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Thinking About the Emotional Interaction of Therapist and Family

Article in Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy (ANZJFT) · March 1989
DOI: 10.1002/j.1467-8438.1989.tb00731.x

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 A.N.Z. J. Fam. Ther., 1989, Vol. 10, No.1, pp. 1-6

Thinking About the Emotional Interaction of

Therapist and Family
Carmel Flaskas*

The emotional interaction of therapist and family has been difficult to explore within the field of systemic family therapy. This paper looks
at ways of thinking about this process. As a starting point, 1 take some feelings I had with three families in the course of therapy. These
are used to illustratesome conceptsfrom analytic therapy whichaddress the emotional interaction oftherapistand family. The kind of theoretical
space and guidance offered within systemic family therapy is then explored, and it seems that the Milan frame gives some space for thinking
about the process but offers little guidance as to exactly how this might be done. This is a paper about practice, though it's primarily a
theoretical discussion. There is no aim of establishing a 'correct' way of understanding the emotional interaction of therapist and family.

INTRODUCTION
I'm interested in exploring the emotional interaction of
therapist and family in the process of family therapy. Along
with feelings and emotions in general, the emotional inter-
action of therapist and family has been difficult to explore
within the traditions of systemic family therapy. I like to
think that feelings and emotions are tentatively creeping
back onto the agenda of systemic family therapy. Some
papers presented at the national Women in Family Therapy
Meetings come to mind here (Kamsler and Webster, 1985;
Goding et al., 1987), and there has been a more regular
appearance of articles in this journal which give some space
to emotional issues (for example: Quadrio, 1986; Morawetz,
1987; Jackson, 1988).
But perhaps it's misleading to make a blanket statement
about the absence of emotions and feelings in the field of
systemic family therapy. It's probably more accurate to
identify the absence as being in the theory and discussion
of family therapy, because I find it hard to believe that
feelings could ever have been taken off our practice agendas.
Rather, I think it became harder to think about feelings
within the theory confines of systemic family therapy and
harder to talk about feelings in a milieu which privileges
techniques, miraculous interventions and the absolute virtues
of cybernetics and the new epistemology. Of course, the
reality of practice is that we negotiate emotions constantly,
both the family's and our own, and that this is sometimes
problematic and sometimes not. One way or the other,
though, the emotional interaction of therapist and family
is a rich aspect of therapy and deserves to be talked about
and theorised.
What I plan to do here, then, is to layout some ideas,
not as any kind of blue-print, but simply as one way of
talking and thinking about the emotional interaction of
therapist and family. I'll begin with some thoughts about
feelings and how we understand them, then tell you about
some feelings I had in the process of therapy with three
families. I want to make some sense of these feelings using
concepts from analytic (or psychodynamic) therapy, and
finally consider what kind of space systemic family therapy,
and the Milan framework in particular, allows for making
sense of the emotional interaction of therapist and family.
SOME THOUGHTS ON FEELINGS
Initially I wanted to call this paper "Feelings and Families".
There's no doubt that it's a snappier title, but a fundamental
ambiguity around the idea of feelings stopped me using it.
The ambiguity is this. It's very easy to think of feelings as
belonging to someone - my feelings, your feelings, her
feelings - to the point that feelings almost become sealed
off as a strictly intrapersonal issue. Family therapy is, of
course, much more interested in the inter-personal, and
indeed one of its main theoretical building blocks has been
an opposition to therapies which primarily concern
themselves with the intrapersonal or intra-psychic.
Perhaps partly for this reason, feelings have been written
out of systemic family therapy in a number of different
ways. Though structural and strategic models do not
preclude the acknowledgement of feelings, in both
frameworks feelings are primarily relegated to the status of
strategy. Minuchin, for example, allows the possibility of
using the family's feelings in the process of joining, as a
guide for assessment or in specific therapeutic techniques
such as enactment (see Minuchin, 1974). Within a strategic
'Carmel Flaskas works in a child and family counselling team at Canterbury
Community Health Centre and teaches social work at the University of
New South Wales (PO Box I, Kensington, NSW 2033).
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1988 National Women
and Family Therapy Meeting held in Orford, Tasmania.
Flaskas
framework, feelings again can be used as a guide to
assessment, as a tactic in interventions or in strategically re-
framing the family's dilemma. In both structural and
strategic models, behavioural sequences take theoretical
preference over emotional sequences, and Brian Cade
captures this distinction nicely when he writes of strategic
approaches:
Thus clear problem definition in terms of actual behaviour is
important, rather than using predicates such as 'he is naughty'
or 'I am depressed'. Questions such as "What exactly does he
do that you consider naughty?", or, "How does your feeling
of sadness affect your behaviour?" can encourage a more
detailed analysis (1987, page 41).
