Abstract
This chapter argues that systemic therapies are well built to remediate damages in systems such as individual, couples, families and groups by using many different kinds of interventions. However, many of these interventions can come across as too driven by adherence to very specific epistemological position for one to believe they are scientifically based. In this chapter, we review the development of systemic therapies and the challenges that have emerged regarding manualising the approaches that the field has produced. We explore how more reductionistic therapies have increasingly been recognised as the gold standard due to their simplified manualisation, while family and systems therapy has missed opportunities for policy influence and government approval due to the reluctance to address the challenges of manualisation. We contend that for systemic therapies to survive, we must find ways to articulate what we do in therapy, training and research in ways that foster both the creativity and the rigor needed to be effective. This chapter shows how, through the use of processes rather than procedures, one can produce manuals that allow therapists to be as complex and artistic as they wish but still maintain the focus on the scientific method that will enable them to be approved as evidence-based psychotherapies.
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17 February 2022
This book was inadvertently published with the wrong affiliation of Dr. Peter Stratton. The correct affiliation is
Notes
- 1.
First-order cybernetics is about how to know and manage and control a system and how a family system organizes itself to maintain homeostasis and balance. It is divided in two components: first cybernetics which studies the system in equilibrium and, after 1963, with Maryuama (1963), the second cybernetics begins the study of far from equilibrium systems and what happens when there is a deviation. For instance, what happens in a family who lives for years in a complex situation in which a symptom maintains an unstable equilibrium? Second-order cybernetics is about observing systems (von Foerster, 2002; Sluzki, 1985).
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Mariotti, M., Saba, G., Stratton, P. (2021). Towards a Truly Systemic Account of the Current and Future of Manualisation. In: Mariotti, M., Saba, G., Stratton, P. (eds) Handbook of Systemic Approaches to Psychotherapy Manuals. European Family Therapy Association Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73640-8_1
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