linguistic starting points that could be organized into new
communication systems. The desire paper groups developed themes centered around
“power”, “love”, and “understanding”, and Brün focused on how the communicativity
of these themes created barriers to change. He introduced anticommunication the
following semester along with an assignment to anticommunicate. The students’
 K responses to that assignment “could be called works of art” (von Foerster and Brün,
40,7/8 1970, p. 18).
This phrase was telling, as Brün’s compositional work in the development of
electro-acoustic music and computer graphics was very much concerned with what
could be called works of art (Brün, 2004). Though his history with cybernetics was not
as extensive as von Foerster’s, Brün’s work with computers allowed him to develop
1152 vocabulary for linking disparate systems. Furthermore, his work in new music drew
from a history of political dissidence in the arts. Contemporaneous with the heuristics
course, Brün’s computer graphics such as the Mutatis Mutandis series (Figure 1)
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Figure 1.
Mutatis Mutandis 73 Notes: Computer graphic by Herbert Brün; Brün began working on the Mutatis
Mutandis series in 1968 and continued into the 1990s
 invited composers to interpret computer graphics in order to generate scores for von Foerster’s
acoustic instruments. Such interdisciplinary art called for a not-yet-communicative heuristics course
language or a meta-language in the interest of generating new connections with the
assistance of available technology.

5. The heuristics course as a contribution to social change

A document entitled The Whole University Catalog was produced by the heuristics 1153
class in 1969, and it included Brün’s treatise on anticommunication (von Foerster, 1969,
p. 11). The first of several course-generated publications, The Whole University Catalog
“contained information about local food, housing, and culture; academic and social
resources; and essays, poetry, graphic art, and photography” (Hutchinson, 2008). The
rear cover of the document explained that proceeds from the sale of the book would go
to Illinois’ Special Educational Opportunities Program, which was the mechanism by
which African-American enrollment at Illinois was increased during the 1968-1969
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school year and thereafter (Williamson, 2003). Many of the student writings contained
in the Catalog were contemptuous of the status quo at Illinois, with short text titles such
as “Changing the grading system” or “F * * * the foreign language requirement” while
others flouted academic standards and offered information on drugs and where to find
free food and shelter. The Catalog thus earned the “scorn of certain campus
administrators and even one Springfield legislator, who hauled von Foerster before a
special hearing to answer for his students work” (Hutchinson, 2008).
The heuristics course was an intersection of cybernetics, politics, experimental
pedagogy, and composition. The senate hearing was documented, though the
proceedings reveal little more than that von Foerster was present, and that the
committee might not have had enough money to hire a transcriptionist (Illinois General
Assembly, 1970). von Foerster may have received some sort of warning, but he kept his
job and he did not shy away from teaching unconventional courses in the following
semesters. Nor did he shy away from orienting the BCL towards increasingly radical
epistemological views (i.e. rejecting objectivity and embracing constructivist ideas).
Brün not only held on to the ideas he generated for the heuristics course, he founded
a school based on them. He republished his text on anticommunication on the eve of the
founding of the School for Designing a Society (Brün, 1989) and the promotional
literature for the School for Designing a Society put a spotlight on Brün’s distinction
between communication and anticommunication[5]. During the 1980s, Marianne Brün
(1985) had replicated the assignment to write a list of statements under the heading
“Right or wrong, my desires” in a course on “Designing Society” at Illinois that became
the starting point for a “living book” in a discussion initiated at an ASC conference.
Herbert Brün would re-introduce the assignment at the inaugural event of the School for
Designing Society, in 1993[6].

6. Seminar with Ivan Illich in Cuernavaca

In the Summer of 1971, Ivan Illich and Heinz von Foerster arranged a series of meetings
at the Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico with Herbert
Brün, Humberto Maturana, Gordon Pask, and students. The discussions reflected
Illich’s (1971) recently published Deschooling Society, as well as Brün and von Foerster’s
reflections on heuristics, Maturana’s (1970) recently proposed theory of “autopoiesis”,
and Pask’s (1975) interjections from his nascent “conversation theory”.
 K The meetings with Illich appear to mark a turning point in von Foerster’s thinking
40,7/8 about education. On September 3, 1970, he had written that “learning is usually, and
correctly, understood as the sum total of the processes by which knowledge is
acquired”, that during times of “socio-cultural continuity it appears as if ‘knowledge’
were a commodity” and that learning is conceived of as the “acquisition and
maintenance (memorization) of that commodity”[7]. He goes on to say that in times of
1154 “socio-cultural discontinuity” knowledge “is contested” and learning becomes
concerned with “processes of perception and discovery (the cognitive processes)
rather than memorization”[8]. Though von Foerster’s ideas are far more conservative
than his later writings on the subject, his wording already echoed Illich, who wrote
about how schools “reproduce society” and asked, “will people continue to treat
learning as a commodity?” (Illich, 1971, 1973). von Foerster’s educational critique
became far more radical in later years when he was giving talks about second-order
cybernetics. He stopped referring to knowledge as something transferred or acquired,
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and he ruthlessly critiqued educational tests as a “measure of the trivialization” of

students (von Foerster, 1971). Though von Foerster never went so far as Illich who
advocated educational de-institutionalization, he continued to develop his educational
critique in his later career (von Foerster, 1984, 1990).
The seminar in Cuernavaca amplified the shifts in von Foerster’s thinking, in his
drift away from first-order engineering problems and toward issues of observation
itself, looking at language and society. von Foerster and Brün’s 1970 “Comment on
heuristics” was mild compared to his later epistemological proclamations. A decade on,
the de-trivialization of knowledge acquisition would become one of his main points (von
Foerster, 1984). Brün and Illich were open to including art/design and radical critiques
of education in cybernetics, but it was von Foerster and Maturana who began to
formalize the inclusion of such topics in cybernetics literature. They were not alone, nor
was cybernetics, in re-evaluating the lenses of perception through which socially
meaningful work was being conducted in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

7. The decline of the BCL and the ASC in 1974

The BCL continued to conduct research and offer unconventional courses until von
Foerster’s retirement in 1974, and the ASC became paralyzed after the November 1974
meeting on “Control and Communication in Social Processes”. Regular ASC conferences
would not resume until the 1980s. I would like to suggest that the incorporation of social
critique, non-objectivity, and design, combined with political and economic
circumstances, to trigger profound changes in the cybernetics community in the late
1970s.
The decline of the BCL, and of cybernetic research in the USA in general, has been
attributed to their reliance upon the US military establishment to fund its research.
Once the military’s funding priorities changed, so the story goes, there was no funding
for cybernetics[8]. Still, von Foerster and Brün put together a large research proposal
for the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1972[9]. The proposal contained echoes of
the Cuernavaca meeting and the heuristics course. It also resembled Beer’s (1981)
Cybersyn project in Chile, which involved a national network of computers organized to
facilitate participation in large-scale decisions about society. von Foerster and Brün’s
proposal was rejected. During the final four years of the BCL, there were only two
successful grants that listed von Foerster as the principal investigator: an air force
 grant in 1970 to support “direct access intelligence systems” and a small non-military von Foerster’s
grant in 1973 to support von Foerster’s final college course which produced the book heuristics course
Cybernetics of Cybernetics (1974).
It is also worth considering that this final output of the BCL, Cybernetics of
Cybernetics, was full of visual art, experimental writing, and games. This book did not
advance any particular line of research so much as stipulate the plurality of subjects
that second-order cybernetics was to cover. The introductory pages describe it as an 1155
output of a university course, and an accompanying “parabook” includes the course
description, and abstracts of each of the sessions of the course (von Foerster, 1974). Also
included were various illustrations, photographs, games, experimental writing from the
students in the course, and multiple overlapping organizational systems by which a
reader could choose to explore the book. One was an elaborate system of circles that
were printed in the margins of the pages. When the open circles were hole punched, one
could trace an alternate set of routes between the parts of the book. There was also an
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accompanying “meta-book” which contained entailment diagrams that provided

alternative sets of links between the concepts in the book. It also contained language
from the 1972 NSF proposal reformatted as an essay (Brün, 1974).
While researchers are prone to complain when funding agendas de-emphasize their
work, it remains questionable whether there was such a dramatic shortage of funding for
non-military scientific research in the 1970s as a result of the Mansfield amendment that
cybernetics itself was unduly affected (Branscomb, 1992). The National Academy of
Sciences was still funding basic research in the mid-1970s, so it seems facile to blame the
decline of cybernetics on a single bill. At the time, there were also serious internal divisions
within the ASC that led to a suspension of activities in 1974. Officers of the ASC took the
publishers of the Journal of Cybernetics to court (Umpleby, 2005), and there was not
another meeting of the ASC until 1980 (Whitaker, 2010). The themes of subsequent ASC
meetings often included art/design and education (Table II), unlike the earlier incarnation
of the ASC (1964-1974) that never held conference a conference on these subjects.
The radical turn of Heinz von Foerster to an epistemology of constructivism (which
included a fundamental critique of empirical research, the concept of objectivity, and

Conference title Year Location

Cybernetics and Education October 18-20, 1982 Columbus, Ohio

Creative Cybernetics December 2-5, 1987 Urbana, Illinois
Art, Cybernetics: Society October 18-22, 1990 Montreal, Quèbec
The Teaching of the Teaching of Cybernetics January 28-31, 1993 Norfolk, Virginia
Cybernetics in the Art of Learning November 3-7, 1993 Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania
Design, Planning, and Human Understanding April 2-5, 1998 Santa Cruz, California
Ecological Understanding II: Design and June 13-16, 2002 Santa Cruz, California
Conversation
Constructivism, Design, Cybernetics: Radical, Social, March 29-April 1, 2007 Urbana, Illinois
2nd-Order
Cybernetics Talk Dance Anticommunication March 12-15, 2009 Olympia, Washington Table II.
Cybernetics: Art, Design, Mathematics July 29-August 5, 2010 Troy, New York Artistic and educational
themes of ASC meetings
Note: This is not a list of all ASC meetings, but only those that focused on art/design or teaching/education after the 1974-1980 hiatus
 K the premises of the US school system) marginalized the BCL within the College of
40,7/8 Engineering at the University of Illinois. von Foerster’s contemporaries elsewhere in the
humanities and social sciences were drawing similar conclusions (Foucault, 1969), but
the mainstream of science and engineering continued to operate in the logical
positivism that he had now spent half a decade rebutting. Thus, when the ASC began to
promote radical constructivism in the 1980s, there was not only interest from biologists,
1156 mathematicians, and engineers but also considerable interest from artists, designers,
and people concerned with learning, pedagogy, and conversation. Brün and
von Foerster’s 1972 NSF grant proposal seems to have been a predecessor species to
the “socially beneficial information processor” in Designing Society (Brün, 1985), which
in turn was the predecessor to the founding of the School for Designing a Society in
1992[10]. Brün and von Foerster’s work could therefore be considered an influence,
though not a singular cause, of the accents on design and pedagogy in cybernetics
activities since the 1980s.
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Notes
1. There are many other sources of cybernetic thought on art, design, learning and
conversation. The work of Gregory Bateson, Humberto Maturana, and Gordon Pask are three
such sources. Their work preceded, and was contemporaneous with, the heuristics course.
2. Source: Folder on the heuristics course, from the Herbert Brün Library in Urbana, Illinois,
“Pre-P.W.E. Folder 54”.
3. Source: Folder on the heuristics course, from the Herbert Brün Library in Urbana, Illinois,
“Pre-P.W.E. Folder 54”. A short text by Heinz von Foerster entitled “Comment on heuristics”
dated September 3, 1970 uses this definition.
4. Source: Folder on the heuristics course, from the Herbert Brün Library in Urbana, Illinois,
“Pre-P.W.E. Folder 54”. University of Illinois’ “Course Outline” form to register the heuristics
course officially in the course catalog. This completed form included the elective areas and
the names and departmental affiliations of the instructors. The form was signed and
submitted by Heinz von Foerster on May 30, 1968. The course was listed as an elective in the
fields of “electrical engineering, computer science, biophysics, psychology, education” and
the instructors were Heinz von Foerster (engineering/biophysics), W. Ross Ashby
(engineering/biophysics), Herbert Brün (music), Herbert Schiller (economics/
communication), and Paul Weston (coordinated science laboratory). Humberto Maturana, a
biologist from the University of Santiago, Chile was also a frequent guest contributor to the
heuristics course (Maturana and Poerksen, 2004). The mixture of different departments,
including the arts, engineering, and biology was unprecedented, even for the Biological
Computing Laboratory at the time.
5. Brochures for all sessions of the School for Designing a Society are found in the Herbert Brün
Library in Urbana, Illinois. References to anticommunication also appear at: www.
designingasociety.net/ (accessed April 10, 2010).
6. Source: Unpublished video by Maria Isabel Silva in the Herbert Brün Library in Urbana,
Illinois, June 14-15, 1993. Video No. 7.
7. From a short paper entitled “Comment on heuristics” by Heinz von Foerster, September 3,
1970. Herbert Brün Library in Urbana, Illinois, “Pre-P.W.E. Folder 50”.
8. The Mansfield Amendment to the Defense Procurement Authorization Act of 1970 limited
research funds to research initiatives “with a direct and apparent relationship to a specific
military function or operation” (Umpleby, 2003). Several authors have stated that this bill was
 responsible for the BCL’s loss of funding in the early 1970s (Müller and Müller, 2007; von Foerster’s
Hutchinson, 2008).
heuristics course
9. From the Herbert Brün Library in Urbana, Illinois. According to the preface, the first draft of
this proposal had been completed April 15, 1971. In February 1972, Heinz von Foerster,
Herbert Brün, and four other men submitted a funding proposal entitled “Cognitive
technology: a citizen-society problem solving interface” to the NSF Research Applied to
National Needs. It was the biggest research proposal the BCL ever produced, requesting 1157
$917,841 to be spent over four years.
10. The first School for Designing Society session lasted one week during the summer of 1992.
Records are available in the Herbert Brün Library in Urbana, Illinois.

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2010).
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Ulrich, H. and Probst, G.J.B. (Eds), Self-organization and Management of Social Systems,
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von Foerster, H. (1990), “Lethology: a theory of learning and knowing vis a vis undeterminables,
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Press, Rantoul, IL.
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BCL Research Report 13.1, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL.
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About the author

Robert Scott recently received a PhD from the Department of Educational Policy, Organization,
and Leadership at the University of Illinois. From 2005 to 2008 he served as Director of the School
for Designing a Society in Urbana, Illinois, a project that is a direct descendant of the heuristics
course described in this essay. His research makes use of the Herbert Brün Library which is a
project of the Herbert Brün Society in Urbana, Illinois. Robert Scott can be contacted at: rscott2@
illinois.edu

To purchase reprints of this article please e-mail: reprints@emeraldinsight.com

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Contemp Fam Ther (2013) 35:376–387
DOI 10.1007/s10591-013-9269-z

ORIGINAL PAPER

Steps to a Therapy of Human Relationships: The

Evolution of Family Therapy in Italy

Gianmarco Manfrida • Elena Giachi • Erica Eisenberg

Published online: 12 April 2013

 Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

Abstract A brief description is given of history, developments and future perspectives of

family therapy in Italy, including information about Italian law requirements for training
and accreditation as therapists and fit of family therapy with current medical and social
services systems in the country. A characteristic feature of the Italian situation is family,
couples and also individual therapies merging into a common systemic-relational
approach, which with different adaptations and techniques according to different contexts
allows professionals to deal with problems at any level of systemic complexity, from
individuals to organizations. Challenges fostered by the economic crisis can be productive
to Italian family therapy, which has always been socially oriented and close to people’s
real life: therapists seem inclined to refine their clinical skills, schools to improve the
educational level and patients might be more open to relational aspects of human
interaction.

Keywords Family therapy
Italy
Systemic relational approach
Psychotherapy Italian

laws
Italian society relational psychotherapy SIPPR

‘‘If you will place your trust in Italians, you will always be disappointed’’ (Francesco Guicciardini,
Florentine historian, 1483–1540).
‘‘Good troops, bad officers, but remember that without them we would not have Civilization’’ (Erwin
Rommel, German general, 1891–1944).
‘‘One resists the invasion of armies; one does not resist the invasion of ideas’’ (Victor Hugo, French author,
1802–1885).

G. Manfrida (&)
E. Giachi
E. Eisenberg

Centro Studi e Applicazione della Psicologia Relazionale, viale Vittorio Veneto 78, 59100 Prato, Italy
e-mail: gmmanfrida@gmail.com
E. Giachi
e-mail: centrostudi@dada.it
E. Eisenberg
e-mail: centrostudi@dada.it

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Contemp Fam Ther (2013) 35:376–387 377

Already in the 1500s the historian Francesco Guicciardini expressed a lack of confidence in
the substantial reliability of the Italian people; yet even German general Rommel recog-
nized the personal qualities and the cultural value, if not the organizational and com-
manding skills, of the Italians. Some readers of this review on the current state of Family
Therapy in Italy may be surprised by the undeniable presence of anarchy and individualism
which we will not attempt to hide. We will also try to illustrate some aspects of creativity,
idealism, and brilliance—which are not lacking—in the hope of someday being able to
disprove Guicciardini also in regards to our reliability.

Family Therapy in Italy: The Specific Application of a Widespread Interpersonal

Model

The birth of family therapy in Italy can be dated back to 1967, the year in which psy-
chiatrist and psychoanalyst Mara Selvini Palazzoli founded in Milan, along with her
medical colleagues, the Centro per lo Studio della Famiglia [Center for the Study of the
Family]. Initially the Centro operated from a psychoanalytical perspective and only sub-
sequently it adopted the Palo Alto strategic model to work with families of young psy-
chotics and anorexic patients. The book Paradox and Counterparadox (Selvini Palazzoli
et al. 1978) had a great influence on the practice of family therapy, especially due to its
methodological severity and for the creativity of the paradoxical interventions therein
introduced. At the end of the 1970s, thanks to the experiences born of the Centro—
experiences which until then had only been reported by Selvini Palazzoli within her
university lectures—Boscolo and Cecchin founded the Centro Milanese di Terapia della
Famiglia as a School of Psychotherapy in Milan. It is, however, in Rome in 1972 that the
first School aimed at training family therapists, the Centro Studi di Terapia Familiare e
Relazionale [Research Center for Family and Relational Therapy], was born. The Roman
group, led by Luigi Cancrini, adopted key strategic and structural concepts derived directly
from the work of Haley (1963) and Minuchin (1974). Some of the students of this Roman
group later founded their own independent schools of family therapy, such as M. Andolfi
and G. Vella; in fact, most therapists and teachers working in the field of family therapy in
Italy will have received their initial training here and many schools training in family and
relationship therapy on the national territory have stemmed from this school. In 1994, the
Centro Studi was recognized by the Ministero dell’Istruzione, Universita’ e Ricerca
(MIUR) [Ministry of University and Scientific Research] as a post-graduate school, with
nine independent training centers in Italy. Among these is the Centro per lo Studio e
l’Applicazione della Psicologia Relazionale di Prato [Center for the Study and Application
of Relational Psychology of Prato], which has been active since 1979.
In the early ‘80s the various branches of the Centro Studi launched an initiative to
promote liaising with other Italian schools of family and relationship therapy whose
experience and expertise was recognized both on a national and international level. This
initiative led to the foundation, in 1982, of the Societa’ Italiana di Psicologia e Psico-
terapia Relazionale (SIPPR) [Italian Association of Relational Psychology and Psycho-
therapy], which became the key interlocutor of similar associations in Europe and
America. In 1988 the Centro, along with its branches, contributed significantly to the
establishment of the European Family Therapy Association (EFTA), which recognizes,
associates, and legitimizes training activities in the field of Family Therapy in Europe.
Among the 23 Italian training institutions associated with EFTA, only seven have the
words ‘Family Therapy’ in their name; five refer to Systemic Therapy; and 11 prefer the

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terms ‘Relational Therapy’. This is a clear sign that in Italy, family therapy is not perceived
as a psychotherapeutic specialty but rather as a specific context of application with specific
tools and techniques; an approach which ascribes both the cause of psychopathology and
its potential treatment to interpersonal relationships.
The difficulty in trying to define a unique name for institutes involved in training in this
area reflects a wider identity crisis which concerns family therapy. Already in the 1980s,
the identity of the ‘‘family therapist’’ began to waver; newly trained family therapists were
faced with the realization that their work with families covered only a minor portion of
their professional activity. It became necessary for the schools and training centers to
re-direct training towards a ‘systemic’ or ‘relational’ thinking model, which could be
applied to different therapeutic contexts. The term ‘relational’ per se was considered
ambiguous, and since several other contemporary currents of psychotherapy used the
concept of relational or interpersonal, the term systemic-relational was chosen. Despite this
choice, the national association founded in 1984 with the goal of uniting the different
Italian schools and family therapists was named Societa’ Italiana di Psicologia e Psico-
terapia Relazionale [Italian Association for Relational Psychology and Psychotherapy],
thus eliminating the reference to the concept of ‘‘systemic’’, which appeared narrowly tied
to Paul Watzlawick’s comunicationalist and neo-behaviorist concepts (Watzlawick et al.
1967). This stance, which prevented incidents such as the abrupt volte-face witnessed in
the United States where the Family Therapy Networker magazine was transformed into the
Psychotherapy Networker, is also partially related to a different cultural context than that
of the Anglo-Saxon countries. While in Anglo-Saxon countries it is possible—if not
required—for children to leave the parental home at an early age in order to attend college
or seek employment, in Italy different economic, geographical and cultural factors delay
this process. Factors such as unemployment, the lack of affordable housing for students,
the accessibility of higher education close to home, the emotional bond between close
family members, the Catholic tradition and more lead to a prolonged intergenerational
enmeshment. As a result, in the US the family is more readily perceived as a resource to
which the individual can turn to in times of difficulty, whereas in Italy the family can be
perceived as an entity from which the individual tries to defend an already small inde-
pendent space. In the Anglo-Saxon culture, ‘calling the family in’ can be perceived as a
mobilization of resources (Krycak et al. 2012), whereas in Italy it can give rise to perse-
cutory experiences both in the parents (‘‘it is our fault….’’) and in the children (‘‘I am not
perceived as an adult…’’). Of course, all of these perceptions and experiences can be dealt
with within the therapy setting, but on first impact, a center for relational therapy will be
easier to introduce than a prospective family therapy.
The systemic-relational approach is widely diffused in Italy, with 74 psychotherapy
schools out of 339 (22 %) referring to this approach, whereas on the individual level the
number of systemic-relational psychotherapists is exceeded only by those of psychody-
namic orientation.
Within all the relational schools the family-roots are preserved by referring constantly
to the models of the ‘founding fathers’: Bateson’s epistemology (1972), the strategic
approach (Haley 1963), the structural model (Minuchin 1974), the counterparadox (Selvini
Palazzoli et al. 1978), the Milan Approach (Boscolo et al. 1987; Boscolo and Bertrando
1996) and the changes introduced by the second cybernetics (Hoffman 1990), all these are
taught and credited in the different relational schools and known by all family therapists.
While the psychodynamic model in Italy has had its stronghold among private practi-
tioners and the cognitive-behavioral approach grew strongly in universities, the relational
approach originated and spread mainly among public health services, so much so that in

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the 80s’ many public health facilities were equipped with the one-way mirror in order to
work with families. Because of these origins family therapy retains a strong interest in
social work even though over the years public services have abandoned the widespread
practice of family therapy and have turned to less costly solutions such as family inter-
ventions inspired by the Expressed Emotions (Leff and Vaughn 1985; Leff et al. 2002)
model and self-help groups. Nowadays trainee-family therapists have very low expecta-
tions of being employed in the public service and turn primarily towards private practice,
which is reflected in the current trend in the use of family therapy in Italy today.