With the new epistemology, feelings scarcely get a look-
in, and can be actively censored if they're seen to be part
and parcel of the dreaded linear epistemology. In the Milan
framework, the therapist should orient to emotion more in
terms of how it's shown rather than how it's felt. This shift
is most clearly discussed in Paradox and Counter-Paradox,
the early work of the Milan associates (Palazzo Ii et al., 1978,
pages 26-28), and continues to inform their later work. The
theoretical priority here is not the behavioural sequence but
rather the context of relationships and sequence of meaning
in the family.
I have never felt comfortable with the idea of viewing
emotion as merely something which is shown. I react against
it because it seems to me to be a negation of my own
experience of emotions, and I think probably of the
experience of most people I work with in therapy. I may
show that I'm depressed in certain kinds of ways and to
certain people and my showing this becomes part of
particular interactional sequences, but I don't just show I'm
depressed, I feel it, and when I do it's painful. It is perhaps
this potential denial of individual pain which bothers me
most. Yet I think the thing I like about the Milan shift from
feeling emotions to showing emotions is that it reminds us
that we only ever feel things in the context of relationships,
whether it's current relationships or the history of past
relationships we bring to all our current interactions. So the
one nice thing I find in the Milan frame of showing emotions
is that it very clearly names feelings as always inter-personal.
Now if I thought I could say "feelings" and convey this
interpersonal context, I'd just use it with gay abandon and
scrap the more formal and one-step removed notion of
"emotional interaction". But in the end, as you can see,
I chose to use "emotional interaction" in the title of this
paper. For the time being, it is a safer option and less
ambiguous because it clearly indicates that I'm talking about
a process that is happening between at least two people.
We could dignify this way of understanding feelings by
calling it an interactional concept of feelings. Indeed, I could
claim legitimacy for it by pointing out that it is a non-linear
view of feelings in direct line with Bateson's ecological view
of relationships and the new epistemology. However, we
don't need to invoke Bateson in this discussion, and I will
be happy enough if we proceed with a rough idea of feelings
as always interpersonal, and we can back this up with the
great historic truth: it takes at least two to tango.
2
On the basis of this understanding of feelings, I'll now
offer some examples of the emotional interaction of
therapist and family, taking as a starting point my own
feelings in the process of therapy with three families.t
SCENES FROM PRACTICE
Scene 1
I've just seen a family for the first time. The referral had
come from the school nurse - the older girl had gone to
see her about her eight year old brother who she thought
was eating too much and getting too fat. The mother had
contacted, unsure about whether there really was a problem
and whether counselling was a good idea. It turned out that
the father had suicided two years before after a long history
of depression and illness. Throughout the whole session, I
feel like I'm walking on eggshells. I race home after it's
finished and change to go out - then catch sight of myself
in the mirror: I'd dressed all in black. "Good grief,
Carmel", I think, "you look like you're going to a funeral" .
Scene 2
The parents had contacted for help with a five year old girl
- the presenting problem was temper tantrums. Over the
past three years they'd sought help from a social worker who
offered behaviour management and supportive casework,
a child psychiatric clinic where a registrar had begun an
orthodox assessment, and a therapist at another community
health centre who'd used a Michael White-type frame. While
the family's name was on the waiting list, I was contacted
by an officer from the child welfare department - there
had been a notification of the child, and the worker believed
that tension was very high and that there was a significant
risk of abuse.
In the second session, I was exploring how the mother
and father could tell the difference between an extreme
version of a normal five year old tantrum and a "real turn".
The mother gave me an example of a "real turn" which had
happened several months before. The daughter was shouting
and screaming and running around the house. Her behaviour
was so severe that her mother thought she might have
become possessed by a devil - her eyes had changed and
she had a terrible look, "it was pure evil". The mother and
father stripped the child and put her in the shower, and she
became even more uncontained. At the point of possession
by the devil, my stomach turned, I had a sick feeling and
for a short period found it difficult to stay in touch with
the parents. I also had a sense of panic and fear for the child.
Scene 3
I see a family over an eighteen month period. There is one
child, and she is presented at age twelve with sleeping
difficulties and temper outbursts. It takes her up to three
hours to go to sleep and she wakes every night. Her mother
finds herself having to sleep with her. The daughter has in
fact never learned to sleep easily and by herself. The doctor
tPlease note: I have changed some details of the families' situations in the
interests of confidentiality.

