Frameworks for Practice

in the Systemic Field: Part 1

— Continuities and Transitions
in Family Therapy Knowledge
Carmel Flaskas
School of Social Sciences and International Studies, University of New South Wales, Australia

This is the first of two articles to map the landscape of practice theory in systemic
family therapy. In this first article, the representation of knowledge for practice is
explored, and an argument is made that while frameworks remain important, the
relationship to them is now more conditional and pragmatic. A particular chronol-
ogy is offered of the development of family therapy practice theory frameworks,
beginning with the frameworks that emerged in the 1960s to the 1970s. An analy-
sis is given of the important transitions in the 1980s and three sets of influences in
this decade — ecosystemic epistemology, the feminist challenge and postmod-
ernism — are identified. This reading emphasises hidden continuities in the transi-
tion, despite the seemingly discontinuous shifts in practice theor y from the
beginning of the 1980s to the beginning of the 1990s. Context and relationship are
identified as the enduring parameters of systemic family therapy knowledge,
though understandings of context and relationship have been recast in the
contemporary (post-1990s) practice theory. The second article will explore the
four contemporary influential approaches in Australian family therapy — the Milan-
systemic, narrative and solution-focused frameworks, and the dialogical perspective
— and point to intersections in practice ideas and integrative movements.

Keywords: family therapy knowledge, practice theory, practice frameworks, model

A foundational territory in teaching family therapy lies in how you choose to repre-
sent the parameters of the systemic field, how you choose to represent continuities
and commonalities in the development of practice theory frameworks across time,

Address for correspondence: Carmel Flaskas, School of Social Sciences and International Studies,
University of New South Wales, UNSW Sydney 2052. E-mail: [email protected]

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Volume 31 Number 3 2010 pp. 232–247
Frameworks for Systemic Practice: Part 1

and how you choose to represent the contemporary practice theory frameworks.
This is the first of two papers that together map this territory. I am offering the
papers for discussion to others teaching family therapy, and to those who are learn-
ing family therapy and wanting to ‘place’ practice theories within the systemic field.
How you represent theory for practice is not as straightforward as it might first
appear. The field of systemic family therapy has for various reasons been vulnerable
to telling its own history in a way that privileges the discontinuity of frameworks
across time and the difference between frameworks. This inward-looking perspec-
tive has generated rather grandiose announcements of paradigm shifts in the history
of the development of our knowledge. It has also at times fuelled divisive competi-
tion between frameworks. Yet, in the activities of learning and teaching family
therapy, the value of an appreciation of the continuity of the parameters of the
systemic field across time becomes crystal clear, as does the value of appreciating the
commonalities across frameworks alongside the differences in the options they offer.
As well, how you might represent practice knowledge in family therapy in 2010
is different to how it might have been represented in 1995, which in turn is differ-
ent to its representation in 1980 or 1965. I am not referring just to the content of
the (then) contemporary frameworks at any particular point of time. Rather, I am
referring to how the whole idea of practice theory frameworks comes to be repre-
sented and the changes in how we locate the knowledge of frameworks in relation
to practice and to family therapy as a whole.
The discussion for this first article comes in four parts. The first part is more of a
preamble, addressing the current context of the representation of practice knowledge,
in light of the by now taken-for-granted postmodernist sensibilities and the common
factors discussions. I will then chart the way in which family therapy practice theory
across time is represented in chronologies and groupings, introducing my own
choices about this. The third part considers knowledge generated in the period from
the 1960s to the 1970s, while the fourth part identifies the 1980s as a decade of
transition, locating the convergences of three different sets of influences that shaped
the transition to the contemporary frameworks. The conclusion of this first paper
will sketch the contemporary landscape and the way in which the enduring parame-
ters of context and relationship have been recast in our current practice theory.
The second paper — Part 2: Contemporary Practice Theory Frameworks — will
map the Milan-systemic, narrative and solution-focused frameworks, as well as the
dialogical influence, which has increasing coherence as an alternative theory
perspective in family therapy. I will be interested in similarities as well as differences
and the parallel genealogies of each framework, with the focus primarily on theory
rather than techniques. I will also gesture to the points of intersections in some
current integrative perspectives. While the first and second papers together form the
whole exploration of my project, they can each be read separately, offering readers
flexibility in terms of their own interests in family therapy knowledge.
It perhaps goes without saying that any commentary on the history of ideas
involves choices and emphases shaped by the context of the enquiry. I am a family
therapy educator and practitioner and academic, and my ‘home’ is Australian family
therapy. The commentary I am offering both reflects and speaks to this particular
context and different contexts of enquiry would generate different choices and

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Carmel Flaskas

emphases. There is also necessarily a juggle of breadth and depth, and so I would
like to invite readers to follow up their own particular interests, using the references
in these two articles as a base for further exploration of family therapy knowledge.