Current Trends in the Use of Family/Systemic/Relational Therapy in Italy

The need to start private practice in a context of an economic recession aggravated by the
competition of a great number of colleagues, means that more and more students seek an
effective and practical clinical training. The schools of relational therapy make use of
direct supervision via the one-way mirror to work with different kinds of psychopathology
and problems, relying on educators who are themselves experienced clinicians rather than
full-time theoretical teachers, therefore these schools, thanks to their practical and concrete
approach, still attract the interest of many young people even though most college pro-
grams barely describe the relational model in their psychology courses.
Currently in Italy, family therapy is sought more frequently by individuals than by
families or couples, therefore training centers and schools should focus on providing
training which can be applied to different relational groups, especially to the individual
patient who seems to represent the new frontier of the relational model (Mosconi and
Peruzzi 2008). For this reason, in the last decade, many Italian family therapists have
focused on the study of personality disorders, searching for the causes in childhood trauma
and attachment issues, studying interpersonal patterns, and proposing strategies and ther-
apeutic techniques which can be applied in an individual setting as well as in a family or
couples’ setting.
Cancrini (2007, 2012) has long studied the link between the relational and psychody-
namic and interpersonal approaches (Smith Benjamin 2002, 2006), while Ugazio (1998)
has done the same with the cognitive-constructionist approach. Telfener (2006), from a
modern feminist perspective, has focused especially on the Narcissistic Personality Dis-
order in males. Selvini (2004) has devoted his time to studying and classifying the different
interpersonal patterns of each personality disorder. The contributions of these authors
exemplify the trend described above, as the relational approach is applied and used in the
therapeutic relationship, turning the therapist-patient relationship into the main instrument
of change for relational patterns acquired during childhood.
Another example of this trend—of applying the relational model to the individual
therapy setting—is represented by the introduction in Italy of a narrative approach based
on social constructionism. Manfrida (1998, 2011) has developed a personal perspective of
therapeutic stories, starting from Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) classic work on the social
construction of reality. Manfrida creates an original synthesis of the similarities and dif-
ferences between this and the American Narrative Therapy inspired by White and Epston
(1990).
Another current trend in the area of family therapy in Italy is represented by the work of
Laura Fruggeri (2012), Mariotti and Frison (2000) who, through the application of different
methods and approaches, have been researching different techniques and the results of
therapeutic interventions in order to assess clinical outcomes. This effort to overcome the

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outdated custom of self-referencing has the goal of enabling the comparison of results not
only with colleagues from other approaches, but also with patients and society in the wider
sense. Chianura et al. (2011) have edited a handbook on Family Therapy for SIPPR which
represents the state of the art of both research and clinical practice of the main Italian
teachers and therapists.
Luigi Onnis continues to pursue his studies on psychosomatic disorders generated by
interpersonal issues, while his version of the therapeutic sculptures technique (2011),
which has grown apart from Philippe Caillé’s and Yveline Rey’s original model (Rey and
Caillé 1998), is used to represent a couples’ current relational experience and their
expectations for the future.
Some important contributions are also being made by young clinicians and teachers.
Vallario (2010) has described the Chronogram, a computerized method which collects and
analyzes the history of individuals and families enabling the user to detect significant
elements which can be useful within therapy. Vallario (2013) has also relaunched and
revitalized the family therapy lunch-sessions technique for anorexics proposed by Minu-
chin et al. (1978). Giuliani and Nascimbene (2009) instead are at the forefront of narrative
models proposing a theory and a technique to create a therapeutic hypertext!
Loriedo and Vella (1992), Andolfi (1979) and their many pupils promote a relational
psychotherapeutic approach both in the clinical field and in research, enriched by a greater
awareness of specific aspects of patient narratives.
Rodolfo de Bernart continues to develop the use of images in therapy and techniques
based on these images, such as collage, photo genogram, the use of film-clips, founded on
the belief that the image grants privileged access to the ‘‘relational implicit’’ of individuals,
couples and families (de Bernart 2012).
In Italy, the flexibility of the relational approach has allowed for its application to
different contexts aside from the classical psychotherapeutic setting. The relational
approach has been used in hospitals (to provide support for patients and families, as well as
for physicians and healthcare professionals, and for managing staff group-dynamics), it has
been applied to supervision within therapeutic communities, and it has also been applied
within classroom settings or in work/organizational psychology and in corporate envi-
ronments. The relational approach is also the theoretical and practical orientation of choice
for professionals who work in very specific settings such as out-patient centers or neuro-
rehabilitation facilities, given that the national health system guidelines recommend the
global care of the patient and his/her family, according to a bio-psycho-social perspective.
The Tuscany Regional Board, showing a rare example of institutional interest, has
established the Centro per le Criticita’ Relazionali [Center for Critical Relations], directed
by Dr. Laura Belloni. This center has the aim of supporting medical teams, healthcare
personnel, organizations, and all those who might be experiencing difficulties in relation to
their patients, staff members and other organizations.

How Does Family Therapy Fit into Current Medical and/or Social Services Systems?

Italians can turn to the Servizio Sanitario Nazionale (SSN) [National Healthcare System]
for free or very low prescription charges. The SSN is articulated in different Unita’
Sanitarie Locali (USL) [Local Healthcare Units] which provide services to a population
within a geographically circumscribed area. A few of these USL, which also provide
psychiatric and/or psychological assistance, are equipped with the one-way mirror and can
provide family therapy. These treatments are usually managed by the SSN healthcare staff

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with the help of trainee family therapists or interns coming from private schools. The
therapy sessions are normally prescribed in sets at a minimal prescription charge for the
patient as they are covered by the national health system.
The availability of these services can vary greatly among the single USL as each unit
responds both to the requests of the local population and of the managing staff. A lack of
funds poses a limit to the number of requests which can be attended to. In Italy, social
services are not allowed to provide any kind of psychotherapeutic intervention, be it family
or individual, by law only certified medicine doctors or psychologists who are also trained
and certified psychotherapists can provide this service.
Families can turn to their local Consultorio Familiare, a counselling service for families
and individuals which is found in every USL. These provide a wide range of services to the
family, it is possible to turn to the local consultorio for parenting support, for health related
issues (especially for women, children and adolescents), for pregnancy support and more.
Consultori also provide family mediation services for parents who are separated or in the
process of separating, and can provide support to families who undertake an international
or national adoption or fostering process.
In sum, over the last few years the national health system has greatly reduced the space
allotted to psychotherapy. Due to the economic crisis most public services focus on
implementing basic prevention strategies (for example within schools), or in managing
single clinical and social emergencies, which are often handled with the simplistic use of
medication.

Training and Training Programs in Psychotherapy and Family Therapy

In Italy, the Ministry of University Education and Research (MIUR) governs the
acknowledgment and activities of the schools and post-graduate specialized courses qual-
ifying trainees for the profession of psychotherapist. Currently, there are nine state uni-
versity schools which follow different curricula: clinical psychology, neuropsychology,
life-cycle psychology, counselling and psychological assessment and health psychology.
Post-graduate courses offered by state universities have a duration of five academic years,
whereas private schools which are governed by law D.M. no. 509 of 1998 only have a four
year duration. Candidates are admitted in limited numbers through a selection process; since
2008 the degree of these private schools has been equalized to the public university degree.
The key qualification of a private psychotherapy school is to be recognized by MIUR
while the Ministry of Health acts only as a consultant. To be acknowledged by the MIUR,
each school must provide a wealth of information regarding its policies. It must document
its theoretical and methodological approach; it has to provide references concerning the
approach taught; it must give proof of an agreement with public or private services where
trainees can do their internship; it must provide information about the owners or official
holders of the school as well as on the availability of qualified teachers and the presence of
adequate structures and equipment required to effectively hold courses. A MIUR technical
commission reviews whether the school is qualified for teaching psychotherapy and if it
observes the current laws and regulations. This commission can consist of up to 15
members qualified in the field of psychotherapy: among them, five are experts chosen by
MIUR, five are professors chosen by the National University Council (CUN), three are
chosen by the National Council of the Orders of Psychologists, and three are chosen by the
National Federation of the Orders of Doctors of Medicine. The MIUR website lists 339
schools providing psychotherapy training (Nardi and Arimatea 2011).

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382 Contemp Fam Ther (2013) 35:376–387

As opposed to private ones, university schools follow a theoretical integrated approach

rather than a specific therapeutic approach and are less practically and more culturally
oriented. On the contrary, private schools teach many different theoretic and methodo-
logical approaches, mostly psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioral or systemic methods.
Most of the private schools join the non-profit National Coordination of Psychotherapy
Schools (‘‘Coordinamento Nazionale Scuole di Psicoterapia’’-CNSP)—which aims at
qualifying these schools. Furthermore, many schools are also constituted as associations
which intend to develop and spread a specific theory or approach.
As mentioned, in Italy specialized psychotherapeutic programs must last at least four
years. Theoretical lessons and clinical practice must comprise at least 500 h each year, of
which 100 h must be devoted to an internship within an accredited public or private
institution. During their training, interns apply their theoretical knowledge to the
requirement to help patients, thus gaining experience in clinical diagnosis and intervention
in critical situations.
Each training program is divided in a theoretical and a practical part and each school has
a board of teachers and a scientific committee of three experts (with at least one external
university professor). According to the applicable general regulations, the board will
decide on an internal rule comprising the characteristics of the course and the theoretical
and practical guidelines, therefore, the training can be modified according to this rule (law
D.M. no. 509 of 11 December 1998, art. 7a) (Nardi and Arimatea 2011).
The training common to all schools must comprise: (a) general psychology, develop-
mental psychology, psychopathology, clinical diagnosis, and a general overview of the
major psychotherapy approaches, (b) a specific in-depth training regarding the theoretical
approach of the school, (c) practical training and supervision according to the specific
approach of the school, including—in most family therapy/relational schools—live
supervision, and (d) an internship in a public or private qualified institution to put the
theoretical knowledge into practice.
Every school has its own criteria, but the requirement concerning qualified clinical
experience and a scientific curriculum applies to both trainers and supervisors.
In each school the board of teachers has large decision-making powers regarding the
choice of both staff and activities (i.e. whether the course is to last four or five years or how
to manage the theoretical and practical activities). Furthermore, as the applicable law does
not require the personal therapy of the trainees, in some schools personal therapy is
compulsory and must last a defined number of hours, while in other schools it is not
required and only recommended. In Italy psychotherapies (including short-term ones) are
not covered by the national health system and must therefore be paid for by the patient.
This entails further expenses for the trainees. Supervision is done during the training and its
length will be decided by the school board, which keeps an individual record of each
trainees’ acquired educational level.
Every year the school board sends a report to MIUR concerning both the scientific-
educational activity of the preceding year and the program for the following year. This
report is assessed by a technical consulting board. The board determines the formalities of
the annual and final examinations. The final examination for all schools consists both of
written and oral exams. Trainees must present a written graduation thesis on a theoretical
issue to indicate the educational level acquired, while in the oral examination they must
discuss clinical cases treated under supervision. On the grounds of this assessment, the
trainees graduate as psychotherapists and are able to register to the Elenco degli Psicot-
erapeuti [Roster of Psychotherapists], maintained by the national associations of doctors in
Medicine or Psychology (Nardi and Arimatea 2011).

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Contemp Fam Ther (2013) 35:376–387 383

Among private schools, training fees vary greatly, rates range from a minimum of
3.500/4.000 EUR per year to a maximum of 15.000 EUR per year, as most schools also
require students to undertake the cost of individual therapy. State school fees are around
3.000 EUR per year. Part of these fees are tax-deductible.

Family Therapy and Couples Therapy

In Italy, couples therapy is perceived as a specific application of the relational model,

therefore both theoretical and clinical training coincide with that of the family therapist.
Most schools require the fulfillment of a number of hours of supervised clinical practice,
these are considered equally formative be they hours of couples therapy or family therapy.
A research conducted by the SIPPR revealed that family therapy centers, in which trainees
operate under direct supervision, receive an equal number of requests for family and
couples therapy (Manfrida et al. 2011).
In the realm of private practice, couples are often received by their therapist in his/her
private office, therefore outside of the organized setting with the one-way mirror and the
presence of two therapists. Furthermore, in much the same way as the family therapist will
work with the single patient, individual therapists will sometimes work with couples and,
occasionally, with families. Once a therapist is registered in the national roster of psy-
chotherapists, he/she can exercise the practice of psychotherapy in general regardless of the
specific approach studied when training.

What Professional Organizations are There for Family/Systemic Therapists?

By law, therapists must be registered to the association matching their degree, therefore
either the regional Medical or Psychological Associations. These associations regulate
ethical aspects and guarantee the professional requirements of its members. There are also
other associations which are linked directly to a specific school or schools, to which most
students are registered when they enroll in school, and continue to refer to even after
having completed their training. The main associations in the systemic-relational field are
Società Italiana di Terapia Familiare SITF (the schools derived from Andolfi), the Centro
Studi di Terapia Familiare e Relazionale (this groups the schools derived from Cancrini),
and the Società Italiana di Ricerca e Terapia Sistemica SIRTS (the schools deriving from
Boscolo and Cecchin).
The Italian Association for Relational Psychology and Psychotherapy (SIPPR), over
which Gianmarco Manfrida currently presides, is a scientific association of psychothera-
pists who enroll voluntarily AFTER completing their training and AFTER being registered
to the roster of psychotherapists. SIPPR is not an educational institute and therefore does
not provide training for students. SIPPR was founded in 1984 as an association of private
schools (specifically the schools of Boscolo and Cecchin, Cancrini, Vella and Loriedo,
Andolfi and Saccu, and De Giacomo) with the aim of ensuring the quality of the training of
the teachers of said schools. Today SIPPR membership is open both to the teachers of the
schools and to those clinical therapists who have had the required four year training and
who apply the relational model.
Over the years, SIPPR has been presided in turn by Gaspare Vella, Luigi Cancrini,
Gianfranco Cecchin, Camillo Loriedo, Marisa Malagoli Togliatti, Valeria Ugazio, and
Pasquale Chianura. This association now enjoys considerable prestige and is the only

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national association to represent Italy among EFTA members. SIPPR members can par-
ticipate for free to regional meetings every 18 months and SIPPR organizes either an
international or a national conference every three years. This association publishes an
online newsletter every semester and an updated roster of all its members can be found
online at www.sippr.it. SIPPR also promotes scientific research and the publication of
books representative of the relational model.
During the last election board meeting, the current president of SIPPR, Gianmarco
Manfrida, listed the aims of the association (Manfrida 2010b) which are:
• To become more present and visible in society. Lacking significant academic support
and ancient roots, relational therapists need to find access to media that will enable
them to share their wealth of experience and clinical skills with the general public.
• To promote and develop individual therapy both in the area of training and in clinical
practice, because relational therapists are psychotherapists in all respects and for all
situations, not only for couples and families.
• To enhance clinical heritage, documenting the extent of therapists’ work and
developing outcome research (Košutić et al. 2012), without being daunted by the
‘‘evidence-based’’ or quantitative investigation models, which are no longer considered
the exclusive bearers of scientific truth.
• To liaise with the field of neuroscience which, through the research on mirror neurons
and, more recently, on the brain’s production of protein mediators, proposes to
determine the connection between the relational and biological worlds.