has been prescribing medication, and four years before the
parents were on the brink of going ahead with a foster
placement for the child. The mother has a history of
different family care-givers as a child, and of long-term
sexual abuse. The father also has a difficult background.
In retrospect, the therapy progressed fairly evenly. This
was masked by cycles of major backslides, which the family
found very difficult. I also find the backslides difficult, at
times wish I'd never see them again and feel really hopeless
and inadequate as a therapist. As I write this, I wonder about
the order of these feelings - my hunch is that the feelings
of hopelessness and inadequacy are first past the post, and
the not wanting to see them again comes up fast to protect
me against feeling too hopeless and inadequate. In fact,
during the most painful backslide, I have a fantasy. I will
go to the receptionist and beg "please oh please Flo, ring
and tell them I've died and they'll just have to go somewhere
else from now on". I really felt I couldn't bear to see them
again.
Now I'd like to make some sense of these feelings. In each
case they were quite powerful, and it would be nice to think
about them in terms of the process of therapy and in a way
that might be helpful to me as the therapist.
USING CONCEPTS FROM ANALYTIC THERAPY
Concepts from analytic theory can be used as one way of
making some sense of the feelings I had with these families.
I think the framework of the analytic therapies offers the
most developed conceptualisation of the emotional inter-
action of therapist and client/family. This is because the
process of change within analytic therapies is seen to come
about through the relationship of therapist and
client/family. In terms of therapeutic practice, then, analytic
therapy is intensely relational and the primary emphasis is
on the interaction of client/family and therapist.
Now there are three concepts which can be used to address
specifically the interaction of therapist and client/family.
The first is the concept of transference, which refers to the
feelings that the client brings to their experience of the
relationship with the therapist, and the pattern or the
dynamic that becomes set up in the process of interaction
with the therapist. In the tango of analytic therapy, the other
side of this interaction is counter-transference, which
describes the feelings which are stirred up in the therapist
during the process of therapy, and which in turn become
part of the emotional interaction of the therapy. These
feelings might be the kind that the therapist brings to the
therapy from her own life which become triggered in the
course of the therapy. Alternatively, these feelings might be
more complicated in origin, and come about by the therapist
feeling some of the feelings that the client or family is
experiencing.
The third concept of projective identification addresses
and extends the idea that the therapist sometimes feels things
that the client is experiencing. The theory goes like this:
within therapy (and not just within therapy) the person or
family is likely to have feelings which are unmanageable,
unacceptable or just too painful to bear. These feelings are
3
A.N.Z. J. Fam. Ther., Vol. 10, No.1, 1989
split off, and handed over in the context of the relationship
with the therapist. The therapist in turn takes these feelings
on board and experiences them, at least initially, as if they
were their own. Projective identification is an unconscious
process, and is by no means a concept of pathology.
It's probably worth underlining that these three concepts
- transference, counter-transference and projective identifi-
cation - are all interactional descriptions. For the sake of
clarity, I will use counter-transference in this discussion to
refer to feelings which primarily come from the therapist
and are triggered in the therapy, and projective identification
to refer to the feelings the therapist has which come from
the client. I'd now like to say something about my feelings
with the three families using these concepts.
The first scene is I think a fairly clear and simple example
of projective identification. I was aware in the session of
feeling like I was walking on eggshells, and acting with a
carefulness and tentativeness in line with this feeling. But
at another level, I took away a feeling which I had not been
aware of, and didn't recognise until I saw myself in the
mirror, dressed in funeral clothes. I felt like I was going to
a funeral, which I think was the feeling the family had in
coming to the first session and which resulted behaviourally
in all the cues which then made me feel like I was walking
on eggshells. Later I suspected that for the mother at least,
life had been a funeral since her husband had suicided. I
think there was very little of my own emotional issues
involved in my feeling the family's feelings. The mirror
image showed me an incongruity, and when I thought of
the family I'd just seen, I realised I in fact didn't want to
wear funeral clothes at all.
But I think something more complicated went on with the
second family. It was I think partly my own counter-
transference, and partly projective identification. My
stomach always turns in reaction to abuse, and I found the
story of the parents seeing a five year old child as possessed,
stripping her off and forcing her into the shower triggering
a particular reaction. Quite simply, I don't like to look at
abuse, I find it difficult and painful. I distance myself from
feeling that, and it doesn't surprise me that for a time I felt
unable to stay in touch with the mother or father, that I
found myself looking at them but not really seeing them.
