Family Therapy, Psychoanalysis, and Change

In this century a major change in scientific paradigm has evolved. The Aristotelian model has increasingly given way to the concepts of field and relativity, to general systems and cybernetics. In this shift the sciences of physics and chemistry and all the natural sciences have been profoundly affected. So, too, have the human behavioral sciences, and family systems theory is the manifestly new paradigm. In the transitional intervals of the past 30 years, the time of my own clinical career, the structures of psychoanalysis have undergone evolution under the influence of the new theories, and together psychoanalysis and family therapy have attempted to find reciprocal accommodations as clinical experience has evoked new hypotheses, which in turn have inspired new clinical approaches.

In 1974 Watzlawick et al. (1974) wrote a book entitled, Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution, and they dedicated it to Don Jackson, a pioneer in the field of family therapy, and like many of the innovators in that field also a psychoanalyst. The book dealt with, among others, the issue of behavioral persistence, and behavioral change. There is a question of values, of course, in deciding what is worthwhile preserving, and what would be better let go. In the world as we know it today many are concerned about the ease with which things are disposed of, and in some quarters the word “reusable” has a pejorative if not a decadent ring. Be that as it may, some states have