Future Directions for Family Therapy Practice, Training, and Recognition in Italy

Relational and family therapy is widespread in Italy both in terms of number of recognized
private schools (74 out of 339) and in the number of therapists. The scientific contributions
of this field to both national and international literature are also significant: names such as
Selvini, Cecchin, Andolfi, Cancrini, Fruggeri, Ugazio, Onnis, Manfrida are known thanks
to the publication of books and articles in Italian and in other languages. However, the
relational movement has not yet known the popularity it deserves in Italy. Compared to the
psychodynamic and cognitive-behavioral models, psychology students are rarely intro-
duced to this approach in their graduate studies. Among the general public the relational
model is virtually unknown: patients rarely specifically request relational therapy, be it for
individuals or for couples or families. The few requests that are made for family therapy
occur when they are referred by other professionals to specific institutes. On the other
hand, couples therapy is often carried out in private practice, without careful attention
being paid to the setting, and—despite the efforts of the professional associations—often
carried out by such figures as family mediators or counselors whose training has been
varied, short, and sometimes questionable. Research also showed that clients often choose
interventions on the ground of economy of time and money: if the problem is considered
modest, like an anxiety disorder, the general preference of the family is to resort to
individual interventions; whereas if the problem is perceived as severe, as in the case of
psychotic disorders, behavior problems, or severe eating disorders in adolescents, it is then
more likely that the resources of the whole family will be mobilized (Manfrida and
Conforti 1991).
The lack of unity in the Italian relational movement has also been fostered by the
different origins of the many schools on the territory, all jealous of their autonomy and

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often in competition with each other for pupils and organizing events. The current state is
one in which the different schools, each autonomous and independent and rich of creative
activities, are often subjected to harrowing internal conflicts and exhausting skirmishes
with their neighbors. The birth of SIPPR itself, in 1984, represented a compromise made
among the main schools in an attempt to reach an agreement to control the quality of
training and to regulate the psychotherapy market. Despite this effort, in the past the
representatives of the Italian schools have not always placed the relational model before
their self-interest or that of their institution. In recent years, however, thanks to Pasquale
Chianura who sponsored that admission and membership to SIPPR be open not only to
teachers—who are necessarily tied to a school—but also to many independent therapists
and clinicians, there has been a great renewal of enthusiasm among the members: con-
ference attendance is very high, young and promising professionals contribute new and
original ideas, and the teachers seem to overcome old suspicions and be able to work
together for the popularity and development of family therapy and of the relational model.
In the concerted effort to gain scientific and social recognition, there has been an
increase in the initiatives designed to document the effectiveness of interventions and
patient satisfaction. Italian relational therapists are well known for their clinical skills, even
in situations of emergency, but they have always neglected to provide an account of their
activities, thus losing the opportunity of contributing to wider professional growth. The
effort of documenting and reviewing activities is being strongly promoted by SIPPR,
which oversaw the translation of Peter Stratton’s SCORE questionnaire (2005) and is
promoting its widespread application both in schools and among private practitioners.
The relational model can potentially be adapted to many levels of interpretation and
action, and it is currently being applied to various areas of public and private organizations:
to families of different types (homosexual, transgender, immigrant) and with different
types of problems (violence, parental alienation syndrome, chronic illness) and to indi-
viduals (anxiety disorders, personality disorders, sexual disorders). A new frontier for the
relational model is also represented by new communication options, such as e-mail or short
text messages. Manfrida has published (2010a) the first book in the world on the diagnostic
and therapeutic use of the latter.
The current economic crisis has had a significant impact on interpersonal relationships
and on family organization, as well as on individual aspects of personality to the point of
affecting both frequency and symptoms of psychopathology (it is sufficient to consider the
increase of depression and of suicide rates). The lack of economic resources has reduced
the rate of separations and divorces and has caused a further increase of the age at which
children leave the parental home due to the general lack of employment. Young couples
must postpone moving in together, and more nuclear families have resorted to living in the
same household. The revival of the extended family has become necessary to assist elderly
family members whose retirement pension is pooled with the family resources.
The economic crisis, to which SIPPR devoted a national congress held in Trieste in
October 2011, poses new challenges to all therapists, especially to relational ones, which
have always been proud to assist their patients with the practical problems of daily life.
Session frequency, therapy goals, and the timing of interventions must be redesigned.
Moreover the therapist feels more than ever the responsibility to live up to the sacrifices
that patients make in order to invest in their well-being, renewing their confidence and
hope at every meeting.
Private training institutions are facing an equal challenge, they have to enable the
newly-trained therapist to work well, in order to repay the trainees’ trust and sacrifices and
to keep up an adequate number of entries. We imagine that, at this time, many private

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schools may find it difficult to reach the required quota of students to fill the courses, and
that some schools might eventually be forced to close.
The very same challenges fostered by the economic crisis can, however, be a productive
challenge to the relational model which has always been open to the complexity of the
world and sensitive to problems of real life. It is possible that in the future, therapists will
refine their clinical skills, schools will improve the educational level, and patients might be
more open to the relational aspects of human interaction. Even now we are witnessing, in
Italian society as well as in individual clients, families, and professionals, many signs of
renewed commitment, of recovery of old values and of courageous innovation. A gener-
ational renewal has begun also among the therapists with the emergence of young and
creative therapists, while the traditional boundaries separating different schools are now
collapsing.
If the family and relational therapists movement is able to develop a strong identity to
present to the public with increased credibility, I believe that the future of the approach will
have a beneficial impact stretching beyond the therapeutic realm: promoting a more
relational perception of humanity, of individual problems, of problems experienced by
families.
In Italy the family has always been—for the therapist—a relational laboratory, chosen
as the primary object of intervention as it is the basic social unit in which it is possible for
therapists and trainees to witness both the pathogen and therapeutic effect of interpersonal
relationships. With this in mind, it will be possible to work with individuals and/or
organizations; extending—with the necessary adaptations—to individual experiences and
institutional structures, that which has been acquired in family therapy. The social root of
our approach is characteristic of the Italian situation. Over the next few difficult years, we
have the opportunity to make it bud and grow as a cultural resource in society. We are
confident that Italian relational family therapists will be up to the task.

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123
The Milan Approach, History, and Evolution
PIETRO BARBETTA
UMBERTA TELFENER

The two authors intend to underline the continuities and discontinuities that organize
the Milan Approach, after the splitting from Selvini Palazzoli and Prata; they intend to tell
the teachings of Luigi Boscolo and Gianfranco Cecchin from the beginning of training in
1978 till nowadays. After having spoken of some important stages in the work till the death
of the two masters, the article underlines two major new aspects. 1. We speak about the cor-
poreal turn: embodied experience as preconceptual know-how from which concepts are
structured. We speak about the connections between bodies and social issues that enact
forms of knowledge and understanding. 2. In this period of war, violence, and tyranny, we
speak about epistemology and ontology as complementary stances: the need to let others
disclose themselves, by allowing them to speak their own terms of engagement. The thera-
peutic effort is one of deactivating the dangers of one’s own presuppositions and prejudices
that limit one’s capacity to describe and make hypothesis. There are social ontologies, com-
munities with strong moral intensity, historical and social realities that need therapists to
take position, since they need to take side and be aware of the categories they utilize. Histor-
ical and social ontology deals with the continuous change of symptoms in connection to the
continuous change of the social panorama in the context we live in. We live by the bodies we
are.

Keywords: Milan approach; Family therapy; Clinical theory

Fam Proc x:1–13, 2020

A SHORT HISTORY

We bring with us the bits and pieces of our unique existence

(Angela Carter)

Discontinuities

T he Center for the study of families in Milan was founded in 1971 by Mara Selvini
Palazzoli, Luigi Boscolo, Gianfranco Cecchin e Giuliana Prata (Selvini, Boscolo, Cec-
chin & Prata, 1974, 1980a, 1980b). The four psychoanalysts decided to adopt the systemic

Milan Center for Family Therapy, Milan, Italy.

*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Umberta Telfener, Milan Center for
Family Therapy, Via G. Leopardi, 19, Milan 20123, Italy. E-mail: utelfener@gmail.com.

1
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doi: 10.1111/famp.12612
2 / FAMILY PROCESS

frame, following the MRI pragmatic model and utilized terms such as systems, family
changes, feedback, loyalties, communication.
Paradox and counter-paradox—published in Italy in 1975 and in 1978 in English—was
probably the first attempt to implement Bateson’s double-bind theory within clinical prac-
tice, an important move to theory, utilizing one of the most important transdisciplinary
systemic epistemologist. Double binds were seen as the relational deceit that captured
family pathology: families fall into paradox since they are unable to abandon the emo-
tional field. Hence, counter-paradox was conceived as the main therapeutic praxis during
sessions,1 a strategic intervention to undo what the family had fallen into. The so-called
identified patient was considered the family member whose sacrifice maintained the unity
of the family. Sessions were divided into 5 different stages: presession, first step with cli-
ents, discussion behind the one-way mirror, prescription at the end of the session, dialogue
on retroactions. Each session had its intervals, as in a Greek Tragedy (Papp, 1980).
Since Bateson’s book Towards an ecology of mind (Bateson, 1972), the Milan Team
started to adopt his cybernetic epistemology. Influenced by Bateson’s thinking, the group
became purely systemic (Boscolo, Cecchin, Hoffman, & Penn, 1987; Hoffman, 2001). Their
main focus was on context and epistemological premises, while their practice became more
and more of a relational intersubjective dance. Questions were no longer requests for lin-
ear information but rather tools used to “perturb” the therapeutic system and thus allow
differences to emerge. Final reformulations were no longer strategic prescriptions from
the outside, rather, affective considerations linked to the ongoing therapeutic process.
Starting from 1978, the history we are telling concerns only the training and therapy
run by Luigi Boscolo and Gianfranco Cecchin, the Milan Approach°, which after the sepa-
ration of the foursome ran a different path from the two women clinicians—Selvini Palaz-
zoli and Prata. Reversing the idea of training as “instructions for use,” or mere passage of
techniques, they regarded it as a process to learn to think systemically, with the aim of
opening up new possibilities (Barbetta, 2018; Barbetta & Telfener, 2019). Trainers and
trainees alike were immersed in a sort of orgy of hypotheses (Pearce, 1993) addressing the
differences among family members, how to allow the process to emerge, how to enhance
personal points of view and nuances. They constructed temporary hypotheses that were
instable and never final, abandoning the idea of clinical interpretation. The constant ques-
tions trainees asked during the training courses persuaded the two expert therapists not
to take for granted what they were doing, thus fostering legitimate questions (von Foer-
ster, 1984), those questions that allow creativity, to which there are no predefined answers
since they are not already organized by predefined premises.
Starting in the early 1980s, Boscolo and Cecchin evolved a new way of conducting ther-
apy. Leaving aside the strategic approach, they implemented a method based on the state-
ment “do not fall in love with your hypotheses”, reversing the therapist’s position
altogether. Strategy was transformed into strategizing (Penn, 1982, 1985; Tomm, 1987,
1988),2 the art of deciding which temporary hypotheses to utilize in relation to the ongoing

1
As, for example, the paradoxical prescription of the symptom.
2
“Strategizing” (Tomm , 1988) is not a mere change in the name of “strategy”. In strategy, there is a “con-
scious purpose” (Bateson, 1972) of the powerful psychotherapist, who is used to, and expert in, adapting
persons and families within an idea of adaptation and integration, to became successful; strategizing is
instead a flexible movement where the therapist, who is respectful and confident of family changes, facili-
tates the change perturbing the family with questions that help members of the family to describe them-
selves as autopoietic and flexible systems.

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BARBETTA AND TELFENER / 3
conversation. The methodology that developed, involving circular and reflexive questions,
emerged with the aim of complexifying, perturbing,3 and creating differences without
knowing where the system could end up. Externally dictated strategies no longer made
any sense4; strategic tools that were excessively directive and tactical were not considered
appropriate since they were interventions coming from a distant therapist that now had
passionately entered the dance. The surprising final interventions on symptom prescrip-
tion could only be viable, in fact, if the therapist felt the passion for “going there.”
In 1983, Karl Tomm organized the conference Philosophers meet clinicians in Calgary,
in which Maturana, von Foerster, Boscolo, Cecchin, Cronen, and Pearce took part. Con-
structivism and second-order cybernetics become the strongholds of the Milan model and
trainees for the next ten years would go on to study Maturana and Varela (1980), Pri-
gogine and Stengers (1984) and von Forester’s epistemology (1984). The emphasis shifted
to the premises that organize interactions and the framework that defines how we know
what we know, as well as the possibility of changing relationships rather than behaviors.
The issue of “languaging”,5 as Maturana and Varela call it (1980), has become one of the
benchmarks of the analysis of the therapeutic process: an action that allows people to
dance together. From a technical point of view, this shift enhances reflexive operations
and focuses on the observing system, which comprises the relationship between therapist
and observed system and any significant other. The reflexive epistemological phase con-
siders complexity as a clinical mandate: attention is focused on premises, beliefs, and
myths; time is explored in all its facets. The Milan associates increasingly distance them-
selves from a normative idea of how people and families should be, moving toward obser-
vation of how they actually interact.

Continuity
Since its earliest days, the Milan systemic practice has dealt with bodies in pain
(Scarry, 1985) where pain cannot be told, it shows a hole within language. In 1963, Mara
Selvini Palazzoli published a book in Italian entitled L’anoressia mentale (Self Starvation)
and many anorexic women have come to the Center since then. The title is striking. Talk-
ing with “fasting girls” at the hospital, Selvini discovered that they had “decided” to starve
themselves, though they may not have been aware of it: the symptom became a decision.
What kind of decision was Selvini talking about? It is a well-known fact that, in an eco-
nomic boom, anorexia is the most common disease among adolescent women (Barbetta,
2005) especially in Western countries, among the middle and upper classes. Is anorexia, a
kind of epidemic or a collective protest? If it is an epidemic, there should be some evidence
of a virus; if it is a protest, there should be a Union. Curing the daughter’s mysterious self-
starvation (Selvini, 1963) is clearly impossible within a psychoanalytical setting, psy-
chotherapy practice has to shift from individuals to families.
The second experience with “bodies” was the therapeutic practice with families in a
“schizophrenic transaction” (Selvini, Boscolo, Cecchin, & Prata, 1975). The Milan group
decided to contribute to the process of de-institutionalization of madness with family

3
“Perturbation” is a term used by Maturana and Varela (1980). The term is intended to substitute “infor-
mation”. Information is a quantity of communication that goes from an emitter to a receiver, “perturba-
tion” is a qualitative gesture within a relationship, as Maturana and Varela write: “The orienting orients
the orientee within its cognitive domain”. In other terms, in communication there is no information, just
perturbation.
4
Peggy Penn (1982, 1985) and Karl Tomm (1987, 1988) eventually deepen the questioning matter in the
Milan group as a methodology for therapy.
5
Languaging is not just language, the -ing suffice presents the idea of an ongoing process where lan-
guage is just a part of something more complex, as body positioning, words and slang, and something quite
different: language in action.

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therapy. The team discovered that family members enacted a rigid system of relationships
around the Identified Patient (IP) position.
The two experiences of therapy with anorexia and schizophrenia demonstrate that
the emphasis of Milan systemic family therapy is the body: the body of the “fasting
girls” and the fragmented body of the schizophrenic system, embedded in the whole
family as a system that operates beyond words. Family bodies with their different,
unique double binds, in fact, have always been the focus of family therapy: a nonlin-
guistic, prereflexive mode of dealing with knowing how instead of knowing that (De
Landa, 2016) was proposed. The context becomes the main signifier within which to
consider how people are positioned.
The Milan group offers a processual, evolutive and complex way of thinking, the joy of
exploring many possibilities, the refusal to judge, irony, lightness, the capacity to consider
the adaptive attitude of any interactive pattern. It becomes this the time when trainees
and professionals came from all over the world to follow the Mount Isola summer courses,
where there were interesting collaborative exchanges on clinical matters and where the
first local international teams were created.
The Milan Approach takes a constructivist position and differentiates epistemology
from ontology. Nonetheless, it does not disclaim ontology. We could call their construc-
tivism “the art of lenses,” a term widely used by Lynn Hoffman (Hoffman, 2001) and Luigi
Boscolo (Boscolo & Bertrando, 1993). Reality can be observed from infinite points of view,
although lenses are double-sided: they create points of view in two opposite directions,
from inside out and from outside in. Something that may look blurred from one place looks
quite different from another marginal positioning; the gestalt changes. It is positioning
that defines shape.6 In therapy, epistemology is the time when we deal with many possible
points of view and explanations, exploring the premises of all the people implied; there
also is the need to deal with the “real” story that comes through in the therapeutic rela-
tionship (ontology). We need to use our body and our intuition to feel it, questioning our-
selves on the possible blindness and prejudices that our theory inevitably imposes on us,
preventing us from grasping nuances. This double level of observation is viable for thera-
pists to enhance the difficult social situations they face. Therapy becomes the art of creat-
ing confidence and tenderness within any moment of the therapeutic interaction, through
the therapeutic relationship.
In 1980, the group started to shift its attention outside the therapy room, opening up to
professionals working from different positions and institutions on conjunct cases. Families
and psychotherapy were no longer the sole focus of Milan systemic therapy. Boscolo and
Cecchin taught systemic thinking as a frame that could be implemented in any possible
context (schools, hospitals, court mediation, public institutions, large companies), in any
critical context (family life, adoption, violent settings, foster care among others). Systemic
thinking has become a scaffold that allows therapists to work with many different possible
systems. As teachers of the Milan approach, we do not specifically deal with families: we
consider problem-determined systems, the people who share the same definition of “prob-
lem” (Anderson, Goolishian, & Windermand, 1986) and name “family therapy” or “sys-
temic therapy” any processual intervention that deals with complexity. In a systemic
framework, for us, to work with one individual or a whole family, a group or an institution
implies always to face the complexity of the whole system. We either overtly consider the
significant others involved in the interchange with what is happening, or simply take
them into account with no direct contact.

6
Psychoanalysis takes perception for granted, as systemic thinkers it is fundamental. Bateson thinks
the unconscious is constituted by images.

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BARBETTA AND TELFENER / 5
THE CORPOREAL TURN

If you desire to understand learn how to act, since the way in which you act determines what you
will see. (Heinz von Foerster)
The new trend of Milan systemic therapy deals with new authors who we found very con-
gruent to Gregory Bateson’s ideas. These authors had no direct contact with him but, as
Bateson, are interested in newness, instability, inclusion, and dissent. As well as Bate-
son’s, their ideas created some sort of “chaosmotic” (Guattari, 1992) attractor: the union of
chaos and cosmos (in Greek order, the Universe as ordered), a paradox that unites two
incompatible instances and becomes generative. We therefore are studying Deleuze and
Guattari (1980), Foucault (2008), Viveiros de Castro (2015), and many others.
Among recent developments in our School, there has been the concept of “corporeal
turn” (De Landa, 2016; Farnell, 2012; Latour, 2005; Stiegler, 2019), signifying acts and
forms of embodied knowledge. Bodies matter beyond the medical organism, the neurologic
network and the psychoanalytical sexuality; they are not just an issue of cultural differ-
ence.
Until the 1970s body and movement were not considered active resources that could be
used to approach social realities, when the therapist could not immediately grasp what
was going on. Family bodies in our view are a very powerful interconnected system with
rules, habits, and unspoken actions. What we now call “corporeal turn” has been a feature
of Milan systemic therapy from the start, given that the Milan Group deals with the rela-
tionship of bodies to the social and political issues of everyday life. These issues include
the economic boom, mental asylum de-institutionalization in the 1980s, present-day asy-
lum seekers, emergencies due to natural catastrophes and war, child abuse, the oppres-
sion against women, gaming, gambling, toxic mania, and the resurgence of oppressive
institutional practices (Barbetta, 2019).
The Orlani family comes to the Center for Anorexia.7 Gerolamo and Maria, the two par-
ents, are MD.; they have two children: Claudio and Gianna. When they appear at the door
of the Center, at 8 pm, in a winter night, the two therapists see a nose gastric tube pending
from Gianna’s nose, a tiny and tender girl 13 years old. It is not the first time that we see a
similar immediate presentation of the family; nonetheless, at any moment when it happens,
we see the tube as the symbol of another host coming to the session: death. This time, the
age, the childish body, and the tender expression of Gianna are so hard to be beard that one
of the two therapists feels completely wedged. They sit in the therapy room, the two thera-
pist close to each other as if they are looking for the protection one of the other, while the
family seems more open and relaxed. One of the two therapist is frozen, the other explains
the usual information for continuing the session, names, rules of privacy, the one-way mir-
ror, and so on. During this time, the other still feels frozen and impotent. At the time when
the explanation ends, the frozen therapist decides to “break the glass”: he stands up and,
very quietly, with small steps, approaches Gianna’s chair. When the therapist is nearby
Gianna, he gently asks her: “do you know what this is?”, indicating the tiny tube pending
from her nose, and she, while touching the tube: “yes, it is a nose gastric tube,” smiling at
him. He continues: “do you permit me to touch it as well?” and she: “yes, please.” The two
touch the tube together; then, the therapist says: “thank you” and goes back to his chair,
moving closer to the family. Now the therapists can continue the conversation.
The therapist who does it, in supervision says: I cannot explain what happened, it is as
if I touched the Torah Scroll. I got rid of the “aura,” I think that, in that very moment, I
de-sacralized the symptom. We call the first part of this story “ontology”—what happened,

7
Pietro’s example.

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the feelings—the second part, what the therapist says in supervision, “epistemology,” his
explanations.
The therapy went on for seven session and we could go on to account how, in seven ses-
sion, all along one year, Gianna became a beautiful teen-ager, but what we would like to
illustrate here, what we call “corporeal turn” is not the decision to utilize new or old tech-
niques. It is not to make body movements all along the session; it is rather inserting a
more or less “minute particular” of embodiment (Bateson, 1972, From Versailles to cyber-
netics). The reader can see, in this case, that the need of using the body starts from the
therapist, in all respect of the family, of the person, particularly of the so-called Identified
Patient. Therapists are not immune to sensation and feelings; to the contrary, they can
use them with humility for enhancing the therapeutic relationship. They can be curious
about the wide competences possessed by the family concerning their own life. We call
such a competence “ontology,” not something theoretical rather something embedded in
their habits. We call “epistemology” all the hypotheses we, as therapists, can make around
what happens during the session: clinical epistemology. The corporeal turn does not mean
that we use the body anytime, without reflecting on our bodies, rather it means that we,
as therapists, need to get rid of any abstract theory that frames the family: systemic the-
ory, strategic ideas, or any other theory that generalizes.
In this mode, movement is seen as imaginative; during the therapeutic process, it could
become tender and joyful, although not necessarily openly explained. Lives are expressed
through actions, feelings, experiences, and sensations within a social domain. Units of
movement are given meaning and the clinician pays attention to them, considering body
language, deep beliefs, and habits—even those with no words to express them, which need
to be reached by trust in one’s guts and in therapy by means of intuitions and examples
and peripheral talk, using stories and anecdotes. Using the body in therapy means many
things: considering the nonverbal sequences that clients perform and watching their/our
bodily sensations. In principle, the body of the other—the client, the patient—is not the
main focus; the main focus is, rather, the interaction between bodies, the dance bodies cre-
ate in the therapy room together. This expands the clinician’s range of body reactions: The
observer’s body, as much as that of the observed, shows the therapist’s passion in their
own practice in the field and connects to the relational body that emerges (the morpho-
genetic field of Sheldrake, 2009).
The corporeal turn does not necessarily mean adopting psychodrama, family sculpture,
or other forms of acting in the session—although these are allowed. Using active tech-
niques, as well as making people interact and participating in the emotional climate that
emerges, becomes a possibility, as in this following case where transitional objects are uti-
lized.
In the second session, I8 hypothesize that Maria, age 19—who came to me for help, com-
plaining about night fears, her inability to sleep and generalized anxiety since she was for
the first time in a relationship—has probably been “abused” by someone when she was
very young. I have this hint due to her suspiciousness and her fear of attachment, despite
an apparently regular family of origin. I trust my feelings but I am aware that asking is
not enough. I don’t want in any way to impose my hypothesis: people often have no words
for what happened to them, either because it happened in a preverbal period of their
growth, or because they have blocked the memory and there are no words to express it. I
decide to play with puppets, as I sometimes do. I ask her to choose some that describe her
and her significant relationships; I myself choose two that describe her at first glance. She
chooses one for her mother (a dolphin that swims in deep waters), one for her brother (the
pink panther that looks distracted), and one for her new love (Chip and Dale, the two