In fact, when the mother said her child's eyes were pure evil,
I thought "your eyes are pure evil".
Now I could just censor this thought, tell myself that it's
a dreadful thing for a therapist to think, not to mention
linear, and most unhelpful in maintaining engagement. But
it seems to me that I wasn't the only person involved in that
kind of emotional response. The mother clearly found
something unbearable in the level of her daughter's anger
and fear, and handled it by not seeing her as a five year old
child but as possessed by an evil spirit. The child in turn
probably threw that back at the mother in the same way I
did - you're evil; no, you are; no, you are - and so it
became passed around the family like an emotional hot
potato. As the therapist, I had taken up a place in the family
and my reaction was to want to follow the same sequence.
During the time I was out of touch with the parents, I was
intensely aware of the child in the room, and right at that
Flaskas
point I think I had taken the place of the child and felt
something of what she felt. It was a rugged interaction to
be involved in, and it may well have been that I wasn't the
only person who felt sick and fearful.
In a way, I think my own counter-transference meshed
with the projective identification, but if I had to separate
them out, I'd guess that 15070 was to do with my own feelings
and 85% fitted with the family's.
The third situation was also rather murky. Those of us
who choose to work as therapists generally don't like to feel
inadequate and hopeless. I certainly don't. But what I
noticed in the pattern of backslides with this family was the
extremeness of my own reaction to them. I found it really
difficult to hold on to the concrete evidence that the family
had shifted in the process of therapy, and while the backslide
was on it was as if the changes counted for nothing.
I think these proportions were more the family's than my
own. All the family found the backslides difficult to bear.
The mother seemed to feel the hopelessness most and showed
it in agitation and depression, the father felt a failure and
would become angry, while the daughter felt powerless and
excluded. In the most difficult backslide, the parents thought
again about fostering their daughter. I was taken aback by
the sudden push for exclusion, yet it was mirrored in the
feelings I had as therapist - the parents wanted the daughter
to go somewhere else, I wanted the family to go to another
therapist. The mother especially felt almost unbearably
hopeless and worthless, and the extremeness of my own
feelings of inadequacy as a therapist was in line with this.
In my fantasy, I felt it was a life and death issue - I would
die, and then they'd have to go somewhere else. For
goodness sakes, it was a fantasy, I could have had an
extended holiday in Tuscany and got away that way! I think
the fantasy that I would need to die was probably the
mother's. I will just comment that the proportions of these
feelings are not uncommon for someone who has survived
a very painful past with a major early loss, changes in
caregivers and then long-term sexual abuse.
So I'm saying that one way of thinking about my feelings
in working with this family, is to think about them in terms
of projective identification, that I took some of their feelings
on board and felt them as if they were my own. There was
a danger in my counter-transference. I toyed with the idea
of in reality referring them to another therapist. Had I felt
more vulnerable to feeling hopeless, I may well have acted
on this. I feel quite sure that this would have been the wrong
thing to do.
I would like to make one last comment here, and it is more
a comment on the process of writing about work with
families. In writing about my feelings with the last family,
I kept wanting to make this addition: "Of course, I had these
'negative' feelings in the context of a close therapeutic
connection with this family, and very much respected and
liked the three individuals". I resisted adding this, because
it kept reading as a defensive and unnecessary comment.
I then realised that I wanted to say this, not so much to the
readers of this journal, but to the family themselves.
This could be used to tell us more about the projective
identification and my counter-transference, but I am more
4
interested right now in using it to comment on the process
of distancing that occurs when we write about families. It's
as if we try to occupy some privileged external position as
commentator of the "case-study". This is a problem, as
there is no such position and because we have real'
relationships with families that we work with. I have a real
relationship with this family, even though I no longer see
them and am now writing about my experience of them in
this paper. My desire to add the comment can serve as a
reminder of the reality of the relationship of therapist and
family, despite the distancing that occurs in the process of
writing. It can also prompt me to be self-conscious of my
choice of "emotional interaction", which is a quasi-
behavioural description, rather in line with the very
traditions in systemic family therapy of censoring (or at least
sanitising) the emotional aspects of therapy.
SYSTEMIC FAMILY THERAPY:
A SPACE WITHIN MILAN?
But for the moment, let's leave an analytic way of thinking
about my feelings with these families. I want to explore the
kind of space systemic family therapy allows for an under-
standing of the emotional interaction of therapist and
family.