Beyond Models — Locating Knowledge For and About Practice

Many of us by now teaching family therapy ‘grew up’ in our own trainings with
models of practice, some of us enchanted by them, some of us ambivalent about
them, but nonetheless all of us in their grip. A good model of practice, regardless of
whether you warm to it or not, offers a coherent set of understandings that explic-
itly or implicitly theorises the nature of practice itself, and prescribes a well devel-
oped and complete set of practices and techniques for undertaking the work of
therapy. This project of constructing the ‘wholeness’ of a model, so that the model
may stand as sufficient in and of itself for theorising and meeting the needs of
practice, was crafted within the broader modernist conception of knowledge.
Within this epistemology, knowledge was to be crafted faithfully in relation to the
real world, so that incrementally we could build a more and more complete and
accurate representation of that part of the world which was under observation
(Flaskas, 2002a). Even the choice of the word ‘model’ reflects this project, with its
images of a simplified representation of a total process, or a three-dimensional
accurate miniature of ‘the real thing’. Models by the nature of their claims to whole-
ness tend to produce ‘forced choice’ and one could argue that this tendency has
driven one aspect of the competitiveness between models.
So far, I am not saying anything special about family therapy, and my linking of
the earlier project of models to modernist conceptions of knowledge is not with a
view to critique. Instead, I am simply identifying what you would expect: that in
family therapy, as with other practice fields, how we relate to the production of
knowledge about our own practice, and how we treat that knowledge, is always
happening within a broader social context of how the production of knowledge is
constructed and understood. In this case, our earlier location of discrete, separate
and whole models of practice was part-and-parcel of broader modernist conceptions
of how knowledge should be.
In 2010, people rarely use the language of ‘model’ to describe their practice
orientation. Rather than ‘model’, people are more likely to talk about ‘approach’,
‘framework’, ‘ideas’, or even just ‘(X) therapy’ or the ‘X way of working’. One is also
more likely to hear a particular way of working used as an adverb or adjective — for
example, ‘I work systemically’, or ‘I use a lot of narrative ideas’. I’d suggest that this
change of language both reflects and constructs a different relationship to how we
locate the influence of practice frameworks in our work. But what has changed?
Certainly not the borders of the different frameworks per se, because narrative and
solution-focused, and Milan-systemic and dialogical ideas are still learnt and taught
and used in our practice. What I think has changed is how we relate to the borders
of frameworks. In an immediate way, the current language downplays claims to a
single, universal, ‘whole’ model, sufficient in and of itself for the theory and practice
of family therapy, and suggests a more conditional fluidity about our relationship to
particular ideas.

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There have been a number of commentaries that point to the growing maturity
of family therapy — that the more established family therapy becomes as a modal-
ity and field, the less there is a need for negative comparisons with outside frame-
works or intense competitiveness internally (see, for example, Nichols, 2008, p.
299). However, sitting alongside this change within family therapy is the change in
the wider social and intellectual environment with respect to the location of the
nature of knowledge. The shift to postmodernism no longer needs to be proclaimed
— and the decade of the 1990s, in which so much of our practice theory literature
began with denunciations of the ‘what-is-modernism-and-why-we-don’t-do-it-
anymore’ kind, has passed. For a short while it seemed as if postmodernism itself
would paradoxically be treated as an alternate ‘model’ (see, for example, Anderson,
1997; Weingarten, 1998), but this trend turned out to be transitional to a period in
which postmodernist sensibilities became embedded in different practice frame-
works in a more taken-for-granted way. In terms of the positioning of knowledge,
the postmodernist move away from the (modernist) search for single and (poten-
tially) ‘complete’ knowledge led to a tolerance of the possibility of multiple descrip-
tions of practice and multiple knowledges for and about practice. Glenn Larner
advocates this greater openness to the use of multiple knowledges in meeting the
needs of complex practice, calling especially on the work of Levinas and the ‘ethics
of hospitality’ (Larner, 2009a, 2009b).
The increasing influence of the common factors research has strengthened this
openness. Studies across nearly four decades have researched the generic factors
involved in successful therapy outcome, regardless of therapeutic modality or
model. A common factors perspective has been articulated in a number of impor-
tant publications across the last ten years (Duncan et al., 2009; Hubble et al., 1999;
Sprenkle & Blow, 2004; Sprenkle et al., 2009). Many family therapists are by now
familiar with the main findings from this research — that there would seem to be
four groups of factors related to positive therapy outcomes: the strengths and
resources that clients bring with them to the therapy, including all the fortunate
factors in their lives promoting change; the placebo effect, or clients’ capacity for
hopefulness about the therapy; the therapeutic alliance and relationship-mediated
variables in the therapeutic process; and, finally, the specific techniques and models
used in the therapy (Hubble, Duncan & Miller, 1999). The research ‘guesstimate’ is
that the first two groups of factors, which lie outside the influence of the therapy
itself, would together seem to account for 55% of the outcome variance. Of the
remaining 45% of the outcome variance, the therapeutic relationship variables
would seem to account for around 30% while the specific model variables account
for 15% (Hubble et al., 1999).
While this research very effectively challenges competitiveness between
models, it would be a serious mistake to read it as ‘anti’ the idea of practice
frameworks. Indeed, Sprenkle and Blow (2004) make it very clear in their review
that these findings about positive therapy outcomes relate to the range of estab-
lished and effective therapies, and not to any kind of practice that might be
calling itself counselling or psychotherapy. Far from arguing that the whole idea
of frameworks no longer matters, Sprenkle and Blow suggest instead that the
effectiveness of particular therapies relates to the way in which their specific

