Abstract
“At the Edge of Safety” argues for thinking of structural family therapy as a “moral laboratory.” Borrowing a trope from Cheryl Mattingly’s recent book Moral Laboratories, the article reconsiders a therapeutic style that was once controversial by analyzing personal stories of supervision—i.e. professional training—in light of Mattingly’s suggestion that a social space in which people conduct experiments on themselves and their lives may be considered a moral laboratory. Family therapy is especially good to think with, because it is simultaneously a real and a metaphorical laboratory, physically lab-like in its use of visual technologies, yet moral in the way it puts the possibility for situational change in the hands of human actors. The technological apparatus stages evidence for sub-visible, interpersonal dynamics, while the provocative quality of not only therapeutic actions, but also of supervision, points to an ethos of experimentation. Stories of supervision reveal how personal of an experience being supervised can be. Trainees are pushed to become something otherwise, in learning to “expand” their styles. Sometimes the push is just right. Sometimes it goes too far. Whatever the case may be, the stories analyzed speak to anthropological questions concerning the uncertainty of human action and the many ways people can unknowingly injure one another with small hurts.
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Notes
Mattingly’s paradigmatic case concerns a mother named Tanya, who disagreed with her husband over which activities were appropriate for their son Andy—one of three children, a boy born with cerebral palsy. Her husband Frank proposed signing him up for a local “special needs” soccer team, for children with cognitive disabilities. Tanya had refused, worried her medically fragile son, who would be the only child in a wheelchair on the field, would be hurt. Frank prevailed, Andy played, and sure enough, he was knocked over in a game. To Tanya’s surprise, Andy was just fine, and she realized that “despite all her determination that others see her son as capable, she herself underestimated him” (2014:4).
This case is just one of many illustrations of how families with very sick children work to “step up to the plate,” having been “propelled into a new, often unexpected and unwanted project of [moral] becoming” (5). The families who have inspired the “moral laboratories” trope found themselves having to reevaluate their own commitments, create new communities, and transform the social and material spaces in which they lived in facing their challenges. Tanya’s story involves much more than a mother learning to “let go.” Only by seeing the concrete results of an experiment with an activity she had feared would Tanya learn something new. In another case, a family matriarch and her adult daughter “build a whole repertoire of experiences that give evidence to support their improbable hope” (79). Marcy, a former crack cocaine addict of 18 years, experiments with the mother she could be in the context of mundane but concrete routines such as accompanying her own mother and son to his physical therapy sessions. Ten years later, we learn in the last chapter, this very boy is murdered senselessly. In an angry and agonized lament to a gathered crowd of family and friends, a grieving brother pleads for change during a candlelight vigil, transforming a dodgy neighborhood park into an experimental space for social critique.
With this in mind, the soccer ball that appears in the previous footnote, as well as the Narcotics Anonymous book Marcy was reading during her son’s physical therapy sessions, take on a new significance.
Minuchin intended for these stories to “illuminate for the reader the values, biases, and constraints that he or she brought to the therapeutic encounter and how they affected both the supervisee’s preferred therapeutic style and my work to expand that style” (2006:99). That he did so is interesting given family therapy’s emphasis on the observable rather than the past—a specialty left to psychoanalysis.
Lee’s childhood story is full of irony and beauty. A short passage will have to convey its tone: “I once saw a woman running after her husband with a chopper; when she caught up with him, she chopped the umbrella that he was carrying, rather than the man himself. There was another woman who told her husband that if he left the house she would strip herself naked on the street, and she did. My father once took a beggar from the street and offered him a job to help me with my homework. On his second night, he tried to take one of the servant girls, who punched him flat on his nose. He was back to the street in no time, but whenever I got stuck with my homework, I would still shout my questions at him from the balcony, and he was always happy to provide me with an answer” (217–218).
By depersonalization, I believe Minuchin had meant that Bill’s family did not treat him like a person, a full human being. Earlier Minuchin is quoted as advising Lee to invite the brother to observe how their parents talk to Bill: with him, at him, or over him (228). While “depersonalizing” is the term Minuchin happened to use, I will in the next section interpret this family’s dynamics in terms of “ordinary violence.”
The relationship between family therapy and social engagement is rather complicated, and not a history I can get into here. Keeping social factors at bay is not the same thing as being ignorant of social inequality and the broader contexts in which family troubles develop.
On its surface level, the theory of the double bind is problematic for all sorts of reasons. But I would argue that the mother and the child in Bateson’s theory ought to be taken as metaphors—with the mother standing in for a person with power, and the child standing in as a vulnerable individual who depends on the powerful person for resources and recognition. The mother–child relationship, meanwhile, is a stand-in for any kind of relationship characterized by a significant length of duration. The entrenchment of patterns of hostility, denial, and paradoxical communication can be quite painful for the person who occupies the lower social position. The Azande in Evans-Pritchard’s classic study of witchcraft had a means for addressing interpersonal hostilities without directly accusing one another of negative feelings, although it is worth noting that accusations only traveled down the social hierarchy. It seems to me that family therapy may offer something similar, though the “accusations”—if you will—travel upward.
The big man imposes his will on others, and his willfulness is reflected in his capacity for anger.
See Imber-Black (2014) for a recent assessment of the state of family therapy in the United States. Imber-Black expresses the same disappointment about family therapy’s failure to make systemic change in the field of mental health services, but adds that family therapy’s marginal “step-child” status has its benefits, including room for staying committed to its point of view.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Lone Grøn for her support and encouragement, and for thinking of organizing the AAA double panel on moral (and other) laboratories in the first place, which led to this special issue. Many thanks to Tanya Luhrmann and Cheryl Mattingly, who served as discussants, and to the anonymous reviewers, who gave the manuscript a meticulous read and lent their expertise on family therapy and anthropological theory. All shortcomings are my own.
Funding
This study is part of a larger project funded by the Research Grants Council, University Grants Committee, Hong Kong (14610115).
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Kuan, T. At the Edge of Safety: Moral Experimentation in the Case of Family Therapy. Cult Med Psychiatry 41, 245–266 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-017-9520-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-017-9520-4