Exploring the conceptual space allowed by a particular
theoretical framework can at times be like dancing with a
shadow, so it might help if I draw some rough distinctions
before I move on. Here I'm asking the questions "Can the
emotional interaction of therapist and family be thought
about in this framework, and if so how?" Now it might be
helpful to think of three possibilities:
(1) There could be a framework which makes it almost
impossible to think about a particular process, because
the theoretical constructs which define the framework
actively censor or exclude the process. We could say such
a framework allows no space for the process to be
thought about.
(2) There could be a framework which does not address a
particular process, but where the theoretical constructs
which define the framework are not in opposition to that
process being explored. We could say that such a
framework allows some space for the process to be
thought about, but offers little guidance as to how it
might be thought about.
(3) There could be a framework which actively addresses
a particular process, and where this theorising is part
and parcel of the theoretical constructs which define the
framework. Such a framework both allows space for the
process and gives a particular way in which it can be
thought about.
With respect to the emotional interaction of therapist and
family, analytic therapy is an example of this third kind of
framework. With some qualification, I think structural and
strategic models of family therapy are an example of the
first kind, and the Milan model is an example of a
framework which offers some space but little guidance.
The qualification I'd like to make about structural and
strategic models is this. Both allow a small amount of space

for addressing the emotional interaction of therapist and
family, but it is essentially a descriptive and pragmatic space
rather than a conceptual or explanatory space. Minuchin
does in fact write of a process akin to transference when
he uses "induction", which can be understood from his
writing as the process of the therapist' 'conforming to the
habitual pathways of the family" (Goding et al., 1987, page
6). If this is seen to be helpful to the therapy, the therapist
might "accommodate" to these pathways as a planned inter-
vention. However, the therapist could unwittingly experience
an induction into the family system, and this could have
negative effects. This is called "suction" and should be
actively avoided by the therapist (see Minuchin et al., 1967,
pages 285-288). We can see here that although Minuchin
gives a very specific discussion it is confined to a descriptive
and pragmatic consideration.
As noted earlier, the core concern of strategic family
therapy with tactical interventions in behavioural sequences
leads to a strictly pragmatic acknowledgement of feelings,
both of the family and the therapist. This same characteristic
mitigates against any reflection on the emotional interaction
of therapist and family which is not immediately useful to
the therapy. Leupnitz identifies the oppositional dualism
between reflection and change as a corner-stone of the
strategic approach (Leupnitz, 1988, page 82). This dualism
is an example of a theoretical premise which actively excludes
consideration of the emotional interaction of therapist and
family as a process.
I think that the major restraint in structural and strategic
models moving beyond a pragmatic description of the
emotional interaction of therapist and family, is that they
rely on a view of the therapist as being outside the family
system in the process of therapy. This means that it is nearly
impossible to conceptualise the relationship of therapist and
family in an interactional way, and this is the defining
limitation of first-order cybernetics. Moreover, to the extent
that feelings and emotions are addressed in these
approaches, I suspect that we are looking at a linear concept
of feelings as the internal property of individuals. If I'm
right, this is rather paradoxical, given an analytic framework
allows for a radically interactionist concept of feelings. But
this is all very tentative.
It might be important for me to re-state here that I am
exploring the possibilities of thinking about the emotional
interaction of therapist and family, and that my comments
on structural and strategic approaches concern the
conceptual possibilities they allow. I do not think for a
moment that either of these models precludes emotionally
very sensitive practice on the part of the therapist. The
absence of theoretical attention to the emotional interaction
of therapist and family could present issues in training or
evaluation, but these are different questions again.
But let's turn to the Milan frame, which offers some space
for thinking about the emotional interaction of family and
therapist precisely because of its commitment to the idea
that for the duration of the therapy, the therapist and family
form a special system. This is the meaning of the application
of "second-order cybernetics" or Von Foerster's notion of
"the cybernetics of cybernetics". It is intentionally a more
5
A.N.Z. J. Fam. Ther., Vol. 10, No.1, 1989
rigorous application of Bateson's work and his premise that
the unit of evolution and change is the interaction within
a system rather than anyone side of the relationship. Thus,
applied to family therapy, the unit of evolution and change
is the interaction within the system, which includes the
therapist's interaction with the family, not anyone side of
the relationship within the system. This is quite different
from the structural and strategic notions of the therapist
acting on or intervening in the family system.