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Carmel Flaskas

theory and practices utilise and promote common factors, and that there are
various ways in which common factors can be expressed and promoted within
psychotherapy practice knowledge.
Yet while the increasing confidence within family therapy, the influence of
postmodernist sensibilities and the influence of the common factors perspective may
all have played a part in the move toward a greater openness about practice knowl-
edge, I am inclined to think that ‘privately’ family therapy practitioners have always
moved between and across models, regardless of the formal public strictures of model
adherence. I have argued before (Flaskas, 2002b, 2005) that in ‘real life’ practice,
experienced practitioners build a repertoire of practice knowledges across time. Very
good practice often displays a finely tuned capacity to draw on a range of ideas in the
interests of the needs of the particular work with a particular family in a particular
context. Lynn Hoffman, arguably the finest commentator on twentieth century
family therapy knowledge (see, for example, Hoffman 1981, Hoffman 2002), offers
herself as a case example of the ‘setting aside models’ practitioner (Hoffman, 1998).
In her 1998 article, she writes of her own choice of ‘greatest hits’ of family therapy
practice knowledge across time, and her own constantly developing integration of a
range of ideas which fit with her use of self and guide her practice.
In her response to Hoffman’s article, Celia Falicov (1998) balances the plea for
setting aside models with the reminder that the fine bricolage represented in
Hoffman’s account is the province of the very experienced practitioner. Falicov
makes the point that it is easier to learn and to teach family therapy via the bound-
aries of specific frameworks — that one’s confidence builds through learning the
detail and coherence of frameworks and, with it, the capacity to integrate theory
ideas and practices. I would agree here, for there is a discipline in the process of
learning frameworks ‘from the inside out’. Practice frameworks provide practition-
ers with building blocks for their own practice and they offer systematic and coher-
ent ways of thinking about and ‘doing’ family therapy. Moreover, our own creativity
can be inspired by the creativity of different ideas and techniques within different
frameworks, as we develop a repertoire of practice theory that is finely tuned to our
own contexts of practice and our own use of self.
In short, the kind of knowledge that is represented by practice frameworks is
located differently now to the earlier period of models and model adherence. A
range of factors could account for family therapy’s move ‘beyond models’, including
the integration of postmodernist sensibilities and the common factors research.
What has changed, though, is not so much the value of practice frameworks and
the discipline and borders of their theory and practices, but rather the way we relate
to practice frameworks and their borders. Frameworks still matter, but we currently
relate to them more pragmatically, with less competitiveness and a greater openness
about the value of a plurality of knowledges in meeting the complexity of practice.
There is also a commitment to a process of learning that factors in the integration
process for each practitioner and the potential use of multiple frameworks. The
reading I am about to give of the development of practice theory in family therapy
and its important transitions sits within this understanding of our current relation-
ship to our own knowledge.