8
Umberta’s example.

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BARBETTA AND TELFENER / 7
Disney squirrels, herself and her partner embraced). The figures she chooses to describe
herself are a timid turtle to represent her shyness, and a twisted thread to represent her
insecurity. To describe her, I choose a diamond with many faces and a horse with wings
that wants to fly high in the sky. I need to remind her to represent her father. She chooses
a crocodile with an open mouth and an octopus with many tentacles. When I ask her to tell
me a story about all these objects, she selects only some of the objects and picks out the
squirrels, the dolphin, and the winged horse, working on why she is unable to fly and feels
so guilty and attached to earth. This becomes the metaphor that feeds us through the ses-
sions: a girl that wants to fly and is kept too low, as if her mother had not taught her to
swim in deep water. In the fifth session, she comes back spontaneously to the puppets she
had chosen previously and wonders why she considered her father a crocodile. She
answers to her question: “it is because he has been nasty and vicious, certainly with
mother, probably with me as well.” This is all that is explicitly stated in the sessions. We
will work on her relationship further on in the process even though I will never express
my hypothesis. It is as if it had been sufficient that I had framed the thought in my mind
that its evolutive power had continued to perturb.
One day,9 the Ethno-clinical team—composed by an anthropologist, a psychiatrist, and
a psychologist–psychotherapist—receives a call by one professional of a group of practi-
tioners working in different services within the Territory. They present what they define
a very difficult case that has been going on for 4 years. Some of the practitioners are con-
vinced they made mistakes in treating the case and therefore refer it.
The ethno-clinical team asks them to come all together. The meeting is composed by
nearly twenty people who never met each other for coordinating their work. They are psy-
chiatrists from the hospital, others from a psychiatric community, two psychologist of the
child guidance, social workers from social services, and other people involved by different
institutions. They talk about a “black woman”—from now on we will call the Identified
Patient with the generic appeal of “black woman”—who has two children. The children
are now in the father’s custody, and she cannot see them by order of the judge of the juve-
nile court. The judge, by the way, is not attending the meeting and has taken this decision
only after having read the documents concerning the “black woman.”
The ethno-clinical team is curious of what happened before and the territory profession-
als tell the story: At the very beginning, she was aggressive against someone of the team,
and even against other “black women” in the community where she had been placed. The
team refers her to the social services and then sends her in a community. She had been
sent to the territorial psychiatry by the Welcoming Center of Asylum Seekers, the first
contact she had in Italy, because she did not talk. In psychiatry, she got some medication
and became aggressive, she was then sent to the social services for assessment. The pro-
fessional who made the first conversation with the “black woman” says that during their
conversation she declared to be the “daughter of a ‘White Princess’”; then he adds: “you
know, she was completely delusional.” The psychotherapist from the Ethno-clinical team
asked: “Why didn’t you think she was evoking a maternal reverie, instead of thinking
immediately about delusion?”. In all the group, there is a kind of curious reaction, the pro-
fessional answers: “I did not think this way, I was influenced by the fact that she was fol-
lowed by the psychiatric service, I took for granted her psychosis, I had just to confirm it.
Now that I think about it I feel sorry. Was, I probably mistaken?”.
After the meeting with the whole problem-determined system, we saw, for the first
time, the “black woman.” She was over-weight, watching at nothing, the hands over her
legs, with no expression. It was difficult to talk to her, but—feeling recognized and
accepted by the anthropologist that knew much about her region and told us all about it in

9
Pietro’s example.

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front of her—she allowed herself to become an “Igbo woman,” coming from the Igbo region
of what the English colonialism has called Nigeria; moreover, she told us to be Ogbanje,
daughter of a white deity from the water of the torrent nearby her village. In order to help
us reconstruct the story with her—story that we hypothesized not an edifying one but very
cruel—we introduced a cultural mediator, a man from a village next to hers, who was
working for us in Italy and talked to her sometimes in Igbo, sometimes in English, while
she was answering part in Igbo, part in English and part in Italian.
There has been a session in which the psychotherapist drew with pencil and paper what
she was thinking/seeing. “I see an elephant,” and the therapist drew an elephant: “the
name of the elephant is Kevin and Jonathan, my children,” and the therapist put the two
names on the drawing. For the first time,she started to cry. It was after this intervention
that she started to be more and more active in the psychiatric community, and after some
time, the Institution admitted Ogbanje to see her children. By now, most part of the Insti-
tutional services had disappeared from the scene of therapy, as often complaining the
inevitable lack of time.10 We continued to work on her memories till she became “able” to
see her children and her husband again in sessions with us. The rest is a long story, still
difficult.
Within our world, we use our name to designate ourselves, and we talk about ourselves
in first person, saying “I”; this belongs to our everyday ontology. It can be difficult for us to
understand a person who changes her name under different circumstances, like the black
woman we are speaking about. She presented herself with her traditional name when she
felt unwelcome in Europe—separated from her children and husband, judged legally
incompetent, over-medicated—and with her married name when the systemic interven-
tion managed to connect all the systems around her, and she began to see her husband
and children again, got a lawyer who took care of her interests, reducing her dosage of
medicines. When she used her traditional name, she felt fat and bald, when she starts to
live again, she loses weight and her hair grows: her body has an ontological framework;
her reality is not a social construct but the result of feelings and stories lived.
What we want to stress, about the case of “Ogbanje,” is how social services not coordi-
nated among each other but with a utilitarian common idea of what is going on, can main-
tain pathology going. How dangerous it is taking for granted the psychiatric diagnostic
domain and believing that if a person comes from psychiatry and talks in a strange lan-
guage, telling strange things, no matter who she is, she must be psychotic. Moreover, if
she appears obese, her talk is not fluid, the gaze is on the void—frequently because of med-
ication—if she is silent, she must be severely ill and dangerous for her children. We want
to underline how useful it is to respect and accept the story told, how curiosity to listen
with no judgment brings to recognition, how patience and no urgency to understand
allows for movement and evolution. This case demonstrates just how significant the con-
nection between bodies and social issues can be. The connection enacts forms of knowledge
and understanding; kinesthesia becomes the sensory feeling of clinicians as well, deter-
mining the reciprocal positioning; therapy becomes an increasingly relational practice of
resonance.
We stress in both examples the need for the clinician to tune into the story, open the
body to sensations and trust her/his feelings with passion and tenderness without the urge
to go somewhere in the session. “I could be you” should be a guiding prejudice.
Just as a writer becomes a kind of ethnographer or field observer, so should a therapist
consider not only the words of those who come to therapy, also their gestures, facial

10
Mental Health Services in Italy are working on emergencies and have very little time to meet among
professionals to speak about the cases they see in different settings. This urgency procedures often create
iatrogenic situations.

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BARBETTA AND TELFENER / 9
expressions, tone of voice, and other sounds. As in the cinema of neorealism, the way of
grasping feelings from the long shot, a temporary stop of the action, is based on the posi-
tioning of a body within a context. The subject is the social context where bodies are
embedded, where the event is going on within the scene in that very moment. The domi-
nant facial expressions (Guattari, 1992) of a violent man, of an old woman who lives in the
countryside, of a powerful manager who is used to ruling others, of a battered middle-class
woman, of a child in the midst of a war, all have their nuances. There are differences both
within each category—not all middle-class battered women have exactly the same expres-
sion, although there is certainly some common ground—and among the different groups.
It is easy, for example—to distinguish the facial expression of a Sicilian migrant in Ger-
many from that of a manager involved with the mafia.
We don’t deal with body parts but with the whole body’s sequence of interactions where
any position is just a shot of photography followed by another shot, in an ongoing progres-
sion of interchanges. Out of the corner of their eyes, observers, when acting, can see some-
thing different that emerges from their actions11 (enaction). The interactive setting is
enhanced, the therapist dances with clients and all the significant others that constitute
the problem-determined system. The scene is not made up of characters; it is made up of
sequences, what Bateson has brought back from Bali when working with Margareth
Mead, a sequence of photographic shots (1942). Systemic therapists work with sequences:
battered-women, psychiatric-patients-who-are-tied-to-the-ward-bed, Veterans-returning-
from-war, people-tortured-in-Libya, children-separated-from-their-families-at-the-Mexi-
can-border,poor-families-who-lost-children-kidnapped-for-organ-extraction, bored-house-
wives, bourgeois-marriages, spoilt-children, sibling-rivalry, and other sequences coming
from the present time, the Anthropocene era of the Earth, where marginality shouts.12
The photographer, Eugene Richards, in a 2018 exhibition at the International Center of
Photography in New York, shows how the “camera as a tool” can grasp: “. . . social advo-
cacy, exploring complicate subjects such as poverty, racism, emergency medicine, drug
addiction, disease, the American family, aging, the effect of the war and terrorism. . .”
(Barnes & Zugazagoitia, 2017). In one of the most challenging images taken at a Hospital
in Denver, Colorado (Doctor after loss of patient, 1987), one can feel the doctor’s despera-
tion at the death of a patient: open white coat, one hand on his head, his body standing up
helplessly, his face obscured by sadness, and discomfort. One immediately realizes that
the patient was poor, a victim of the private Colorado healthcare system which does not
provide adequate equipment to Medicaid hospitals.

EPISTEMOLOGY AND ONTOLOGY AS COMPLEMENTARY STANCES

We should stop thinking in the usual track, unsettling what we think we know in favor of what
we have not jet imagined. (Eduardo Viveiros de Castro)
In present times we tend not to separate ontology from epistemology; we prefer to observe
the link between the two. If epistemology consists in the analysis of the premises present

11
The element that fascinated Bateson was the gesture. We could define the gesture as a relationship
between different organs: a slap or a caress designate two different kind of relationship between the inter-
nal part of the hand and the cheek, and when you learn to the cheek of someone else, as a theater student,
your teacher says: “Come on, do not hesitate! In this very moment you are nothing but the slap”.
12
We know that patients tied to the bed of a psychiatric unit and veterans tortured by terrorists can
bring the same trauma even though the first one is under treatment in a mental health institution and the
other remains within a context of war or criminality. This is the reason why Franco Basaglia and Franca
Ongaro (Basaglia & Ongaro, 1975) defined closing patients in psychiatric hospitals “crimes of peace”.

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in the field, ontology consists in the core of each person dancing together with the others.
Ontology and epistemology are not two separate experiences. The connection between the
two domains obliges therapists to stay within the relationship, here and now, using a per-
sonal style: listening instead of interpreting, being careful of their resonance, feeling ten-
derness, being there.
The “ontological turn” is a methodological proposal based on anthropological and ethno-
graphic description methods, a figure/ground reversal in which the practice of ethnogra-
phy becomes the ground (Wagner, 1981). Within systemic practice, the issue is not what
the real nature of the world is. We are interested in creating the conditions whereby the
world outside is observed as a multiverse reality, with its own terms of engagement. It
means that there are social ontologies: moralistic communities where a woman has to
watch the way she dresses; oppressive institutions where a child can be psychologically
abused; big companies where workers are forced to contribute to pollution under the
threat of losing their job; criminal societies and terrorists who buy weapons from “regular”
arms factories; criminal families (mafia) where loyalty is necessary to maintain appear-
ances of normality; refugees who do not receive asylum in Europe, even though they come
from camps and war. How can such realities be considered linguistic “constructions”?
We know that therapy requires intuition and we also know that intuition requires a lot
of practice, that is the reason why we ask students to enter sessions since the beginning of
their training. It is a matter of staying within the session, of exploring the “timing” (Bos-
colo & Bertrando, 1993), proposing different connections, learning to ramble and wander
with the others, showing that our expertise is not diagnostic but sometimes literary, artis-
tic, vernacular, or theatrical. We call it therapeutic perspectivism, the art of dealing with
different points of view. Systemic perspectivism moves people to exchange actions, dis-
cussing on differences without disqualifying each other; it has links with art production,
project creation, politics, scholarship, investigation, medical practice, traveling, landscape
architecture, and so on. Passion is not just turning out products, it is ethics, solidarity,
tenderness, care, honesty, and not damaging others.
Can this be viewed as a linguistic construction? Is this a discourse we are all dealing
with, or are we seeing the pragmatic effects of certain discursive practices on reality out
there, as in Foucault (2008)? Historical and social ontologies help therapists to take a posi-
tion even with regard to themselves. Therapists need to take sides through being aware of
the categories they adopt. As systemic ethno-clinical therapists we can listen to the stories
directly from asylum seekers, we can touch the wounds on their bodies caused by beatings,
shootings, and torture (Barbetta, Finco, & Rossi, 2018). As professionals, should we avoid
these social and political issues? Do we have to bow to the institutional mandate of making
bodies docile? Is this our mandate, too? We do not think so: in general, and particularly
during these hard times of escape from freedom (Fromm, 1941). We claim that, as thera-
pists, we should change our attitude toward detachment, as Foucault proposes (1977): we
need to take a position, take sides with the people who attend psychotherapy. Boscolo and
Cecchin at first talked about “neutrality” (Selvini, Boscolo, Cecchin, & Prata, 1980a), the
capacity not to take sides and not to adopt a member point of view; they then changed to
“curiosity” as an attitude of the clinician in order not to buy the hypothesis of the system.
We are developing further the concept of curiosity: 1. recognizing the social aspect in
which the client and the significant others are involved in; 2. remaining faithful to an evo-
lutive stance, to the possibility of the ongoing evolution, even in desperate situations. We
dance with the others being faithful to the possibility of change, which occurs within the
relational context. Boscolo used to say that therapy is nothing less and nothing more than
a therapeutic relationship, but he had his own superb style of staying within a relation-
ship. Therapy is not just a dialogical practice, and dealing with bodies is by no means easy.

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BARBETTA AND TELFENER / 11
If bodies are not just medical or sexualized, if they are not docile bodies, then therapists
need to learn their own style, which is not a simple matter.
Systemic therapy introduces tenderness in the encounter with the other. Tenderness
should be transmitted in a certain way: therapy is neither an antagonistic13 practice, nor
an authoritarian one, because antagonism and authoritarianism seem to be two sides of
the same coin. Tenderness suggests some techniques, which are part of the Milan group’s
training. These are the same we adopt in our practice: act in order to increase the number
of choices (von Foerster, 1984); do not fall in love with your own hypothesis (Cecchin,
1987); ask circular and reflexive questions to maintain complexity and enhance possibili-
ties; avoid any instructional practice; always look out for possible unintended outcomes
(Telfener, 2011).

THE MILAN APPROACH, WHAT HAS CHANGED

Labour well the Minute Particulars, attend to the Little-ones:

And those who are in misery cannot remain so long
If we do but our duty: labour well the teeming Earth"
(William Blake, Jerusalem 55:51; Erdman 205)
Hypothesizing, circularity, and curiosity are the three points of reference of the Milan
approach that remain unchanged. They were the only three technical aspects that the
approach has suggested, all the effort has been in thinking systemically and complex.
Nowadays, we feel we have embodied systemic epistemology. We need to deal with new
psychopathologies and institutional dynamics.
We still share the idea that pathological systems are stuck more than “ill” and for this
reason are admirable, since they find incredible capabilities to cope with life, which is
always changing. We don’t concentrate on the observed system but still take into considera-
tion the observing system (von Foerster, 1984) which implies the active participation of the
clinician to what happens in therapy. We are very careful not to share the same point of
view of the problem-determined system—all the people who share the same vision of the
problem—and are very careful never to collude with the dominant ideas, in order to intro-
duce dissent and differences. In a world where clients tend to enter in contact with different
health care agencies, what emerges is a common and shared point of view which becomes
iatrogenic, since it reifies the same processes and the same vision of the system. As Milano,
we pay great attention to the dynamics that risk to maintain the system stable.
What is new in the Milan approach is a needed different attention to discrimination,
poverty, social issues, and human rights. We are dealing with social issues such as
marginalization, that is, what we systemic call out of order, and what the psychiatric dis-
course calls disorder. Our curiosity focuses on the social aspects that create discrimination
and pathology, we are curious about the link between the institutional violation of human
rights and new forms of pathology. We do not engage in macro politics; the political
aspects of our interventions deal with the “minutes particular” (Bateson, 1972) that
emerge within the therapeutic process. At the macro level, we find injustice, harassment,
violence in the social domain, it is important for us not to remain at this level even though
we share the blame. Within the minutes particular we try to make feelings emerge and
create together lines of flight (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980) which often change the body

13
Antagonism colludes with different kinds of criminality, cruelty, harassment; it is the filthy face of
power.

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posture. In the first example, we made of the “fasting girl” we can see how the small ges-
ture of the therapist of touching the gastric nose tube changed the atmosphere, transform-
ing the body posture of everyone in the session.
It is important to remember that the personal history of the clinician enters heavily into
the therapeutic process and there are moments in our life and themes that make us tem-
porarily vulnerable and incapable in dealing with some difficult issues.

CONCLUSIONS
There is an interplay between ethics and aesthetics and a space for arts and humanities
can be opened up: like art, therapy has to deal with singularities. Rather than being an
experience guided by probability—like medicine, which is mainly guided by statistical
probability—psychotherapy deals with the “here and now” emergence, minute by minute.
This concerns style and quality, rather than quantity. What Pasolini and Deleuze called
“free indirect style” in literature, and “free subjective image” in movie making, were
artists approached their characters’ language alongside their facial and body movements
(Deleuze, 1986; Pasolini, 1988): slang, dialect, accent, and body language were the real
material writers and moviemakers worked with. In Pasolini’s view, style was a matter of
the distance or proximity between writer and character: a distance of one step was ideal.
A systemic therapist in a similar fashion, should aim to create a tender and affective rela-
tionship with clients, only one step away.
In this period of war, violence, and tyranny, systemic therapists are called upon to take
care of perpetrators as well as the persecuted; they are equally required to take care of
individuals and families in a consumerist society. The issue is taking the people we work
with seriously and not dominating them; considering the relationship as something with
an ontological truth: it exists, it should not be taken for granted, it may hide harassment,
dishonesty, psychological abuse. We need to create practices that can change hidden grief
into joy and appreciation. This perturbation is not just linguistic, it is a matter of changing
our realities with tenderness and bodily awareness.
The Milan Approach claims that the main symptoms of these times are social symp-
toms. We do not agree with the mainstream idea of reducing everything to the brain and
to language; we prefer to signify units of movement, studying intercorporeal social/politi-
cal life. Our main aim is to develop the capacity to deal with affections within relation-
ships, organized by premises, that emerge within the dynamics of the social world.
Historical and social ontology deals with continuously changing symptoms linked to con-
tinuous changes in the social landscape we live in. We live in the bodies we inhabit.

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Contemp Fam Ther (2013) 35:349–363
DOI 10.1007/s10591-013-9267-1

ORIGINAL PAPER

Development of Family Therapy and Systemic Therapy

in Germany

Rüdiger Retzlaff

Published online: 16 April 2013

Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

Abstract The roots of systemic therapy in Germany date back to the sixties. Systemic
therapy is one of the most widely applied forms of psychotherapy and counseling in
Germany. The majority of therapists and counselors in child guidance centers, couples
therapy counseling centers and youth protective services have been trained in systemic
therapy. A high number of clinical psychologists, social workers and medical doctors have
received training in this model of therapy. In the beginning, multigenerational, experien-
tial, as well as structural-strategic and Milan systemic approaches were popular. Today, the
post-modern systems concepts, solution-oriented and narrative approaches and self-orga-
nization theory appear to be predominant. Some centers provide research and training in
behavioral and psychodynamic family and couples therapy. However, systemic approaches
are clearly leading the field with over 10,000 people who have received systemic training
and about 150 training institutes across the country. The critical attitude shared by many
leading figures towards empirical research has limited its success in university programs.
In addition, training is usually provided in the form of post-graduate courses rather than at
academic institutions. Currently, three journals and one online-journal publish articles on
various systemic topics. Many publishing houses have a series of books on systemic
therapy and one publishing house specializes exclusively on systems oriented books. In
2008, systemic therapy gained recognition as an evidence-based treatment. Four years
later, the appropriate authorities have not initiated the process of assessing it as a treatment
paid for by public health insurances. In consequence, systemic therapy is not available on a
large scale in the public outpatient psychotherapy system. Some additional remarks are
provided on the history and current situation of systemic therapy in Austria and
Switzerland.