The Milan associates themselves do not use a special label
to describe this idea of the formation of a special therapeutic
system. However, Peggy Penn and Lyn Hoffman (who have
acted as commentators on their work and further developed
the Milan framework) refer to an idea of a "co-evolutionary
model" (see Penn, 1982; Hoffman, 1981). To quote Penn:
the family and therapist attempt to relate in a way that co-
evolves the therapist family ecology (1982, page 269)
and later:
this model is best considered as a co-evolutionary model, for
once joined in therapy, the therapist and family co-evolve
together, forming a new context that is wholly subject to change
(1982, page 280).
Now, even if we dispense with the biological metaphor, and
just stick to an idea of the development of a special
therapeutic system, there is space here for thinking about
the emotional interaction of therapist and family. However,
this remains at the level of a tantalising theoretical possi-
bility unless we move to asking further questions about
exactly how the Milan frame would conceptualise this inter-
action. It is at this point that we encounter difficulties. To
take the specific examples of my feelings with the three
families, it seems to me that the Milan framework offers
only very general clues as to how I might make sense of these
feelings. This is the frustration of trying to use a framework
which allows conceptual space but offers little theoretical
guidance.
In spite of this, it is still worthwhile identifying the kind
of directions the Milan model might give. The first direction
would be for the therapist actively to use her feelings and
the interaction with the family to generate positive systemic
hypotheses. So I could use feeling as if I were walking on
eggshells and about to go to a funeral, in constructing a
systemic scenario around the child eating too much and
getting too big. Similarly, I could use finding myself wanting
to attack and reject the mother ("your eyes are evil") to
hypothesise protective scenarios in the family around feeling
frightened and hurt. It is important to note that within a
Milan frame, these feelings are not used to lead back to the
"truth" of the family's experience, but rather to allow possi-
bilities for re-thinking the family's dilemma and prompting
a new context of meaning.
The second general direction a Milan frame would give
is to focus on the effect of the therapist's feelings on her
on-going interaction with the family. In this way, the
relationship between therapist and family is viewed in much
the same way as relationships within the family. Attention
is drawn to how the therapist shows (or doesn't show) her
feelings, who she shows them to in the family, what sense
the family make of this and what they do in return. In short,
the focus is on the interactional pattern which emerges
Flaskas
between therapist and family and the system of meanings
which accompanies it. Thus, when I feel hopeless and inade-
quate, what sense do I make of it and what do I do? Do
I read it as a signal of the family's hopelessness, and does
that make me try to console and reassure them? Do I feel
the family are criticising me by having monumental
backslides, and show this by becoming emotionally distant
and/or blaming? And whatever feeling I express in whatever
way, what meaning does the family give to what I do, and
what do they then do?
Both these directions are potentially helpful to the
therapist, but require considerable work (and to some extent,
creativity) on the part of the therapist to pursue the possi-
bilities. It is as if the Milan frame gives a signpost, but the
track is not clearly marked and can easily become confusing
or peter out. I find this frustrating and disappointing, but
perhaps I'm being impatient. It may be that the question
of exactly how we might think about the emotional inter-
action of family and therapist from within a Milan
framework will have to be a longer-term project, and such
a project would have to combine both theoretical work and
practice experience.
CONCLUSION
There are no grand conclusions to this paper, and this isn't
necessarily a bad thing. I've been wanting to present some
ideas on the emotional interaction of therapist and family,
not with a view to legislating a correct understanding, but
with a view to opening out some thinking in an area which
has traditionally been neglected in systemic family therapy.
I've chosen to do this by discussing how feelings are under-
stood, then using some feelings I had with three families
during therapy to explore ways of thinking about the
emotional interaction of therapist and family.
Some concepts from analytic therapy were placed
alongside an exploration of the kind of theoretical space and
guidance offered by different models within systemic family
therapy. The Milan frame seemed to give some space for
thinking about this area, but little specific guidance as to
exactly how this might be done.
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Although I've drawn some contrasts between different
models within systemic family therapy and between the
frameworks of analytic therapy and systemic family therapy,
I have not wanted to force an oppositional comparison. It's
perhaps clear from this that I have my own agenda of'
looking for connections between analytic and systemic
therapy, rather than establishing the legitimacy of one
framework by disqualifying another. This is all to say that
I am happy enough to let different ideas sit side-by-side. It
may be that in the long-run, the jostling of different ideas
from different frameworks may produce richer under-
standings of the emotional interaction of therapist and
family.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Coli Osman, Gill Burrell, Kerrie James and members
of my women and writing group for their ideas and encouragement.
References
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Melanie Klein was a Woman", unpublished paper presented at the Fifth
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