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Frameworks for Systemic Practice: Part 1

Practice Theory Across Time: Chronologies and Groupings

The development of family therapy practice theory now spans half a century. There
may be different preferences for whether family therapy is described as a modality, a
psychotherapeutic approach, a field of practice, or even a way of thinking. These
could be thought of as different levels of description rather than alternate descrip-
tions. However, regardless of this debate, the core definitional issue remains about
how one understands the parameters of knowledge generated within family therapy
across time. I would identify the enduring parameters of family therapy practice
theory as context and relationship. Naming context and relationship as the endur-
ing parameters of family therapy knowledge clearly needs some unpacking, a task
which I will be undertaking throughout the rest of this paper via a discussion of the
chronology of the development of practice theory.
There are different ways in which family therapy frameworks may be grouped
across time. Rudi Dallos and Ros Draper write in the UK context, where the local
extension and integration of the Milan-systemic framework takes centrestage in
contemporary family therapy, so much so that ‘systemic psychotherapy’ has come to
be the favoured current description of the British family therapy tradition.1 From this
vantage point, in their rendition of the history of family therapy practice theory,
Dallos and Draper (2000) have chosen three periods: the 1950s to the 1970s (empha-
sising strategic and structural models and the lens of family life cycle), the mid-1970s
to the mid-1980s (second order and early Milan ideas), and the mid-1980s to the
present day (emphasising the influence of social constructionist ideas, narrative and
solution-focused therapies, and the development of reflecting processes).
William Doherty and Susan McDaniel (2010) follow Suzanne Hanna (2007),
all writing in the US context, and choosing a grouping of ‘first generation’, ‘second
generation’ and ‘third generation’ theorists and theories. Doherty and McDaniel
(2010) include structural and strategic therapies in their first generation frameworks
spanning to the early 1980s, solution-oriented and narrative therapies in their
second generation from the 1980s, and name a ‘third generation’ as the integrative
therapies such as multisystemic therapy. Interestingly, from this North American
perspective, the Milan-systemic framework scarcely rates a mention, nor does it
warrant a chapter in its own right in Michael Nichols’s recent collation (2008). One
also notes in North American histories a tendency to conflate narrative therapy with
social constructionist and dialogical therapies (see, e.g., Doherty and McDaniel,
2010).
The contrast, then, is very marked between the UK versions of family therapy
history, that effectively track the antecedents of the (Milan-)systemic framework,
and the US versions, in which the Milan-systemic frame does not figure much at all
as a contemporary influence. One can also note across the UK and North American
accounts that neither context generates as coherent, comprehensive and sharp an
outline of narrative therapy as we would be used to in the Australian context. In the
Australian context, the Milan-systemic framework takes its place as one (but just
one) of the influential contemporary frameworks, and narrative therapy is more
clearly defined. In this way, we sit in a rather different spot to either the UK or US
family therapy contexts.

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Carmel Flaskas

It is perhaps no accident that it falls to an Irish family therapist, Alan Carr

(2000), to give a more comprehensive overview of the English-speaking family
therapy field, grouping frameworks according to whether they focus on behaviour
patterns (e.g., structural, strategic, cognitive–behavioural), belief systems (e.g.,
Milan-systemic, narrative, solution-focused), or contexts (e.g., attachment-based,
transgenerational frameworks, multisystemic family therapy). Carr’s account, by
default, becomes a kind of chronology, as the frameworks he identifies as behav-
ioural in focus (apart from cognitive–behavioural therapy) were generated in the
1960s and 1970s, while the frameworks he names as focused on meaning were
generated in their current versions from the 1990s. The chronology I would give,
and here I should own my Australian perspective in the emphasis of frameworks,
would also bracket the frameworks emerging in the 1960s and 1970s, and the
frameworks articulated from the 1990s, with the decade of the 1980s singled out as
a decade of transition.

Knowledge Generated in the 1960s to the 1970s

Across its whole history, the project of family therapy has been to place relationships
at the centre of understandings of human experience. The original shift in thinking
in the late 1950s was to try to understand the individual within the particular
context of the family, and to use the leeway of family relationships directly in
psychotherapy practice. The conceptual shift was from thinking of the family as the
sum of individual psyches, to thinking of the family as a system made up of interre-
lated parts, where the whole is greater than the sum of individual parts and where
change in any one part of the system affects the rest of the system. Of course, I have
just recited the central tenet of systems theory, a body of knowledge that was gener-
ated in the physical sciences from the late 1940s. Systems theory may not have been
used at an especially sophisticated level in the first generation of family therapy, but
it nonetheless gave entry to a very different (and far more social) conceptualisation
of the individual (Flaskas, 2007).2
It also allowed the use of a number of specific ideas. For example, family thera-
pists began using the early systems ideas of system and subsystem boundaries, of
homeostasis (the tendency of a system to stay the same), and the cybernetic idea of
positive feedback (the kind of information that leads to change). Later, moving into
the 1970s, Gregory Bateson’s understandings about living systems moved centre
stage (Bateson, 1972). The theorisation of circular causality (which is the idea that
causality in living systems is not a chain of ‘linear’ determining cause-and-effect
dyadic interactions, but rather a constellation of multidetermining interactions,
involving many parts of the system, occurring in a specific set of environmental
conditions) propelled the elaboration of circular patterns in family relating.
Subsystems, homeostasis and positive feedback do not feature much at all in the
contemporary family therapy theory frameworks. However, although circular
causality is rarely laboured as a concept in the contemporary systemic frames, it is
deeply embedded in systemic thinking (Flaskas, 2007).
The major models (and they were called models at the time) were structural
family therapy and strategic family therapy, which emerged in the United States.