Keywords Family therapy
Systemic therapy
Germany
History

R. Retzlaff (&)
Director of the Clinic of Marital and Family Therapy, Institute for Collaborative Psychosomatic
Research and Family Therapy, Heidelberg University Hospital, Bergheimer Str. 54, 69115 Heidelberg,
Germany
e-mail: Ruediger_Retzlaff@med.uni-heidelberg.de
URL: http://www.med.uni-heidelberg.de/psycho/pfam; http://www.ruediger-retzlaff.de

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350 Contemp Fam Ther (2013) 35:349–363

A Brief Overview of the History of Family Therapy in Germany

The 1960s

Similar to the USA, psychoanalysts played an important role in the development of family
therapy in Germany. Many people hold the view that it was introduced in our country by
Helm Stierlin. Yet in 1963, Horst-Eberhard Richter, who worked at Gießen University
Hospital, published a book on family therapy from a psychoanalytical perspective (Richter
1963). He did not become interested in systems concepts and did not pursue family therapy
to a larger extent (Richter 1970). Rather, Richter became involved in group therapy and the
application of ideas from psychotherapy to political affairs and social politics. In 1965,
Eckhard Sperling, a child and adolescent psychiatrist from Göttingen University Hospital
presented his work on the family dynamic of adolescent anorexic patients for the first time
(Sperling 1965). He later founded a psychodynamic-systemic integrative model (Sperling
et al. 1982).
Experiential approaches to family therapy were quite compatible to views held by
many humanistic therapists. In the late 1960s, Gerd Müller, who originally had done
research on behavioral parent training programs at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry
in Munich, became interested in family therapy (Müller and Moskau 1983). Together
with Gaby Müller, a Canadian social worker raised in a Czech-German-Jewish family in
Prague, who had survived a number of concentration camps as a young girl, he started to
invite Virginia Satir and the Duhls for workshops. He founded the first formal family
therapy training institute in 1974 in Germany in Munich, which stills exists today.
Around the same time, Martin Kirschenbaum and Carol Gammar started to teach family
therapy in various cities across the country and continued to do so for many years. Maria
Bosch, who had received her family therapy training from Satir, Kempler and
McClendon, also invited Satir and the Duhls for conferences and workshops. She
founded her highly successful family therapy institute in Weinheim in 1974 (Bosch
1983). However, in 1985 she withdrew and started to teach at her new training center in
Weinheim.

The 1970s

In the early seventies, a group of behavior therapists—Ludwig Schindler, Kurt Hahlweg,

and Dirk Revenstorf—conducted research on behavioral couple therapy at the Max Planck
Institute of Psychiatry in Munich (Schindler et al. 1980). Hahlweg had spent a year at the
Department of Psychology and Neuropsychiatric Institute in Los Angeles and worked until
his retirement at the University of Braunschweig. There he conducted research on
behavioral couple therapy, expressed emotion, and behavioral family therapy approaches
in the treatment of severe mental disorders such as psychosis and bipolar disorder (Ha-
hlweg et al. 2000).
The key event for the development of systemic family therapy in Germany was the
foundation of the Department of Psychoanalysis and Family Therapy by Helm Stierlin in
1974. He had accepted the position as the first and to this day only university chair of
family therapy in the entire country. Since 1957, Stierlin had worked in the USA, mostly in
Chestnut Lodge/Maryland. After an interlude from 1963 to 1965 in Switzerland and study
periods in New Zealand and Australia, Helm Stierlin became a member of the National
Institute of Mental Health, where he worked together with Lyman Wynne and Margaret

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Singer. He was invited to Heidelberg by psychoanalysts, but differentiated quickly by

quoting in his introductory lecture at the University of Heidelberg Haley’s work on his
understanding of psychoanalysis (Duss-von-Werdt 1991; Stierlin 2001).
Stierlin attracted a group of highly talented young people. All of them were to become
the leading group of systemic therapists in the country in the subsequent years. Throughout
the years, a number of brilliant and successful people worked in his department for some
time. Characteristic for Stierlin’s style of leadership was the encouragement of individu-
ality of his team members. His first team consisted of the late Ingeborg Rücker-Emden-
Jonasch, Fritz Simon, Gunthard Weber, and Michael Wirsching. Wirsching later moved to
Gießen, and then to University Medical School in Freiburg where he now teaches as
professor of psychosomatic medicine. For a long time, he was the only disciple of Stierlin
who held a regular chair as university professor. Gunther Schmidt and Bernhard Trenkle,
two former students of Stierlin, joined his group and were later replaced by Arnold Retzer,
Andrea Ebbecke-Nohlen and Jochen Schweitzer. Schweitzer had been an intern for a year
at the Cambridge Guidance Center at Harvard Medical School. All members of the
Department of Psychoanalytical Basic Research and Family Therapy published exten-
sively, particularly on family therapy for clients with anorexia nervosa, psychosis, and
family dynamics in general (Stierlin 1978; Stierlin and Simon 1984). Stierlin attracted high
numbers of students to his lectures. Additionally, he and his wife Satuila Stierlin invited
most of the leading family therapists from the USA and Europe to Heidelberg. Originally
starting as psychoanalysts, under the influence of the Milan group, Stierlin and his
department shifted away from psychodynamic concepts to Milan style systemic therapy. In
1983, Stierlin and his associates founded a private training institute, Internationale
Gesellschaft für systemische Therapie (i.e. IGST: International Society of Systemic
Therapy). This institute started a highly successful postgraduate training in systemic
therapy and a series of large international conferences. For many years, members of the
Milan group and Boscolo and Cecchin in particular came to Heidelberg to teach at the
IGST. While the IGST was a key to disseminating systemic therapy in Germany, training
activities withdrew energy from university matters. As a result, Stierlin invested less time
on internal university politics, which was to have serious consequences for the future of his
department.
In subsequent years, Gunther Schmidt and Bernhard Trenkle, who had briefly been
affiliated with the department of Helm Stierlin, became interested in the work of Milton H.
Erickson and founded their own Ericksonian training institutes. ‘‘Hypnosystemic therapy’’
is an integration of systemic therapy, hypnotherapy and self-organization theory. It has
become a mainstream form of systemic therapy in Germany, which is also widely applied
for use with individuals in therapy (Schmidt 2004). While systemic therapy in Germany
has been shaped by postmodern approaches, Trenkle remains, apart from the author, the
trainer with the strongest affiliation to strategic concepts of Haley and Madanes. Another
influential hypnosystemic therapist, with a strong experiential touch, is Nemetschek
(2006). He trained with Satir and M. H. Erickson and later founded a training institute in
Munich in 1978.
One of the first trainees at the Weinheim Institute was Hans Jellouschek, who founded
with his late wife the Family Treatment Center at the Center for Psychotherapy in Stuttgart.
As a close friend of Rosmarie Welter-Enderlin, he developed a humanistic-systemic form
of couple therapy and published more than sixteen extremely popular books on couple
therapy. This made him the most influential couple therapist in the country (Jellouschek
2005; Welter-Enderlin and Jellouschek 2002).

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The 1980s

In the 1980s, during the aftermath of what is called the ‘‘second cybernetics’’, the systemic
field moved away from structural-strategic, multigenerational, and experiential approaches.
In accordance with ideas by Dell, Maturana, and Varela. Nicolas Luhmann presented a
sociological systems theory in 1984 which continues to be highly influential in Germany.
Distinguishing between the three classes of autopoietic systems: organismic life, con-
sciousness, and communication, which are intertwined yet independent, Luhmann main-
tained that systems can neither be predicted nor be influenced in a directive, linear way.
In 1985, Manfred Vogt who had trained in Heidelberg, started to offer solution-oriented
therapy at his training institute in Bremen. In the subsequent years, Steve de Shazer, was
regularly invited as a trainer by him, well as by Gunther Schmidt in Heidelberg.
In 1987, Marie-Luise Conen founded her training Institute in West-Berlin. She had
studied at Temple in Philadelphia and participated, together with the author of this article
in the last training with Boscolo and Cecchin at the IGST. Over time, she invited a large
number of American, British, and Italian pioneers to teach at her institute. Based in
structural and Milan systemic approaches, she published a large number of articles and
books on families in poverty, systemic therapy within residential centers for children and
adolescents, and home-based family therapy. Conen has to be credited for first establishing
home-based family therapy in Berlin. After changes in social legislation throughout the
country, it is now routinely offered by most Child Guidance Centers and by many youth
protective services (Conen 2002).

The 1990s

When Stierlin retired in 1991, there were plans to close his department and integrate it into
the Psychiatric and the Psychosomatic University Hospital. At this time, Jochen Schweitzer
moved to the Department of Medical Psychology at Heidelberg University Hospital. In the
department of family therapy, he was succeeded by the author, who continued to run the
outpatient clinic and courses in systemic family therapy from 1995 forward. Since that
year, the Clinic of Marital and Family Therapy has provided systemic therapy, especially
for families with medical concerns (Retzlaff 2010). The author received post-graduate
training in MFT at the institute of Kirschenbaum, with supervision from the MRI group.
He also had training at the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic, as well as from Boscolo
and Cecchin. He has worked with Hans Jellouschek and Roland Weber in Stuttgart and
trained with Fritz Simon, Gunther Schmidt, Gunthard Weber, Ingeborg Rücker-Embden-
Jonasch, Welter Enderlin, and Hunter Beaumont. After intensive lobbying by Gunthard
Weber and others, in an unprecedented move, the state secretary of science and education
insisted that a new professor of family therapy must be hired, overruling the autonomy of
the university for the first time in decades. He strongly urged the university medical school
to maintain the department of family therapy and to appoint a family therapist as the chair.
In 1998, Cierpka, the successor of Sperling at Göttingen University Hospital, who had had
been trained as a psychoanalyst in Ulm, became the new chair of the renamed department,
with the long name, ‘‘Institute for Collaborative Research and Family Therapy’’. Cierpka
became known by the German version of the family assessment device, a handbook of
family diagnostics (Cierpka et al. 2005) and for his work on family therapy with eating
disorders. Cierpka and the author share an interest in family systems medicine and together
published a textbook on this topic (Cierpka et al. 2001). In the subsequent years, the
department has been highly successful with a series of high-profile, highly visible

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programs such as the German version of Second Step, parent-infant therapy according to
the model developed by Papousek, and an early intervention program for high risk families
with infants. In 2000, Astrid Riehl-Emde, a psychodynamic and systemic couple therapist
who had worked with Jörg Willi in Zurich, joined the department and started projects on
marital therapy with elderly couples.
In 1992, Kurt Ludewig founded a systemic institute in Hamburg and published one of
the first textbooks on systemic therapy. Two years later in 1994, Jürgen Kriz, from the
University of Osnabrück, applied post-Milan ideas and Rogerian concepts to the practice of
systemic therapy. All of these changes resulted in a strong bias towards cognitive and
verbal phenomena in systemic therapy. It also brought extreme skepticism towards any
form of empirical research, which was considered to be an epistemological error. This view
is still held by the majority of leaders in systemic therapy in the country and as a con-
sequence, it makes it rather difficult to succeed in the academic field.
In 1996, von Schlippe from the University of Osnabrück and Schweitzer, published a
successful textbook on systemic therapy, which is virtually read by anyone interested in
systemic therapy. This textbook received 10 editions and has been translated into a variety
of languages (von Schlippe and Schweitzer 2012). It describes all systemic approaches,
particularly solution-oriented therapy, narrative approaches and self-organization theory.
Less credit is paid to more traditional family therapy approaches including structural-
strategic approaches which were considered to be old-fashioned, which means that a
generation of systemic therapists have been trained with comparatively little knowledge of
the more pragmatically oriented schools of systemic therapy. A second textbook on sys-
temic treatment of various disorders by the authors (Schweitzer and von Schlippe 2006)
received much praise and some criticism, as some systemic therapists consider it to be
inadequate to take a nomothetic position as a systemic therapist.
Realizing that non-directive play therapy is more effective if the family is involved in
treatment, Schmidtchen (1999) from Hamburg developed an integration of Rogerian and
systemic family therapy.
As in the USA in the 1990s, feminist issues in family therapy were widely discussed and
two members of the IGST (Rücker-Embden-Jonasch and Ebbecke-Nohlen 1992) addressed
the related issues in writing and teaching.
In the German Democratic Republic, Scholz had started to work with families in the
Dresden Hospital of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry even before the unification of the two
German states. His interest intensified after the family therapy conference in Hungaria in
1988 where he met Minuchin, Stierlin, Weber and many others. Together with Eia Asen
from London, he pioneered multi-family groups for young anorexic patients, and this
format is now widely used, including countries such as Sweden and Norway.
For more than a decade, clinical psychologists had pushed for a better status in the
public health care system. Two publications were highly important for the destiny of
systemic therapy and its position in the health care system. In a report to the Federal
Ministry of Health Affairs, published by Klaus Grawe together with psychodynamic
researchers, behavior therapy, psychodynamic therapy and psychoanalysis were recom-
mended as evidence-based treatments but systemic therapy was not (Meyer et al. 1991). In
a more concise meta-analysis, Grawe et al. (1994) concluded there were not enough studies
supporting systemic family therapy as an evidenced-based treatment, stating instead that
there were promising data and the status might be different if more studies were available.
Grawe et al. were also highly critical about the evidence base of psychodynamic therapy
and psychoanalysis, much more critical than in the 1991 government report in which
Grawe had co-authored.

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In an attempt to gain recognition as an evidence-based treatment, Schiepek (1999)

published a somewhat imprecise report on randomized trials on systemic therapy. This
report was submitted by the German Society for Systemic Therapy and Family Therapy
(i.e. DGSF: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Systemische Therapie und Familientherapie) and the
Systemic Society (i.e. SG: Systemische Gesellschaft) to the Federal Scientific Advisory
Board (i.e. WBP: Wissenschaftlicher Beirat Psychotherapie). Any form of psychotherapy
which is not part of the recognized treatments need approval by the WBP, before the Board
of Health Care Providers (i.e. GBA: Gemeinsamer Bundesausschuss) can even consider if
they will start a second, independent rigorous assessment. To the dismay of many systemic
therapists, this move was rejected by the WBP because of an insufficient data base.
Subsequently, all forms of family therapy were banned (and still are) from reimbursement
from the health insurance system of state and city officials (Beihilfe) and in the training
regulations of psychiatrists, child and adolescent psychiatrists and doctors of psychoso-
matic medicine. Only behavior and psychodynamic therapies and psychoanalysis were
considered a valid form of psychotherapy. In contrast, systemic therapy was not included.
Schiepek, who had for some time been intrigued by the paradigm of synergetics, started to
use this paradigm for psychotherapy process research. He now teaches at the University of
Krems.
After the cognitive turnaround of systemic therapy and the fashionable neutral stance
required of therapists, many of the multigenerational aspects, emotional relatedness and
meaning had been lost. In this context, Weber (1993) published a book on family con-
stellations, developed by Bert Hellinger, which immediately became very popular. Hel-
linger, a former Catholic missionary to South Africa, who had been ousted from
psychoanalytic training in Vienna because of his unorthodox views, received training in
group therapy and Ericksonian therapy. He combined some ideas from Boszormenyi-Nagy
with a particular form of family sculptures, and his own theoretical systems ‘‘orders of
love’’. Family constellations address the inner representation of family systems, within a
large group context, in a format which can be regarded as a form of healing rituals.
Hellinger never worked with families and did not use systemic concepts. Nonetheless, it
was called systemic and quickly turned into a mass movement, with many group therapists,
humanistic therapists and people with a health care license started to conduct large group
workshops across the country. The book was translated into many languages (Hellinger
et al. 1998) and Gunthard Weber conducted workshops around the world. Like in the 1970s
when Satir was criticized that her large group workshops on family sculpting were dam-
aging to the reputation of family therapy, many systemic therapists were discontent with
family constellation work. Eventually, the DGSF and SG published at joint statement in
which they made clear that family constellations (as practiced by Hellinger) violated many
professional standards. Today, the movement has subsided, and family constellations are
regarded as a specific technique which can be used within a systems framework. Weber
and Schweitzer are currently making an attempt to probe its effectiveness as a therapeutic
tool in a study on treatment effects of family constellations.

After 2000

For a couple of years in the late nineties, the IGST in Heidelberg was shaken by internal
conflicts between the younger and older members of the group, and many of the former
trainees were unpleasantly reminded of a painful divorce conflict between ‘‘parents’’. After
a stalemate that lasted several years, which crippled the productivity and creativity of its
members, the group split. Retzer soon founded his own institute, and the younger members

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Fischer, Gester, and Clement remained in the IGST. With support from Stierlin, Simon,
Schmidt, Weber, the late Rücker-Embden-Jonasch, Schweitzer and Ebbecke-Nohlen
founded the Helm Stierlin Institute (HSI) in Heidelberg, and later invited Nicolai, Kindl-
Beilfuss, Reinhard and the author to join the HSI, which continues to operate as a highly
visible, successful post-graduate training institute.
Another more recent trend is an increasing interest in children and adolescents in
systemic therapy. With the largely verbal and cognitive orientation of systemic therapy in
the 1980s and 1990s, children somehow vanished from popular textbooks, and their needs
were not adequately addressed in training. After a few critical articles on the neglected role
of children in systemic therapy, the author published a series of articles and initiated a
special curriculum of systemic therapy with children and adolescents. Therapists such as
Wilhelm Rotthaus, Manfred Vogt, and Therese Steiner have published numerous books on
systemic therapy with children. A textbook on this topic by the author has received five
editions within just 4 years (Retzlaff 2012).
In recent years, along with changes in social structures and parenting styles, similar to
many other countries, parental helplessness became an issue in Germany. von Schlippe
started to invite, teach and publish with Haim Omer, a Brazilian-born psychologist who
now teaches in Israel. His ideas about coaching of parents became rather popular among
German systemic therapists because of its non-authoritarian stance. Ironically, while the
work of Minuchin is largely ignored today, rather similar concepts have been re-introduced
by this approach (Omer and von Schlippe 2003).
Only gradually does the German society realize the challenge posed to the health care
system by migration and the high number of citizens who have migrated to Germany.
Currently, about 35 % percent of children and adolescents have parents who were not born
in the country. Consequently, the number of publications on culturally sensitive systemic
therapy is on the rise (von Wogau et al. 2004).
In 1985, Helm Stierlin visited and taught systemic therapy in China. The Chinese-
German Academy of Psychotherapy (Deutsche-Chinesische Akademie für Psychotherapie)
promoted regular trainings in systemic (and other forms of psychotherapy) and in the past
decades, a considerable number of systemic trainers volunteered to work in the Baltic
States, Poland, Slowenia, and other countries in Eastern Europe.
Couple and marital therapists in Germany tend to be an integration of systemic,
humanistic, and some psychodynamic and behavioral elements. Only recently, emotion-
ally-focused therapy is becoming more known in Germany, and Volker Thomas from the
University of Iowa has carried out the first training workshops at the Department of
Collaborative Research and Family Therapy in Heidelberg in 2010 and 2011.
In 2004, after joining AFTA and participating in the Miami conference on children in
family therapy, the author brought home the idea that there are indeed a sufficient number
of randomized controlled trials (RCT) on systemic therapy to convince the WBP to rec-
ognize it as an evidence-based treatment. Together with Stefan Beher, a talented young
master’s degree student, and Jochen Schweitzer, he founded a working group which was
joined by Kirsten von Sydow, formerly from the University of Hamburg, who had com-
piled a similar number of RCT on the effectiveness of systemic therapy, in order to get
recognized as an evidence-based treatment approach. In the beginning, the DGSF and SG
were highly reluctant to pursue another attempt for scientific recognition. As a matter of
fact, at a 2004 conference in Potsdam, the SG had even discussed dropping any attempt to
gain scientific recognition as meaningless. Then, an official of the internal revenues office
requested payment of 17 % value added tax from systemic training institutes, on the basis
that they did not provide education in a form of scientifically recognized psychotherapy

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(which is tax exempt) and rapidly, the professional organizations supported the working
group. The group prepared a series of articles and scientific reports to the Board of
Scientific Examiners in Berlin (von Sydow et al. 2006, 2007a, b, 2010). Kirsten von Sydow
was invited to present the evidence-base as a deputy member of the board, without formal
right to vote. In the meantime, the author continued to find additional RCT with support
from Beher, Schweitzer and a number of doctoral students. The author’s idea to search in
Chinese databases with the help of Zhao Xudong from Tongji University in Shanghai and
Joyce Ma from Hong Kong, and Chinese doctoral students working at our departments was
a breakthrough. Eventually, in December 2008, the president of the WBP declared sys-
temic therapy to be an evidence-based treatment. Ironically, this was the same person who
had wanted to close Stierlin’s department in Heidelberg. In the past 4 years, the author has
continued to work and publish on the evidence-base of systemic therapy in order to meet
the requirements of the German health insurance systems (Retzlaff 2009a, b). von Sydow
now teaches at the Psychological University in Berlin (PHB).