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They are well documented in all accounts of the history of family therapy knowl-
edge (see, for example, Carr, 2000; Dallos & Draper, 2000; Goldenberg &
Goldenberg, 2004; Doherty & McDaniel, 2010; Nichols, 2008; Rivett & Street,
2009). These models do indeed stand as the first generation of systemic therapy
practice theory. Two other frameworks bear mentioning here, both using a systems
lens and both focusing on transgenerational patterns and relationships. Murray
Bowen’s ideas (Bowen, 1978) about patterns around differentiation in intimate
relationship remain influential in current practice in North America and in
Australia (see, for example, Brown, 2008; Papero, 2000; Titelman, 1998;
Chambers, 2009; Wright, 2009). The framework developed by Ivan Boszormenyi-
Nagy and colleagues (Boszormenyi-Nagy & Krasner, 1986; Boszormenyi-Nagy &
Spark, 1973) focused on intergenerational patterns of invisible loyalties. Though
Boszormenyi-Nagy’s ideas are less visible than Bowen’s ideas in current practice
theory in the North American and Australian contexts, their legacy continues to
show in some Australian writing (for example, Crago, 2006; Kozlowska, 2010; Le
Goff, 2001). I will note here, however, that one only very rarely sees the influence
of either of these frameworks in the current UK context of family therapy. This
might in part be explained by the ease of access in Britain to attachment theory,
which was developing in the United Kingdom just before and right alongside family
therapy, providing what was at the time a ‘local’ transgenerational perspective that
could be readily borrowed, even if it could not be so readily acknowledged.
With respect to the two major models of structural and strategic family therapy,
though, there are many enduring ideas that continue to inform contemporary
systemic practice. Structural therapy continues to be taught and written about (see,
for example, Colapinto, 2000; Minuchin et al., 2006; Vetere, 2001). The flexibility
and usefulness of its ideas can be seen in the contemporary integrative practice
frames of multisystemic family therapy (Henggeler, 1998; Henggeler & Sheidow,
2002), and the Maudsley model (Lock et al, 2001; Rhodes et al., 2009), which has
been specifically crafted for practice in relation to anorexia. Structural therapy in its
own time also fed directly into the development of Jay Haley’s strategic ideas.
Strategic therapy itself, particularly its MRI/Palo Alto version, is the precursor of
brief therapy, which in turn becomes the precursor of solution-focused therapy.
Ideas from strategic therapy also directly informed the early work of Michael White
(see, for example, White, 1984, 1986) and the early Milan model (see the commen-
tary by MacKinnon & James, 1987).
Rudi Dallos and Ros Draper (2000, p. 23) comment that the early use of
systems theory offered ‘both a compassionate view of individual experience but also
a reductionist and possibly mechanistic one’. Yet, despite the reductionist concepts
of this period of systemic therapy, the space was opened for therapeutic practices
that challenged the highly individualised and medicalised practices of the time. The
influence of assessment and therapeutic expertise remained untouched, but individ-
ual mental health symptoms were powerfully de-medicalised, and to a certain extent
de-patholigised. And while the language of the early theory may have been rather
de-humanised, the practices of engaging with families in the room, across ages and
generations, around the intimate patterns of everyday life, tended to be of necessity
more accessible and less mystifying as a form of psychotherapy (Flaskas, 2007).

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In later times, the family therapy knowledge produced in this period would
sometimes be painted as unremittingly conservative. I would suggest that such a
perspective is ahistoric. For its time, early family therapy theory and practice
challenged the orthodoxies of understandings and practices of mainstream
psychotherapy. It is true that the models lacked attention to gender inequality
within families, that they lacked a theory of diversity and wider social context, and
that interpersonal abuse and violence remained largely unaddressed in the formal
venues of early family therapy. Yet in terms of practice commitments, early family
therapy, especially structural family therapy in the US, engaged actively with race
and poverty and difference.
Elsa Jones (1993) writes of the ‘great white male psychiatrist’ creationist myth of
family therapy, underscoring the significant contribution of social work, a largely
female profession, to family practice in the first half of the twentieth century. I
would also underscore here that not all the creators of early family therapy practice
theory were men and psychiatrists and, of those who were, many were not white
Anglo/American examples of their own profession. Salvador Minuchin, Braulio
Montalvo, Harry Aponte, Chloe Madanes, Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy — their names
speak to their histories of immigration from non-English-speaking countries.
Minuchin, the towering figure in this period, spent much of his life working with
very poor African–American female-headed families and he had (and has) a strong
and clear left-wing politics around class, privilege and poverty. He brought to his
work his experience of political imprisonment in Argentina, and an intergenera-
tional family history of refugee migration. Minuchin’s own lived experience of social
marginality and difference was deeply embedded in his relationship to psychother-
apy and to his clients, expressed directly and movingly in this interview comment
about his relationship to working with African-American people: ‘I adopted the
marginalised poor population as my brothers and sisters … they became my Jews,
or I became their Black’ (Stagoll, 2002, p. 126). I make this detour here, at the end
of the account of the practice theory produced in the 1960s and 1970s, because
many of the nuances and political complexities of family therapy theory and
practice in its early stage came to be ‘ironed-out’ in the critiques that were to come
from the 1980s.

The 1980s — Whirlwinds of Transition

If structural and strategic therapies constitute the central ‘first generation’ practice
frameworks, the 1980s proved to be a decade of change and reshaping. Bateson’s
Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (1979) had just been published, and 1980 saw
the seminal Family Process article (1980) of the Milan four (Mara Palazzoli Selvini,
Luigi Boscolo, Gianfranco Cecchin, Giuliana Prata), which followed the 1978 New
York publication of their first book Paradox and Counterparadox. In 1982, the book
The Tactics of Change: Doing Therapy Briefly was published (Fisch et al., 1982).
Meanwhile, in Adelaide, the Dulwich Centre was being set up in 1983, with
Michael White as co-director. In the second half of the decade, and back in the US,
Harlene Anderson and Harry Goolishian began publishing their ideas, which led to
their development of ‘collaborative language systems therapy’ (Anderson et al.,

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1986; Anderson & Goolishian, 1988). Around the same time, and with noticeable
resonances, the Norwegian family therapist Tom Andersen was publishing the first
Family Process article on the reflecting team (Andersen, 1987), leading to his 1990
edited collection The Reflecting Team.
By the early 1990s, just one decade later, the Milan-systemic framework was
somehow already in danger of being identified as the ‘post-Milan framework’, brief
therapy had metamorphosed into solution-focused therapy, narrative therapy had
been launched and named as such, and what I am calling ‘the dialogical perspective’
had started to take shape. There were, of course, many twists and turns along the
way, as the biological metaphors of systems theory gave way to postmodernist
theory ideas expressed mainly through social constructionist and narrative theory,
and as the emphasis on behaviour gave way to the emphasis on meaning.
Three sets of influences came to both intertwine and diverge during the decade.
The first involved ripples within the foundational use of systems theory that came
in the wake of second-order cybernetics and Bateson’s later ecosystemic ideas. There
was a move away from the modernist ‘observer free’ epistemology, with its language
of the therapist ‘acting on’ or ‘intervening in’ a (separate and autonomous) family
system. The shift was to an epistemology in which the unit of change was under-
stood to be the therapist–family system. This shift was accompanied by an accept-
ance (at least in theory, if not in practice) that the conditions of the context of
therapy itself and our relationship to the family construct in part how we are able to
‘see’ the family. There was a brief flurry of publications heralding the ‘new episte-
mology’ (see, e.g., Keeney, 1982; Keeney & Sprenkle, 1982). This was followed by a
good deal of fanfare around an engagement with the constructivist ideas of the
Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, whose work was
positioned as directly continuing Bateson’s ecosystemic legacy (see, e.g., Dell, 1985;
Efran & Lukens, 1985).
The second set of influences toward the mid-1980s came belatedly from
feminism and its political challenge. Feminist family therapists provided a strong
critique of the tendency of family therapy to ignore abuse and negate responsibility
(see, for example, Goldner, 1985; Hare-Mustin, 1986; Luepnitz, 1988; MacKinnon
& Miller, 1987), a tendency that one could argue is an inherent vulnerability of the
theory of circular causality. Feminist therapy had emerged in the 1970s and was
shaped around a number of principles, including the principle that the personal is
the political. The practices developed there had already tackled the patriarchal social
context of gender inequality within families and moved toward collaborative and
demystifying practices in the therapeutic relationship. These practices began to cross
over to family therapy, because a number of (especially women) family therapists
were influenced by feminist politics and practices. The feminist critique also
challenged the de-humanised language of the early systems metaphor and it was one
part of the momentum to put topics like the therapeutic relationship, emotionality
and intimacy back on the family therapy agenda.
Postmodernism, which appeared in family therapy in the later part of the
1980s, provided the third set of influences. Like the feminist influence, this was
belated, reflecting the ‘time lag’ tendency in practice disciplines in responding to
changes in the wider cultural, intellectual and political milieu. The parameters of