The Situation Today

Family therapy approaches flourish in a few other university hospitals. In Freiburg,

Wirsching continued to work with anorexia nervosa and psychosomatics, was involved in
family systems medicine, and published an edited textbook on marital and family therapy.
For the Working Group on Scientific Medicine (i.e. AWMF: Arbeitsgemeinschaft Wis-
senschaftliche Medizin), he also published the guidelines for couples and family therapy
(Scheib and Wirsching 2004). In Göttingen, Günther Reich, who had worked with Cierpka,
continues to treat and study families with eating disorders. Friedebert Kröger started to
work at Aachen University Hospital and now directs a hospital in Schwäbisch Hall. Pre-
viously, he had worked with Werner Herzog in Heidelberg at the Psychosomatic Unit of
the Department of Internal Medicine on family therapy with anorexia nervosa and the
circumplex model. With Askan Hendrischke, and Susanne Altmeyer, Kröger started to
invite Susan McDaniel and published a number of books on family systems medicine
(Kröger et al. 2000).
In the United States, a number of well-researched, manualized treatments such as Brief
Strategic Family Therapy, Functional Family Therapy, Multidimensional Family Therapy
(MDFT), Multisystemic Therapy (MST) have been used extensively. In an international,
multi-centered study in Belgium, France, Netherlands and in Berlin/Germany, MDFT was
implemented (Tossmann et al. 2010) and a number of groups started to use MST, espe-
cially in Switzerland (Fürstenau and Rhiner 2010). The majority of those employed by
youth protective services and drug counseling centers already have some training in sys-
temic or other forms of therapy. At this point, these ‘‘trademark therapies’’ were not or are
only partially superior to treatment as usual. Government authorities seem to be reluctant
to pay for the expensive training and license. Also, as systemic therapy cannot legally be
practiced in outpatient settings, the advance of any of these approaches is limited by the
lack of recognition by the board of health insurers.
Renaissance of therapy supported by video-feedback, which can be found in parent-
infant therapy, is another more recent trend. This usually has a strong systemic foundation,
as well as in approaches such as Marte meo which were originally developed for families
with autistic children. However, it is now commonly used in a variety of settings such as
child guidance centers (Bünder et al. 2009).

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In recent years, a number of systemic therapists have started to teach at Universities of

Applied Science where social workers and educational specialists are being trained. Simon
and von Schlippe held a chair on Family Business at the University Witten-Herdecke, and
Jochen Schweitzer has been working on the organizational theory of medical hospitals. In
addition to teaching hypnosystemic therapy, Gunther Schmidt has worked in organiza-
tional consultation. He has also founded a flourishing private hospital, near Heidelberg
systelios, which is based on his hypnosystemic approach.

Systemic Therapy in Austria and Switzerland

In Austria, starting in the 1970s, Ludwig Reiter worked and taught at the renown Institute
for Marriage and the Family in Vienna. In Switzerland, Gottlieb Guntern, who had spent a
sabbatical at the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic, started to train family therapists in
the late 1970s. In 1967, Duss-von-Werdt founded the Institute of Marriage and the Family
in Zürich, which was later headed by Jörg Willi. Willi was a psychiatrist from Burghölzli
Hospital near Zurich who had developed his ecologically based marital therapy (Stierlin
and Duss-von-Werdt 1985). Rosmarie Welter-Enderlin headed the highly influential
Meilen Center. She had lived in the USA and trained with Haley and Patterson and
maintained close contact to the American Academy of Family Therapy and to her friend
Evan Imber-Black. She also promoted a humanistic-systemic couple therapy with a strong
narrative foundation. Part of the success of her team in Meilen was a series of regularly
held conferences to address specific aspects of systemic therapy. With Ulrike Borst as the
new head, the center has now moved to Zurich and cooperates with the institute which
Willi had founded. Guy Bodenmann at the University of Zurich has been researching and
teaching behavioral couple therapy for the past few years. In Bern, Liechti and Zbinden
provide comprehensive systemic training for therapists.

Journals and Publishers

There are three German language journals on systemic therapy—Familiendynamik (Family

Dynamics), founded by Stierlin and Duss-von-Werdt, Zeitschrift für systemische Therapie
(Journal of Systemic Therapy) founded by Hargens, and Kontext (context), the journal of
the DGSF. System Familie (family system), founded by Rosmarie Welter-Enderlin, was
discontinued, but Psychotherapie im Dialog (dialogues on psychotherapy) discusses in
every issue various topics from the perspective of different psychotherapy approaches,
including systemic therapy. In 2005, Tom Levold, from the Psychoanalytic-systemic
Training Institute in Cologne started systemmagazin, an online-journal of systemic therapy
which is used by many therapists.
Most large scientific publishing houses have series on systemic therapy. An influential
publisher is Carl Auer Verlag in Heidelberg, originally founded by members of the IGST,
which is now owned by Weber, Simon and Trenkle, which has a large number of titles on
systemic therapy. Most scientific publishing houses such as Hogrefe, Jungermann, Klett-
Cotta, Kohlhammer, Springer, Thieme, Vandenhoek and Ruprecht have a series of books on
systemic therapy as well. Two textbooks on systemic therapy have been highly significant
and have shaped the way systemic therapy is practiced and taught (Retzlaff 2012; von
Schlippe and Schweitzer 2012). With so many fine books available in German, and a
reluctance of many publishing houses to translate books because of the costs involved, many

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systems therapists as well as post-graduate training programs rely more on German lan-
guage books than on books in English, which were previously used in the 1970s and 1980s.

Conferences

In 1994, Bernhard Trenkle brought the Evolution of Psychotherapy Conference to Ham-

burg, and a large number of therapists had a first-hand chance to meet many of the
international pioneers of family therapy. Trenkle organized other important conferences on
family therapy—for instance, one held in Karlsruhe with pioneers of the field, (1988) one
in Heidelberg (2004) with Minuchin, in cooperation with the Department of Family
Therapy. A popular conference is Trenkle’s ‘‘Kindertagung’’, a conference on hypno-
therapy and systemic therapy with children held every 4 years in Heidelberg.
Both DGSF and SG conduct annual conferences, with 300–1200 and 300–600 partic-
ipants, respectively. Every 4 years, Trenkle organizes a conference in Heidelberg on
hypnotherapeutic and systemic approaches for children and adolescents, with about 1,200
participants. The biannual systemic research conference organized at Heidelberg Univer-
sity Hospital by Schweitzer attracts about 180–300 people. In 2004, Ludewig organized the
EFTA-conference in Berlin, which was visited by way over 5,000 participants.

Systemic and Family Therapy Within the Current Medical and Social Services
Systems

In 2005, approximately 10,000 therapists had received a systemic training certificate. In

different German states, between 16.5 and 37 % of licensed psychotherapists have also
been trained as systemic therapists, and 55.9 % of counselors at child guidance centers are
systemic family therapists (von Sydow et al. 2007a, b).
Counseling services to adults including couples counseling are provided by agencies run
by charity organizations of the churches or other welfare organizations child guidance
work and child protective services are provided in counseling centers run by the cities or by
charity organizations, which are regulated by the Federal Children and Youth Protective
Services Act. They are funded by the administration of cities and counties. The vast
majority of people working in child guidance centers and the youth protective agencies
have obtained systemic training.
Health care services—including psychotherapy—for people with and without a job are
being paid for by public health insurances and regulated by federal law. State employees
and people with a higher incomes can opt for private health care organizations which are
regulated to a lesser extent by federal law. When clinical psychologists gained access to the
public health insurance system in 1999, after an initiative by the Federal Minister of Public
Health who happened to be a professor of psychology from Heidelberg, only psychody-
namic therapy, psychoanalysis and behavior therapy were considered to be evidence-based
treatments, but systemic therapy was not included on that list. Today, therapists may treat
patients with behavior therapy or psychodynamic therapy and involve relatives, but they
must not call it systemic or family therapy. Systemic (family) therapy is not covered by
health insurances, but it can be provided in inpatient settings.
To legally practice any form of psychotherapy, a state license either as an MD, as
clinical psychologist/psychotherapist or as a child and adolescent psychotherapist is
required. To regulate the thriving market of alternative medicine, there is another, legally

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Contemp Fam Ther (2013) 35:349–363 359

inferior license as a ‘‘health practitioner’’, many of whom offer some form of systemic
counseling. Medical doctors can specialize as a psychiatrist, child and adolescent psy-
chiatrist or as a doctor in psychotherapeutic medicine, with 240 h of theory and four cases
treated with family therapy. This training clearly is insufficient to learn how to treat
families. Psychologists, after a bachelors and master’s degree, receive 600 h of courses in
theory and 2,800 h of clinical practice. In addition, they will have about 8–12 h theory in
family and couple therapy. This also applies to training as a child and adolescent psy-
chotherapist, which is also open to various professions with a master’s degree who work
with children (i.e. educational specialists, etc.).

Training in Systemic Therapy

Universities generally provide only very limited courses on systemic therapy, usually as
part of a master degree program in clinical psychology. After the ‘‘Bologna reform’’ of
university education, some of the Universities of Applied Sciences have started to offer
programs in systemic social work, systemic supervision and the like, but these do not
qualify participants for the practice of systemic therapy. While systemic therapy is highly
popular with many practitioners, it has not entered into the university programs to a large
extent. Most training programs in Germany have a strong lenience towards post-con-
structivist rather that pragmatic, empirically-based approaches of systems oriented therapy
which means that systemic training and practice differs to a considerable extent from
countries such as the USA.
Training in systemic therapy is provided by about 150 private post-graduate institutes.
After 3 years training in systemic therapy or in systemic counseling, participants receive a
specialized certificate. Training consists of the following requirements: 300 h of theoretical
teaching, 150 h of supervision, casework, and peer groups, 150 h of systemic self-expe-
rience, written presentation of cases and a colloquium or a written presentation.
Training for specialization as a psychiatrist, child and adolescent psychiatrist or medical
psychotherapist requires about 240 h of psychotherapy theory. Only recently, some state
boards of medical examiners accept training in systemic therapy as valid hours. Kröger,
together with Herzog, founded a 100 h training program in family therapy for medical
doctors, which is based in Heidelberg.
In three out of 16 states of the Federal Republic of Germany, psychologists and child
and adolescent psychologists with a state license can obtain a formal recognition as a
‘‘systemic therapist’’, which is currently not yet honored by health insurances.
Although behavior therapists such as Revenstorf, Hahlweg, and Schindler worked and
researched behavioral couple therapy, there is no formal training and no professional
organizational group of behavioral family therapists in Germany. Following Richter,
psychodynamic family therapists from Gießen, Göttingen, Munich, and Heidelberg offer
training in psychodynamic family therapy in five training centers.

Accreditation Standards for Training Programs in Family Therapy

In order to get recognition, programs must be a member of one of the two systemic
organization (DGSF or SG). Training must last a minimum of 3 years with at least two
certified trainers/supervisors. The training must be continually evaluated in the process.
Maintenance of standards of training is assessed at regular intervals by external evaluation.

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Specialized Qualification and Certification for Family/Systemic Therapy

Practitioners

A number of specialized qualifications are available, all of which require supervised case
and peer group work as well as a varying amount of theoretical training: systemic therapy
with children (150 h of theory), systemic coach (250 h of theory), systemic mediation
(160 h of theory), systemic supervisor (250 h of theory). To qualify as a certified teacher of
systemic therapy, systemic therapy with children, systemic supervision or systemic
coaching, 5 years of practice and teaching and 5 years of experience and teaching are
required. A number of institutes offer 2–3 year training programs in systemic therapy with
couples, with 200 h of supervision and case work; however, no formal certificate is
offered. The criteria seem somewhat outdated, and in contrast to Anglo-American training
institutes, live supervision as well as observation of senior teachers doing case work is not
nearly as established as in other countries.

Relationship of Family Versus Couple/Marital Therapy

A 2 year long integrative psychoanalytic family therapy training exists, which includes a
considerable amount of systemic and structural elements. Professional organizations of
behavior therapists insist that all forms of pragmatic, evidence-based family therapy are
not systemic therapy but a form of behavior therapy. However, behavioral training insti-
tutes hardly offer any training in any form of marital or family therapy. A large number of
psychotherapists with a state license in behavior therapy—and a smaller number with a
license in psychodynamic therapy—have received additional training at one of the sys-
temic training institutes and will integrate both in their practical work (which is not legal).
Some people believe that sooner or later, a form of general psychotherapy will be taught
and practiced, which would include all forms of evidence-based psychotherapy, including
systemic therapy, but this scenario seems to be rather far away.

Professional Organizations for Family/Systemic Therapists

The German Society of Systemic and Family Therapy (DGSF, www.dgsf.org) is the largest
organization, with about 4,500 individual members—psychologists, social workers, med-
ical doctors; about 100 training centers are institutional members. Traditionally, the DGSF
has an integrative-systemic orientation, which is reflected in the journal ‘‘Kontext’’ for
members of the DGSF. About 25 special interest groups (such as ‘‘systemic work in
psychiatric institutions’’) reflect the diversity of the members. The Systemic Society (i.e.
SG: Systemische Gesellschaft, www.systemische-gesellschaft.de) has about 900 individual
and 41 training centers as institutional members. Traditionally, it has a strong post-Milan
constructivist orientation. Both DGSF and SG cooperate on many levels. The Federal
Association Psychoanalytical Family Therapy (i.e. BVVP: Bundesverband Psychoanalyt-
ische Familientherapie, www.bvppf.de) has about 240 individual members and five
training centers as institutional members.
There is an Austrian Society for Systemic Therapy and Research (i.e. ÖAS;
www.oeas.at) and a Swiss Union for Systemic Therapy and Counseling (i.e. Systemis,
www.systemis.ch).

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Contemp Fam Ther (2013) 35:349–363 361

Future Directions for Family Therapy Practice, Training, and Recognition

in Germany

Future developments will depend on the larger sociopolitical influences. Generally, change
in the health care and the university system is exceedingly slow. In the 5 years since
systemic therapy has been recognized as an evidence-based treatment, the board of health
care providers has contemplated if they will start with an independent evaluation process.
Evaluation of systemic therapy with adults will take 3–5 years; only afterwards, a formal
evaluation of systemic therapy with children and adolescents could commence, which
would take an additional 3–5 years.
Within the next 6–10 years, universities might start a new type of training in both
clinical psychology and psychotherapy on a model similar to training in medicine, which
would lead directly towards a state license. This would be followed by 2–3 years of special
psychotherapy training offered at private and state schools of professional psychotherapy.
Possibly, this training could be based on some sort of an integrative psychotherapy model.
Another scenario is that, in case of a rapid decline of the social and health care system in
the aftermath of the current financial crises, psychotherapy might be dropped to a large
extent from the list of treatments paid for by public health insurance, which would be
detrimental to the practice and training of all forms of psychotherapy.

Conclusion

Systemic therapy has a long and diverse history in Germany. In contrast to the high number
of systemic therapists and post-graduate training institutes, the position within the system
of public health care remains dissatisfying. With the increasing pressure towards effective
treatments, large public health insurances will favor approaches which are resource-ori-
ented, and provide short-term outpatient therapy instead of expensive inpatient treatment.
Systemic practitioners and the systemic professional organizations should be in an
excellent position to meet this challenge by offering various forms of systemic services, in
order make a valuable contribution to the German health care system.

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DOI 10.1007/s10591-013-9245-7

ORIGINAL PAPER

Systemic Family Therapy in Greece: Polyphony

and Diversity

Eleftheria Tseliou

Published online: 1 March 2013

 Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

Abstract The paper aims at presenting the state of the art regarding systemic/family
therapy in Greece, in relation to practice, professional and accreditation issues and training.
It is argued that systemic/family therapy in Greece constitutes a lively and diverse terrain
with roots in the 1960s and a rapid dissemination of the approach following the mid 1980s.
The field’s development in Greece is out-sketched by means of ‘data’ collected from a
variety of sources, like web sites of associations and training centers, published articles and
informal and semi-structured interviews conducted with seminal figures. First, a concise
historical overview of the birth of systemic/family therapy is presented in relation to the
wider socio-political context and the attempt for the reform of the psychiatric system in
Greece during the 1980s. Second, a brief sketch of the existing associations as well as of
the contexts where systemic/family therapy is practiced is outlined in relation to issues
regarding accreditation and statutory regulations. Third, a non-exhaustive list of currently
existing training programs is reviewed in respect of axis, like their content and structure,
accreditation issues, entry requirements, etc. The paper concludes with inferences
regarding the existing state of the art including future potential directions, whilst hinting to
research ventures, which could enrich our understanding of both the history and the
potential of the field in the Greek context.

Keywords (4–6) systemic family therapy
Greece
Historical overview
Training

Professional and accreditation issues

Introduction

My initial response to the invitation to write about systemic/family therapy in Greece was a
mixture of excitement and fear. I have been lucky as I had the chance to meet and work
together with seminal figures regarding the history of the field in Greece. Nevertheless, the
E. Tseliou (&)
Department of Early Childhood Education, University of Thessaly,
Argonafton & Filellinon str., 38 221 Volos, Greece
e-mail: tseliou@uth.gr

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224 Contemp Fam Ther (2013) 35:223–243

venture of attempting to narrate the story of past and present developments, somehow,
seemed daunting. I decided to accept by approaching the task as both a challenge and also a
chance for a journey back in time, reflecting on my own meeting with the terrain of
systemic/family therapy practice in Greece, upon my arrival from the UK, following my
studies there in the mid 1990s.
At that time, I became gradually acquainted with what seemed as a colourful texture
with contrasts and different shadings. The polyphony of the field, originally established in
Greece in the early 1960s, was expressed across several, diverse, independent, but in
certain cases also interconnected, seminal settings. These were mostly located in the two
larger Greek cities, Athens (South) and Thessaloniki (North) but also in other areas, like
for example in the island of Crete (South). This polyphony seemed to entail variable
preferences in relation to epistemological perspectives, theoretical underpinnings and
respective choices in relation both to clinical practice, training methodologies and the
handling of issues regarding professional accreditation. Nearly two decades later, what
seems different is perhaps only the magnitude of the terrain, as systemic/family therapy in
Greece appears to have spread significantly. This was possibly the aftermath of the multi-
year operation of many training institutes and the development of many generations of
systemic family therapists. Systemic/family therapy is currently flourishing in Greece.
Despite the uncontestable liveliness of the field, however, and like the rest of psycho-
therapeutic approaches in Greece, systemic/family therapy practice is still struggling with
issues regarding professional accreditation.
In this paper, I will attempt to draw a sketch of the current state of the art by locating
issues regarding practice settings, training trends and professional/accreditation issues in
the context of the historical development of the field as well as of psychological/psychiatric
practices overall. Up to date, sparse relevant accounts do exist (Avdi 2011; Haritos-
Fatouros and Hatzigeleki 1999; Kaftantzi 2000; Papadioti-Athanasiou and Softas-Nall
2006; Softas-Nall 2003, 2008). However, no previous comprehensive report simulta-
neously addressing history, training and professional issues, is available.
The existing accounts constitute valuable testimonies of both the history and the state of
the art of the field. Some focus on presentations of certain settings, thus inevitably leading
to lack of information in respect of others (Softas-Nall 2003, 2008) or entail a partial
account due to their different focus (Avdi 2011). Others seem unclear in respect of the
adopted methodology regarding either the process of collecting information or the process
of presentation (Haritos-Fatouros and Hatzigeleki 1999; Kaftantzi 2000; Papadioti-A-
thanasiou and Softas-Nall 2006). The task is, indeed, neither easy nor straightforward due
to the multitude of the existing clinical or training contexts and the lack of any official data.
This makes the project of collecting the necessary information in a methodologically
systematic way particularly demanding. Without claiming to have faced the challenge
satisfactory, I will attempt a systematic synthesis of both existing and newly gathered
information. In doing so, I will make explicit my ‘method’ of both collecting and pro-
cessing information, nevertheless without claiming of presenting neither an exhaustive nor
a ‘faultless’ or an unbiased account.