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Carmel Flaskas

postmodernism were crafted as a counter to modernist parameters, in part explain-

ing the flavour of oppositionality embedded in much of the early discussions about
postmodernism within family therapy. Where modernism strived for ‘observer-free’
knowledge, aiming for a more and more complete and accurate representation of
the nature of that part of the world that was under observation, postmodernism
repudiated the possibility of knowledge separate to the desire and involvement
inherent in our attempts to know. In terms of an epistemology, then, the search for
‘complete’, universal and foundational knowledge was countered by a commitment
to a multiplicity of partial knowledges, each bearing particular and contextual
relationships to the attempt to know. In family therapy, the politics of postmod-
ernism reshaped the conceptualising of therapist position and therapeutic process.
Here the assumed ‘expertness’ of the (modernist) therapist was countered with an
image of the collaborative therapist, co-constructing the therapeutic process as
conversation with clients. Meaning and dialogue moved centrestage, while issues of
diversity explicitly came to the fore.
As I have noted before (Flaskas, 2002a, p. 31), if there is to be a basic definition
of postmodernism, it is essentially an oppositional one: what is postmodernism —
not this, not modernism. Yet the creativity of postmodernist possibilities comes
with the next part of the questioning — if not this, if not modernism, then what?
Precisely because postmodernism allows for a plurality of knowledges and tolerates
tensions and contradictions, there are potentially unlimited ‘then what?’ possibilities
for theory produced within its parameters. In family therapy, there has been interest
in a range of theory falling under the umbrella of postmodernism — for example,
the interest in Foucault’s ideas on power and discourse (especially in the earlier
narrative ideas, see White & Epston, 1990; White, 1991; White, 1997; see also
Flaskas & Humphreys, 1993), some engagement with Derrida’s methodology of
deconstruction (see, for example, DeShazer, 1991; White, 1991) and a recent use of
Levinas (Frosh, 2009; Larner, 2004, 2009c). However, by far the most significant
and ongoing engagement in family therapy has been with social constructionism
and the metaphor of narrative, both of which privilege language as the medium of
meaning. All contemporary family therapy frameworks are shaped by social
constructionist and/or narrative ideas.
How this is so will be explored in the second paper to come and in the
meantime I will stick to noting the convergences of the influences of the ecosys-
temic epistemology, feminism and postmodernism in the 1980s. The premise of
second-order cybernetics as applied to the activity of psychotherapy, that the unit of
therapy is the therapist–family system, and that as therapists we are not outside the
system of change, effectively laid the ground for an easier transition to the premises
of a postmodernist epistemology. Similarly, the widening of what constitutes
relevant context in the early 1980s ecosystemic theorising made it an easier jump to
the breadth of the theoretical and political territories of both feminism and
postmodernism. While the social justice aims deeply embedded in the politics of
feminism did not find an easy ‘match’ with the relativism of postmodernism, there
was still a strong resonance in its politics of collaborative practice and in the atten-
tion within feminist therapy to tracking the relationship of social context to
intimate experience.

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Frameworks for Systemic Practice: Part 1

All this might help to explain what otherwise looks like a wholesale change of
foundational knowledge metaphors in systemic family therapy in the late 1980s which,
depending on your point of view, could be cast as ‘onward-every-upward’ progress or
an embarrassing fickleness in attachment to our own knowledge. I was in the genera-
tion training in family therapy in the second half of the 1980s and a joke went around
some of us: ‘blink and you’ll miss a paradigm shift’. Earnest study groups reading
Bateson and Maturana in the first half of the 1980s seemed anachronistic scarcely a
few years later. The vanguard North American magazine The Family Therapy Networker
devoted a special feature in 1985 to constructivism, showcasing articles with primary
references to biology and ecosystemic theory (see, e.g., Efran & Lukens, 1985; Simon,
1985). Six years later, in 1991, the same magazine ran another feature, again on
‘constructivism’ but this time with the focus on postmodernism, and with primary
references to social psychology and sociology (see, for example, Doherty, 1991; O’Hara
& Anderson, 1991). One could only survive this particular confusion by referring to
Lynn Hoffman’s commentary article ‘Constructing Realities: An Art of Lenses’,
published in Family Process in 1990, in which she delineated the difference between the
(biological/ecosystemic) theories of constructivism and the (sociological/social psychol-
ogy) theories of social constructionism.
Thus, the announcements of major shifts plus the initial occlusion of the
theories of constructivism and social construction made for a very confusing transi-
tion decade. Yet an examination of the convergences across the three sets of influ-
ences at play in the 1980s makes the resulting transition appear less anarchic. It also
allows a clearer appreciation of the continuities in the transition from earlier to
contemporary frameworks, as well as a clearer appreciation of the common shape of
the recasting of practice theory post-1990.

Conclusion: The Recasting of Context and Relationship

We come then to the contemporary landscape of family therapy practice theory. In
the same way as in the early period of our knowledge, the contemporary landscape
lies within the specificity of wider intellectual and social and political environments.
How we now relate to knowledge acquires a different flavour because of this.
Postmodernist sensibilities combine with the increasing influence of the common
factors research — and practice frameworks continue to hold value, while our
relationship to them becomes more conditional and pragmatic. A plurality of practice
theory knowledges may be crafted to meet the specific demands of contexts of
practice, the specific demands of our client groups and the practitioner’s use of self.
Family therapy ‘models’ of the 1960 and 1970s — from the dominant structural
and strategic models through to the secondary strand of transgenerational models
— used the early ideas of systems theory in casting their specific conceptualisations
of context and relationship within family relationships. The dominant (and most of
the secondary models) of this period primarily targeted behaviour, though how
behaviour was ‘framed’ and understood in terms of family relationship patterns
varied. The decade that remains the hardest to make sense of in terms of the history
of our own knowledge is the transitional decade of the 1980s and in this paper I
have offered a particular discussion of the whirlwinds of transition. I have suggested

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Carmel Flaskas

that there were significant convergences in the ecosystemic, feminist and postmod-
ernist influences. These convergences created the conditions for theory reshaping
across all the different framework ‘fronts’ of our practice knowledge and this reshap-
ing ‘shows’ very clearly from the early 1990s.
The contemporary frameworks now primarily address meaning. They all show,
in different ways, the influence of theories that have emerged under the postmod-
ernist umbrella, with the single most important sets of ideas being social construc-
tionist and narrative ideas. Language moves to the centre in these sets of ideas and
becomes the medium of meaning within the therapeutic process. Context and
relationship remain the enduring parameters of the systemic field, but one sees a
significant recasting. In the early family therapy models, the practice boundary of
context was more strictly confined to interactional patterns in family relationships,
which is not to say that some first-generation family therapy practitioners were not
keenly aware of the force of social contexts. However, the exploration within
therapy itself of multiple contexts affecting family life is now much more clearly on
the agenda. We see a stronger consciousness about the multiplicity of family forms,
the different cultural expressions of intimacy and connectedness, and the many and
varied ways of ‘doing’ family and relationships. The role of the therapist is more
facilitative and less directive. In short, family therapy practice theory stays within
the enduring parameters of context and relationship but, recast in the contemporary
landscape, both context and relationship are interpreted and explored in broader
and multiple ways (Flaskas, 2007).
But how does this all ‘show’ in the practice theory frameworks consolidated
from the 1990s that are currently the most influential in the Australian family
therapy context? These next explorations will be the subject of the second paper,
which will track in more detail the Milan-systemic, narrative and solution-focused
frameworks, and the dialogical perspective, as well as point to the current integra-
tions. So, for the moment, we can close the door on the particular reading of the
history of family therapy practice theory that I have offered in this first paper, a
reading that has emphasised continuities and the conditions of transitions. Yet, as is
the nature of any attempt to map current disciplinary knowledge, there will be
some returning to the earlier ideas laid out in this first paper and the broader condi-
tions in our own genealogy of knowledge. As the saying goes, stay tuned …

Endnotes
1 For example, the UK family therapy association is named ‘The Association for Family
Therapy and Systemic Practice’ and a number of family therapy training programs have
‘systemic psychotherapy’ in their titles, including programs offered by the Institute of
Family Therapy and the Tavistock Clinic.
2 Some points in this paragraph, and in this section as a whole, have been developed previ-
ously in Flaskas (2007).

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