A Note on Method

‘Data’ regarding the information presented in this paper were collected from October untill
December 2012. A multiplicity of sources was used including, published relevant texts or
reports, web sites of associations and training institutes, informal contacts (by e-mail,

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Contemp Fam Ther (2013) 35:223–243 225

telephone or in person) with key informants, e.g., program directors of training institutes.
Furthermore, five semi-structured interviews with key figures of the field were additionally
conducted via skype and recorded upon permission.1 The interviews explored the inter-
viewees’ accounts in relation to the historical roots and the development of the field, the
relationship between systemic/family therapy and mental health services, issues regarding
training and professional accreditation as well as their vision considering the future of the
field.
All ‘data’ were thematically processed with the aim to come up with concise and as
accurate as possible accounts, as regards the constitution, aims and membership criteria of
associations and the constitution, content and structure, accreditation issues and entry
requirement criteria of the training programs. The process entailed a careful search and
processing of the available information in relation to certain themes/categories that I had
devised beforehand. For example, in respect of the existing associations I decided to focus
my presentation on the date of constitution, the membership criteria, the number of
members and their aims/scope. I then searched for their constitutional acts and decided to
present the relevant information by staying as close as possible to their original texts. As
regards information on the existing training centers and respective programs, I devised a
method of cross-checking. First, I decided upon the themes/categories, then I gathered
information available on their web sites and finally I contacted the settings asking them to
verify or update both the registered information and my account.
Finally, in order to narrate the historical development of the field including the rela-
tionship of systemic/family therapy with medical and social services as well as issues
regarding professional accreditation, I mostly relied on published texts. I then cross-
checked certain information with information derived from informal contacts and the
interviews. The latter provided me with further inspiring narratives, which I have mostly
chosen to use as resources for eloquently told metaphors or sayings, some of which I
decided to include verbatim in certain parts of this paper.

Systemic Family Therapy in Greece

A Beginning: ‘The Rhizome of the Vassiliou Family’

Lynn Hoffman speaks about the rhizome, I think this is what it was, a little seed, a
rhizome you did not know where an how it would spread…
(K. Polychroni, interview 3, December 21, 2012)
Historically, the roots of the field of systemic family therapy in Greece have been
reported as interweaved with the foundation of a private setting in Athens, the Athenian
Institute of Anthropos (A.I.A.) by George and Vasso Vassiliou, in 1963 (Haritos-Fatouros
and Hatzigeleki 1999; Kaftantzi 1996; Katakis 2004; Papadioti-Athanasiou and Softas-Nall
2006; Protopsalti-Polychroni and Gournas 2004). According to a frequently narrated story
(Papadioti-Athanasiou and Softas-Nall 2006; Softas-Nall 2003; Vassiliou 1990, 1997), in
1
My special thanks to Fany Triantafillou and Frosso Moureli, founders of the first state Community Care
Mental Health Centre operating exclusively with systemic principles in Thessaloniki, Greece, Sofia Hat-
zigeleki, systemic therapist and trainer, member of the first state committee for the delineation of criteria
regarding professional accreditation issues, Kyriaki Polychroni, president of EFTA and senior clinical
associate of the Athenian Institute of Anthropos and Mina Polemi-Todoulou, president of ETHOS, the
Hellenic Federation for Systemic and Family therapy.

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226 Contemp Fam Ther (2013) 35:223–243

the 1950s George and Vasso Vassiliou had the chance to meet and work with pioneers of
the field both at the Ackerman Institute and at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto,
like Virginia Satir, Milton Erickson, Nathan Ackerman, Don Jackson and Paul Watzla-
wick. In 1970, they founded the first training program in A.I.A. In Ng’s (2005) register of
the historical development of systemic family therapy across several countries, only Italy is
reported to have experienced such an early beginning, following Palazzoli’s return from
the States in the 1960s.
Until nearly the mid 1980s, the A.I.A., later on re-named as Athenian Center for the
Study of Anthropos, was the main setting, offering training, practising systemically ori-
ented group therapy and simultaneously experimenting with original research and theory
development considering the Greek family and its contemporary evolution from the tra-
ditional era towards modernity in relation to the wider cultural context (e.g., Vassiliou
1968; Vassiliou and Vassiliou 1973). Furthermore, a series of well-known symposia, the
Delphi symposia were organised by the Vassiliou and provided the space for an exchange
of ideas with pioneers of the field (Vassiliou 1997).
Overall, the A.I.A. epistemological and theoretical approach has been reported as
synthesizing a systemic perspective with a humanistic one, entailed in ancient Greek
philosophy (Kaftantzi 1996). It has also been termed as ‘dialectic-systemic… a multi-focal,
multi-level model of intervention’ (Protopsalti-Polychroni and Gournas 2004, p. 11), with
a preference for an emphasis on experiential, group processes (Polemi-Todoulou et al.
1998).
A great number of therapists ‘grew up’ in the context of the ‘Vassiliou extended family’
subsequently ‘spreading the seeds’ of the approach in various settings all over Greece.
Perhaps, just like the Greek family that they extensively studied, the ‘Vassiliou extended
family’ gradually gave its place to nuclear forms, with elements of differentiation but also
of interconnectedness in between them. Petros Polychronis and Kyriaki Protopsalti-Poly-
chroni, the current president of the European Family Therapy Association (EFTA), along
with colleagues have been leading figures in the development of A.I.A. onwards.

1980s: Differentiation, Expansion and ‘Reform’

It was an era of change…people wanted to do things, at that time psychiatric hos-

pitals were still asylums… (F. Triantafillou, interview 1, December 11, 2012)
The 1980s denoted an era of significant developments regarding systemic/family
therapy in Greece, along with important shifts considering the whole context of psychia-
tric/psychological practices. Until the 1980s, the latter were dominated by the institutional
psychiatric establishment (for a concise report see Avdi 2011. See also, Blue 1993 for an
insight from anthropology; Hatzaras 2010; Karastergiou et al. 2005). Nine state psychiatric
hospitals of an asylum type (Madianos 1999) existed along with nearly forty private ones
(Karastergiou et al. 2005), denoting the dominance of drug-based treatments. Psycho-
therapy was offered only on a private basis (Ierodiakonou 1983) and was kept marginal,
despite its emergence nearly two decades ago, like in the case of systemic family therapy
(Potamianos 2003).
As regards the wider context, the early and mid 1980s signified an era of socio-political
changes for Greece. In 1981, the country became a member of the European Union (EU)
and experienced a number of ‘urges’ for reforms so as to better fit the European context,
including the quest for reform of the psychiatric system. In 1982, the newly elected
government asked for financial support from the EU in order to proceed with the reform

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Contemp Fam Ther (2013) 35:223–243 227

(Hatzaras 2010) and in 1983 the Greek National Health System was established. In 1984,
the adoption of the European Council Regulation (815/84) signalled the beginning of an
effort to reform the existing psychiatric system towards the aims of decentralization and
the provision of de-institutionalized care. This was ‘translated’ into the attempt to establish
Community Centers for Mental Health and psychiatric departments in General hospitals
with the aim to facilitate prevention-oriented forms regarding the provision of mental
health care, basically community-located (Hatzaras 2010; Madianos 1999). Psychotherapy
and settings outside the psychiatric asylums were thus economically and ideologically
supported as alternatives toward progress and change in the overall context of an era,
whose main motto was ‘change and reform’ (Triantafillou 1996; see also Potamianos 2003
for an interesting analysis of the relationship between psychology/psychotherapy and the
Greek Left). However, the attempted shift was not without hardships, due to a number of
factors including the lack of resources in trained staff and facilities, or the ambivalence on
behalf of the Greek health professionals towards de-institutionalization (see Hatzaras 2010
for an extensive report). Unlike the rapid, almost violent transformation of the Greek
family from its traditional form to a modern/postmodern one (see Dragonas and Tseliou
2009 for an extensive account on the transformations of the Greek family), the move of the
psychiatric system from asylum forms towards de-institutionalization was very slow
(Haritos-Fatouros and Hatzigeleki 1999).
In this context, several settings of systemic/family therapy in Greece began to appear. In
1983, Charis Katakis, one of the first trainees in A.I.A. founded another private setting in
Athens, the Laboratory for the Study of Human Relations, and started creating her own
distinctive approach in the field, with contributions to training, research, theory and
practice both on a national and international level (e.g., Katakis 1976, 1990, 2004). She has
denoted her approach as an integrative one, in which ‘family-oriented group therapy with
individuals is the central axis’ (Katakis 2004, p. 6) (Katakis 1997; see also, Softas-Nall
2008 for an interview with Charis Katakis). In 1984, in Thessaloniki, Fany Triantafillou, a
psychoanalyst and Frosso Moureli a group analyst, undertook the task of organising a
Community Center for Mental Health, exclusively on the basis of a systemic perspective,
influenced by their meeting with systemic/family therapy in the context of their studies in
London, UK and their commitment to the ideal of community psychiatry (Triantafillou
1996). The setting pioneered the introduction of systemic/family therapy into the public
sector (Haritos-Fatouros and Hatzigeleki 1999) whereas throughout its operation, a series
of well-known key figures of the field, like Gianfranco Cecchin, Lynn Hoffman, Harlene
Anderson, etc. were invited as trainers and ‘mentors’. Starting with the first in 1990, the
Center’s team took the initiative to bring together the systemic/family therapists of the era
in the context of a series of Panhellenic Scientific Meetings for systemic/family therapy
and became one central, pioneering pole for the development of the field.
By 1990, systemic/family therapy was ‘instilled’ in the public sector, both in the mental
health services and in University contexts. Indicatively, one can register among the first
settings, the Community Center for Children’s Mental Health in Athens, which was the
first setting considering child psychiatry (Sigalas et al. 2012), the unit for couple and
family therapy at the University of Athens (Psychiatric clinic, Aiginition Hospital) founded
by Vlassis Tomaras and Valeria Pomini, which was the first university setting (see
Tomaras and Pomini 2004 for a very informative and interesting account of the challenges
entailed in the effort to apply systemic family therapy into public mental health services)
and many others, like for example, the Community Center of Mental Health of North-West
Sector in Thessaloniki and the introduction of systems thinking in a University setting in
Iraklion, Crete, by Nikos Paritsis (see also, Table 1).

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228 Contemp Fam Ther (2013) 35:223–243

Table 1 Systemic/family therapy in the public and private sector (up to 1995): the beginning
Setting

State Private

1985: Community Center for Mental Health (West 1963: Athenian Institute of Anthropos, Athens
Sector), Thessaloniki (F. Moureli, F. Triantafillou) (George and Vasso Vassiliou)
1985: Community Center for Mental Health (Central 1983: Laboratory for the Study of Human
Sector) Thessaloniki (T. Karastergiou and Relationships, Athens (Ch. Katakis)
S. Liappa)
1985: National Organization for Social Care 1984: Human Relations (C. Eystathiou,
(Th. Mousterakis and P. Polychronis) M. Tsagarakis, F. Ververidou
1987: Community Center for Children’s Mental 1986: Institute of Family Therapy, Athens
Health of National Foundation for Social Security, (Psychoanalytic orientation) (I. Tsegos)
Athens (D. Karagiannis)
1988: Community Center for Mental Health (North- 1991: Institute of Family Therapy, Thessaloniki
West Sector), Thessaloniki (F. Moureli) (S. Hatzigeleki, F. Moureli, A. Tsafos)
1988: University of Athens, Psychiatric Clinic, 1995: Center for the development of children, adults
Aiginition Hospital (V. Tomaras and V. Pomini) and the family, Iraklion, Crete (Batsalias,
Theodoraki)
1989: Psychiatric Hospital of Thessaloniki 1995: Institute of Systemic therapy, Ioannina
(Addictions) (Th. Andreadaki, G. Grigoriou: 1992) (Katsanou, Maragoudaki, Toli, Mouzas)
1989: Organization against drugs (OKANA)
(D. Sakkas)
1989: Peripheral University Hospital, Iraklion, Crete
(N. Paritsis)
1990: Center of Mental Health, Ioannina
(O. Mouzas)
1992: Psychiatric Hospital of Thessaloniki,
Thessaloniki (F. Moureli)
1994: Psychiatric Hospital, Family Medical Center,
Chania, Crete (A. Prokopiou and M. Digrintakis)
1994: Psychiatric Hospital of Attiki, Family therapy
unit (K. Charalambaki and F. Kotsidas)
1995: Community Center for Mental Health,
A’ University Psychiatric Clinic, Aristotle
University of Thessaloniki, (V. Kaftantzi)
1995: Psychiatric Hospital of Attiki, Detox Unit,
Department of family counseling and therapy
(Th. Balatsos)
The settings are presented in chronological order and the list is non-exhaustive. Information is derived from
Haritos-Fatouros and Hatzigeleki (1999) and Kaftantzi (2000)

1990s Onwards: Towards Becoming a ‘Revolutionary Establishment’?

the psychiatric establishment will change by the people who get trained in the
systemic approach…it will be eroded (F. Moureli, interview 4, December 23, 2012)
From 1990 onwards, the spread of systemic/family therapy was rapid all over Greece.
Kaftantzi (2000) presents a valuable testimony of the settings which were ‘contaminated’
by systemic/family therapy until 1997, where one can count nine private and twenty-six
public sector settings in Athens, Thessaloniki, Crete and smaller cities like Ioannina, Volos

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Contemp Fam Ther (2013) 35:223–243 229

and Patras. Furthermore, in their recording of settings where systemic/family therapy was
practiced in 1999, Haritos-Fatouros and Hatzigeleki (1999) argue that these include, both
institutional state settings (like e.g., psychiatric hospitals, general hospitals, university
clinics), non-institutional state settings (like, e.g. community centers for mental health) as
well as private settings. Based on these two reports, Table 1 presents a non-exhaustive,
indicative recording of key settings linked with the development of systemic/family
therapy in Greece both in the public and the private sector until 1995. Softas-Nall (2003)
report includes a slightly more updated register. Unfortunately, a current up-to-date survey,
which could register the current spread of settings, is still lacking and was beyond the
scope of this paper.
Despite the lack of official data, on an anecdotal level it is widely known that a great
number of professionals who have been and are being trained in systemic/family therapy, are
currently working both in the public and the private sector all over Greece. Despite the fact
that psychotherapy is still practiced mostly in private settings, systemic family therapy seems
to constitute an exception (Avdi 2011). In addition to psychiatric services, systemic/family
therapy ideas seem to have spread in fields like education and drug prevention services
(Polemi-Todoulou, interview 5, December 27, 2012). As regards University settings, one can
identify either seminars or elective courses in the context of undergraduate or postgraduate
studies in psychology (e.g., see Georgas 2006 for the program in Panteion University),
following earlier introductions, like, e.g. by Papadioti at the University of Ioannina or by
Tseliou at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. However, no graduate degree in psy-
chotherapy exists in University settings (Avdi 2011), including systemic/family therapy.
Currently, two Greek systemic/family therapy Journals are published. The first, Met-
alogos, published in Greek by the Systemic Association of North Greece recently cele-
brated its 10th anniversary, whereas the second, Systemic Thinking and Psychotherapy,
published both in Greek and in English, has just released its first issue on-line (http://www.
hestafta.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1&Itemid=101). Furthermore,
two publication series the one launched by Charis Katakis and the other by Violeta
Kaftantzi have significantly contributed to the ‘dissemination’ of the approach, by means
of publications of national and international landmark texts.
The spread of systemic/family therapy across different geographical locations and
contexts also signified a diversity in respect of theoretical preferences and epistemological
perspectives between the ‘Northern’ (Thessaloniki) and the ‘Southern’ (Athens) camp
(Triantafillou, 1990). For example, the first has been reported as retaining a closer affili-
ation with the Batesonian/systemic and later on constructivist tradition in the field
(Moureli, interview 4, December 23, 2012). The spread has also possibly signified attempts
for autonomy and differentiation within each ‘camp’ or even ‘rivalry’ both in between and
within different settings. Perhaps, this could be seen as suggested by the fact that Greece
was the only country ‘represented’ by three different articles in the Context special issue on
European Family Therapy (Vetere and Papadopoulos 2004) and five different associations
in the European Family Therapy Association (EFTA) until the recent formation of the
Hellenic Federation for the Systemic and Family therapy in Greece, in 2005.

Current Legislation Context and Professional Organizations

I believe the fight that ones gives to unite different pieces makes it possible for one to
change the level of description to a higher order one and makes it possible for new
qualities to emerge… (M. Polemi-Todoulou, inteview 5, December 27, 2012)

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230 Contemp Fam Ther (2013) 35:223–243

Despite the rapid growth and spread of systemic/family therapy and psychotherapy
overall, the move towards professionalization is a very recent story for Greece (Avdi
2011). For example, the state licence for independent practice was issued for psychology
graduates in 1993. As regards psychotherapy, up to date, no legislation regulating training
and practice has been put into force, despite a number of attempts. In 1998, the Ministry of
Health (Central Council for Health) appointed a committee with the task to propose actions
to be taken towards the professionalization of mental health practices. In 2000, an
appointed subcommittee undertook the task to come up with criteria considering training
courses and their accreditation as well as with a proposal regarding the registration of
individual psychotherapists. The committee filed its report in 2003 but it has never been
taken into account or put into effect, up-to-date (Avdi 2011; Hatzigeleki, inteview 2,
December 20, 2012).
Therefore, like in other European countries (e.g., Carr 2013), no state licence for
psychotherapists exists, meaning that anyone who simply holds a state licence to practice
as a psychologist or counselor can actually practice psychotherapy. Furthermore, there is
no official register of systemic/family therapy practitioners. Most choose to register either
with international or national associations, without anyone, however, holding a statutory
accreditation.
As regards professional associations, the Greek systemic family therapy community is
currently experiencing a recently (2005) successful attempt to form a National Association,
the Hellenic Federation for Systemic and Family therapy (ETHOS), following an urge to
do so by the EFTA and an early unsuccessful attempt in the beginning of the 1990s
(Hatzigeleki, inteview 2, December 20, 2012; Moureli, interview 4, December 23, 2012).
The first recorded interdisciplinary systemic association, the Hellenic Group of Systems,
though, is reported to have been founded in 1983 by M. Dekleris and N. Paritsis (Papadioti-
Athanasiou and Softas-Nall 2006). In the late 1990s, the field witnessed the birth of four
different associations, and later on, of a fifth one. Tables 2 and 3 present an overview of
details of the currently existing associations, which include information on the year of their
constitution, the criteria for membership and their aims. Some of the associations accept as
their members professionals trained in systemic/family therapy who hold a first degree in
mental health professions, whereas others further accept professionals holding degrees in
social and human sciences, provided they have additional studies in mental health. Two of
them further require the possession of state licence to practice as a mental health pro-
fessional. A careful study of the associations’ aims shows a variety of areas in which they
aim at intervening. These include the dissemination of systems thinking in areas like
research, training and therapy, with two of them actually providing training, the advance of
their members’ interests, the contribution towards the promotion of ethical standards
considering the practice of systemic/family therapy and the pursuing of the regulation of
accreditation issues, in two cases.

Training and Accreditation Issues in Context

Just like the rest of European countries, Greece witnessed a great expansion in respect of
training programmes in psychotherapy from the mid 1980s onwards (Avdi 2011; for an
overview considering each European country, see also Sultz and Hagspiel 2011). This wide
spread seems closely related with the establishment of psychology departments (Hat-
zigeleki, inteview 2, December 20, 2012; Polychroni, interview 3, December 21, 2012;
Potamianos 2003), which was significantly delayed for Greece, although the first psy-
chological laboratory was established in Athens in 1926 (Georgas 2006). Thus the first

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 Table 2 Overview of Greek associations for systemic/family therapy
Association details Criteria for full membership Members no

1998: Hellenic Association of Systemic Therapy (HELASYTH), Athens
http://www.elesyth.gr/
1998: Hellenic Systemic Thinking and Family Therapy Association
(HE.S.T.A.F.T.A.), Athens http://www.hestafta.org/
Degree in mental health sciences or in social/human sciences including 184
additional university studies in mental health
4 year training in systemic therapy (inclusive of theory, practice and
personal therapy)
1 year supervised professional practice
Degree in psychiatry, child psychiatry, psychology or social work 127
Training in systemic or family therapy (duration and type of
psychotherapeutic practice are taken into consideration in a non-
Contemp Fam Ther (2013) 35:223–243

1999: Systemic Association of North Greece (S.A.N.G.), Thessaloniki
http://www.systemicassociationng.gr/
2001: Society for Systems Therapy and Intervention in individuals,
families and larger systems (SO.SY.T.I.), Crete
http://www.sosyti.gr/index.html
2005: Hellenic Federation for Systemic and Family therapy (ETHOS),
Athens mpol-t@otenet.gr
Hellenic Society of family and marital therapy (H.S.E.M.T.), Athens
specified manner)
State licence to practice as a mental health professional 54
Complete training in systemic psychotherapy
At least 1 year of professional experience
To be either systemic therapists (training in systemic psychotherapy) with 31
state licence to practice as psychiatrists, doctors, psychologists, social
workers and nurses or systemic counselors, who are mental health
scientists or professionals
or
EFTA membership
To be a family therapy association whose members are either family or 5 associations
systemic therapists in accordance to the criteria specified by the 432 individual
Federation, i.e. a minimum of 3 years training in family therapy, members
including theory, clinical practice and supervision and personal therapy
(psychotherapy or family of origin work, i.e., use of genograms)
Lack of availability of information 36

Associations are presented in chronological order, starting with the oldest. Information is derived from their web sites, from informal telephone contacts and from their
constitutional acts available at their web sites, except for the cases of ETHOS (personal archive). I am also indebted to the president of ETHOS, Mina Polemi-Todoulou, who
provided me with information regarding the number of the members of the associations (data collection date: 28/4/2012)
231

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232 Contemp Fam Ther (2013) 35:223–243

Table 3 Overview of aims of Greek associations for systemic/family therapy

Aims Associations

HELASYTH HE.S.T.A.F.T.A. S.A.N.G. H.S.E.M.T. SO.SY.T.I. ETHOS

Issues regarding theory and

practice
To advance systems thinking/ X X X X
epistemology, theory and
(professional) practice
To advance research and training X X X X X
in systemic/family therapy
To cooperate/link with equivalent X X X X X
national and international
associations so as to promote
systemic therapy
To contribute to prevention and X
therapy in the mental health field
To provide training in systemic X X
therapy
To undertake the implementation X
of programmes funded by
national or international settings
Accreditation issues
To delineate criteria regarding the X
professional identity and
training of the systemic therapist
To cooperate with the Greek state X X
and/or with national and
international academic and
mental health settings/
associations towards the
formation of rules and
legislation considering
professional practice of
psychotherapy
To contribute towards the X X
professional accreditation of
systemic therapists
Advance of high standards in X
systemic therapy practice
To take care of the scientific X
identity of the systemic/family
therapy practitioner in respect of
statutory organizations in
Greece and abroad
Members’ interests
To advance cooperation between X X X X
members
To advance/defend members’ X
scientific/professional interests
To contribute to the liason X X
between systemic practitioners
in public and private settings
and to the liason between mental
health practitioners overall

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Contemp Fam Ther (2013) 35:223–243 233

Table 3 continued
Aims Associations

HELASYTH HE.S.T.A.F.T.A. S.A.N.G. H.S.E.M.T. SO.SY.T.I. ETHOS

To sensitize/disseminate X X X X X
knowledge to mental health
practitioners and to the public
regarding systemic/family
therapy and its potential for
prevention and therapy
Dissemination of the systemic X
approach in Greece
Ethics
To contribute towards the X X X
development of a code of ethics
Ensurance of conditions for free X
expression of members’ ideas
To represent and coordinate the X
existing national associations
providing respect of their
autonomy and differentiation
and to represent them in national
and international scientific and
professional organizations

Information is derived from the associations’ constitutional acts available at their web sites. An effort was made to preserve
the original statements as intact as possible. Data regarding H.S.M.E.T. was not available

department was established in 1987 in Crete, whereas today four in total exist (Potamianos
2003) accepting approximately 800 students per year (Georgas 2006). Given the lack of
postgraduate studies in psychotherapy and the existence of only two postgraduate programs
in Clinical Psychology (Avdi 2011), psychology departments constitute a ‘source’ for
potential trainee candidates.
Training programs in systemic/family therapy outnumber those in other approaches,
while the first training program in psychotherapy offered in Greece was the one by the
A.I.A. in 1970 (Avdi 2011). Table 4 present a non-exhaustive overview of training
Institutes, which offer full training programmes in systemic/family and couple therapy.
Most of the settings were founded in the late 1990s or early 2000s. Training programs in
couple therapy are a minority and their existence does not necessarily reflect what seems to
be the case for the USA, where marriage/couple and family therapy are considered dif-
ferent domains with rivalry existing between associations (Kaslow 2000). Training in
systemic/family therapy is offered almost exclusively on a private basis, like in any other
psychotherapeutic approach (Avdi 2011, Christodoulou 1997), with the fees ranging from
4000 to nearly 9,000 euros for a full course, usually lasting from 3 to 4 years with a total
amount of 400 up to 1,500 h. These include theory, clinical practice and personal devel-
opment, with variations as to whether the latter includes personal therapy or work with
genograms. Clinical practice includes indirect supervision in all cases and may also include
direct supervision and/or observation as a team member behind a one-way screen. In most
cases, the theoretical part includes seminars or workshops, with a varying emphasis on
experiential modes of teaching. Only two of the programmes require the owning of a state
licence to practice as a mental health professional in their entry requirements. In other
cases, professionals holding a degree in social or human sciences are also accepted,

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 Table 4 Overview of Greek training Institutes and training programmes in systemic/family therapy
234

Details of Institutes Setting fees Length, structure/content, staff Accreditation/affiliation Entry requirements Type of certificate

1963: Athenian Institute Private Up to 7 years European Family Therapy Professionals in mental Certificate of completion (no

123
of Anthropos, Fees not spec. Clinical part: supervision, Association (TIC full health statutory recognition)
akma@otenet.gr personal (group) therapy member) Degree in social/human
Athens, GR* Theoretical part: workshops sciences (introductory
(experiential approach) course)
Assignments for completion: non
specified
Group of trainers
1980: Open Private 4 years European Family Therapy Professionals in mental Certificate of completion (no
Psychotherapy Center 200e per month Clinical part: clinical practice Association (TIC full health, medicine (child), statutory recognition)
(Institute of Family (1,635 h), supervision (indirect) member) education
Therapy) (400 h), personal (group Affiliation: H.S.E.M.T.
www.opc.gr analytic) therapy (560 h) Compliance with criteria of:
Athens, Thessaloniki, Theoretical part: seminars, EFTA, EAP
Ioannina, GR* symposia (284 h)
Assignments for completion: 3
short essays, dissertation
Group of trainers, community
educational practice
1983: Laboratory for the Private 4 years (1,482 h) European Family Therapy Degree in psychology, Certificate in systemic and
study of Human 8800e Clinical part: practice Association (TIC full psychiatry, social work family therapy (no
Relations (observation behind one-way member) Degree in social sciences/ statutory recognition)
http://www. screen, participation as trainee National Organisation for humanities (provisional
ergastirio.eu/ therapist in didactic group Psychotherapy of Greece acceptance)
default.php?Lang=2 therapy) (674 h), supervision (member)
Athens, Thessaloniki, (200 h), personal (group) Affiliation with HELASYTH
GR* therapy (minimum 300 h)
Theoretical part: lectures,
seminars, workshops (308 h)
Assignments for completion: oral
and written presentations (case
study)
Group of trainers
Contemp Fam Ther (2013) 35:223–243
 Table 4 continued
Details of Institutes Setting fees Length, structure/content, staff Accreditation/affiliation Entry requirements Type of certificate

1992: University Public 4 years (640 h) European Family Therapy State license to practice as Certificate of completion (no
Research Institute of Fees not 2 two year independent circles Association (TIC full psychiatrist, child-psychiatrist, statutory recognition)
Mental Health specified Clinical part: practice (member of member) clinical psychologist
http://www.epipsi.gr/ therapeutic team (4 months), live Clinical experience
education/ (undertaking of 5 cases in co-therapy)
Synexizomeni_ and indirect supervision (80 h and 3
ekpaideysi/1_ marathons), personal development
3B.php group (40 h)
Athens, Greece Theoretical part: seminars, workshops
(128 h)
Assignments for completion: Clinical
Contemp Fam Ther (2013) 35:223–243

paper
Group of trainers
1993: Antistixi Private 5 years (160 h per year) European Family Therapy Mental health professionals Certificate of completion (no
http://www. 250e per month 2 two year independent programs Association (TIC full (psychiatrists, child statutory recognition)
onsite.com.gr/ Clinical part: co-therapy, indirect member) psychiatrists, psychologists,
antistixi2.gr/ supervision, personal (group) therapy Compliance with criteria of: social workers)
Athens, GR* (5 years) EFTA, HELASYTH, Personal therapy and professional
Theoretical part: seminars, workshops HESTAFTA, ETHOS experience in mental health
Assignments for completion: essays practice
(literature reviews, genogram analysis)
No of trainer(s): not specified
1994: Family Therapy Public 3 years (373 h) plus 2 years of European Family Therapy Mental health professionals
Unit, Psychiatric No fees supervision (100 h) Association (TIC full (psychiatrists, psychologists,
Hospital of Attiki* Clinical part: practice (case presentation, member) social workers, occupational
indirect supervision, observation as therapists, nurses)
member of therapeutic team behind one-
way screen), personal development
(genogram work)
Theoretical part: lectures, seminars,
workshops
Assignments for completion: essays
(literature reviews, genogram analysis)
235

123
 Table 4 continued
236

Details of Institutes Setting fees Length, structure/content, staff Accreditation/affiliation Entry requirements Type of certificate

1996: Society for 1996–2010: 4 years (700 h) European Family Therapy Doctors, psychologists, Certificate of completion

123
Systems therapy and University of 4 short independent educational circles Association (TIC full professionals in health, (diploma of systemic
Intervention Crete Clinical part: practice (undertaking of member) Affiliation with education/humanities therapist for doctors/
http://www.sosyti.gr/ 2010–: private cases, observation, indirect SO.SY.TI. psychologists, diploma of
education.html setting supervision), personal development systemic counselor) (no
Iraklion Crete, Athens, 5760e (genogram work, group therapy) statutory recognition)
Ioannina, GR* Theoretical part: lectures, seminars,
workshops
Assignments for completion: written and
oral exams, essays, clinical paper,
undertaking and completion of therapy
in one case
Group of trainers
1998: Systemic Center Private 4 years (over 1.400 h) European Family Therapy Mental health professionals Certificate of completion (no
for Training and Fees not spec. Clinical part: practice (observation of Association (TIC full statutory recognition)
Psychotherapy family therapy sessions behind one-way member)
http://skepsys.com.gr/ screen, participant observation in group Compliance with criteria of:
el/programmes/ therapy sessions, undertaking of cases in EFTA, HELASYTH,
specialization-in- family and group co-therapy, ETHOS, EAP
systemic-therapy/ membership in reflecting team format),
Athens, GR* direct and indirect supervision (incl.
350 h of supervised practice in a clinical
or equivalent, affiliate or non-affiliate
setting), personal therapy (individual or
group), interactional plenary meetings
between trainees, trainers and
supervisors
Theoretical part: seminars, experiential
workshops
Assignments for completion: 4 essays, 5
clinical papers, final group project
(presentation in plenary meeting)
Group of trainers
Contemp Fam Ther (2013) 35:223–243
 Table 4 continued
Details of Institutes Setting fees Length, structure/content, staff Accreditation/affiliation Entry requirements Type of certificate

2006: Institute of Private 4 years (800 h, direct contact with staff) European Family Therapy State licence to practice as mental Certificate of completion (no
Systemic Thinking and 8000e 1st year independent program: 200 h per Association (TIC full health professional statutory recognition)
Psychotherapya year member) (psychologists, psychiatrists,
http://www.systemic.gr/ Clinical part: live (350 h) and indirect Compliance with criteria of: social workers, psychiatric
Thessaloniki, GR* supervision (50 h), personal EFTA, S.A.N.G.) nurses)
development groups (60 h)
Theoretical part: lectures, seminars,
workshops (340 h)
Assignments for completion: 2 essays, 1
clinical paper
Group of trainers
Contemp Fam Ther (2013) 35:223–243

2006: Systemic Institute Private 3 years (450 h, direct contact with staff) Compliance with criteria of: Degree in psychosocial Certificate of attendance (no
of Thessaloniki 4040e 3 independent circles (150 h per year) IGST, S.A.N.G. profession statutory recognition)
http://www.systimiki.gr/ Clinical part: indirect supervision Two years of professional
Thessaloniki & Athens, Theoretical part: seminars experience
GR Assignments for completion: non specified Work setting with potential for
Single trainer the practice of family therapy
Previous experience in
psychotherapy or family
therapy
2009: Ergastirion of Private 4 seminar cycles (750 h, direct contact European Family Therapy Mental health professionals Certificate of completion (no
Systemic Thinking and 5000e with staff) Association (TIC associate statutory recognition)
Training Clinical part: practice (observation behind member)
http://www. one-way screen, direct and indirect
ergasystimicis.gr/ supervision, undertaking of cases in co-
home.asp therapy), personal development group/
Iraklion Grete, GR* therapy, participation in group
supervision of mental health
professionals
Theoretical part: seminars
Assignments for completion: essays or
case studies presentations
Single trainer
237

123
 Table 4 continued
238

Details of Institutes Setting fees Length, structure/content, staff Accreditation/affiliation Entry requirements Type of certificate

2010: Institute of Private 4 year (950 h) Compliance with criteria of: Professionals in mental health, social Certificate of completion (no

123
Systemic Approach 4800e 2 two year independent circles EFTA, S.A.N.G. work and education statutory recognition)
and Family Therapy Clinical part: direct and indirect
www.systimikiskepsi.gr supervision, personal
Thessaloniki, GR* development
Theoretical part: seminars,
workshops
Assignments for completion: case
study presentation
Group of trainers
Institute of Family Private 5 years (1.000 h) European Family Therapy Mental health professionals Certificate of completion (no
Consultation and Fees not spec. Independent circles of seminars Association (TIC associate statutory recognition)
Systemic Therarpy Clinical part: practice (member member)
of therapeutic team and indirect
http://www.systemic- supervision), personal therapy
institute.gr/ (group therapy, experiential
Chania Crete, GR groups)
Theoretical part: seminars,
workshops
Assignments for completion: non
specified
2011: Training and Private 4 years (1.440 h, direct contact European Family Therapy First degree in psychology, medicine, Certificate of completion (no
Research Institute for 8680e with staff plus independent Association (TIC associate social work and in humanities/ statutory recognition)
Systemic study) member) social sciences provided completion
Psychotherapy 2 two year levels Compliance with criteria of: of postgraduate course in mental
http://www. Clinical part: practice (370 h), HELASYTH, AFT (UK), health
logopsychis.gr/ supervision (live and indirect: EFTA, EAP
Default.aspx?tabid= 260 h), personal therapy (310 h
782&language=en-GB minimum)
Athens, GR* Theoretical part: lectures,
seminars, workshops (500 h)
Assignments for completion:
Short papers, clinical work
portfolio, group assignments,
dissertation
Group of trainers
Contemp Fam Ther (2013) 35:223–243
 Table 4 continued
Details of Institutes Setting fees Length, structure/content, staff Accreditation/affiliation Entry requirements Type of certificate

2004: Institute of
Systemic Therapy of
Thessaloniki
http://www.istt.gr
Thessaloniki, Athens,
GR*
2006: Systemic Institute
of Thessaloniki
Private 1 year (144 h) Clinical part:
1300e observation of therapy, indirect
supervision, self-knowledge
group process
Theoretical part: seminars
Assignments for completion:
presentation of two case studies
Single trainer
Private 1 year Clinical part: not specified
1400e Theoretical part: seminars
Not specified Mental health professionals Certificate of attendance (no
(psychiatrists, child-psychiatrists, statutory recognition)
psychologists, social workers)
Two years of professional experience
Work setting with potential for the
practice of couple therapy/
counseling
Not specified Mental health professionals Certificate of attendance (no
(psychiatrists, child-psychiatrists, statutory recognition)
Contemp Fam Ther (2013) 35:223–243

http://www.systimiki.gr/ Assignments for completion: psychologists, social workers)

Thessaloniki & Athens,
GR
2010: Institute of
Systemic Approach
and Family Therapy
www.systimikiskepsi.gr
Thessaloniki, GR*
Single trainer Two years of professional experience
Work setting with potential for the
practice of couple therapy/
counseling
Private 1 year (160 h) Not specified Professionals in mental health, social Certificate of completion (no
1200e Clinical part: direct and indirect work and education formal recognition)
supervision, personal
development
Theoretical part: seminars,
workshops
Assignments for completion:
presentation of case study
Single trainer

The Institutes are presented in chronological order (year of constitution of the Institute and not of the training program), starting with the oldest. Information was initially derived from their web sites,
except for the case of the Athenian Institute of Anthropos, where information is based on the interview with Kyriaki Polychroni (Senior clinical associate of the Institute, President of EFTA) and the
Family therapy unit, where information was derived by an e-mail and telephone communication with Katia Charalambaki (Course director). Subsequently, the Institutes were contacted (by e-mail or
telephone) and asked to verify or update the available information. Those that responded are marked with an asterisk (*)
a
Avdi (2011, p. 71) inaccurately presents the name of the particular Institute as ‘‘Institute of Systemic Thought and Therapy’’
239

123
240 Contemp Fam Ther (2013) 35:223–243

provided that they have further clinical experience or hold additional degrees in mental
health. The issues regarding the type of personal development required, the type of entry
requirements and the issuing of accreditation have constituted main poles of differentiation
and opposition among the training programs (M. Polemi-Todoulou, inteview 5, December
27, 2012).
No training program has statutory accreditation due to the overall lack of relevant
legislation. Therefore, in most cases the graduates are granted certificates of attendance,
whereas in few cases they are granted certificates in systemic/family therapy. Despite the
diversity due to the lack of common, state recognised criteria considering the content and
the structure of training programs, most of the Institutes choose to comply with the criteria
of the EFTA, i.e. 700–900 h inclusive of theory, clinical practice and personal develop-
ment [see, EFTA Guidelines (Minimum Training Standards) 2011]. Furthermore, most are
either full or associate members of the EFTA Champer of Training Institutes (TIC) and are
affiliated either with other European associations or with Greek systemic/family therapy
associations. In all cases, training secures eligibility to become member in a Greek asso-
ciation, for their graduates. Nevertheless, the situation is in flux and at times further
perplexed given also the existence of different backgrounds in respect of training between
the first and subsequent generations of systemic/family therapists, who are currently
involved in training. Most of the first do not have either a complete training in systemic/
family therapy or a training to become trainers in systemic/family therapy, whereas the
latter have usually completed their training abroad.

Epilogue: a Glimpse of the Future

…(systemic/family therapy in Greece)…a puzzle that is not yet completed…it is as if

we hold the pieces and we still do not know where to place them so as to come up
with the whole picture…(S. Hatzigeleki, interview 2, December 20, 2012)
In this paper I have attempted to narrate the story of the origins and the current state of
the art of systemic/family therapy in Greece, acknowledging though the constructionist
adherence that the narrator cannot be distinguished from the act of narrating (Gergen
1999).
Systemic/family therapy in Greece comes across as a lively, creative field, which seems
to have been connected with fore-front international developments, starting with the initial
‘Vassiliou’ era and extending to current practices which incorporate the latest develop-
ments in the field, like for example the attempt to apply the Finish Open Dialogue
Approach (Seikkula and Arnkil 2006) in a Community Care Mental Health Center, in
Volos (Tseliou 2009) or the use of a reflecting team format at the Department for psy-
chotherapy and support for the family of the Psychiatric Hospital in Thessaloniki, founded
in 2000 by Frosso Moureli. Futhermore, judging by the existing number of associations and
the number of their members, the current systemically influenced services and practitioners
and the respective training programs, perhaps we could speak of a case of ‘conquer’, as
regards systemic/family therapy in Greece.
In the current era of austerity, any attempt for a glimpse at the future in Greece is at least
challenging, if not hard to make. Systemic/family therapy may need to face a number of
additional challenges. First, it is difficult to judge the extent in which the existing
polyphony and epistemological and theoretical diversity will find a way towards joint
attempts for creativity in the context of the recently formed National Federation. Second,

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Contemp Fam Ther (2013) 35:223–243 241

the paradox of systemic/family therapy becoming an establishment ‘eroding the psychiatric

establishment’, (see also, Tseliou in press) is at least a worthwhile issue to explore. Finally,
the dilemmas considering professional development and accreditation issues will have to
be faced. Perhaps, the further pursuing of securing state, official accreditation for training
programs may prove beneficial for the practice of systemic/family therapy. On the other
hand, I do sympathize with expressed concerns (Hatzigeleki, interview 2, December 20,
2012; Polychroni, interview 3, December 21, 2012) that it can paradoxically lead to a
‘hunt’ for accreditation, with potentially detrimental effects considering the quality of
training.
In any case, the field might benefit from systematic research, which could both explore
and register its roots as well as the current state of art. Most importantly, it could explore
the ideas, wishes and concerns of systemic/family therapy practitioners, trainers and
trainees but also of family members/service users regarding the questions and dilemmas
posed, thus possibly making ‘a difference that will make a difference’ (Bateson 2000,
p. 459).

Acknowledgments I am indebted to a number of colleagues who were kind enough to provide me both
with support and with all sorts of necessary information within narrow time limits, while preparing this
paper. In particular I would like to acknowledge: Athena Androutsopoulou, Katia Charalambaki, Panagiotis
Chrysos, Sofia Hatzigeleki, Virginia Ioannidou, Violeta Kaftantzi, Dimitris Karagiannis, Elena Karkazi,
Leto Katakis, Popi Konsolaki, Frosso Moureli, Thalis Papadakis, Nikos Paritsis, Mina Polemi-Todoulou,
Kyriaki Polychroni, Fany Triantafillou, Manolis Tsagarakis, Andreas Tsonides.

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Left to right: William Fry, John
Weakland, Gregory Bateson, and
Jay Haley of the Palo Alto Group,
with a tape recorder used to
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70 doi:10.1162/GREY_a_00212