Etextbook 978 0133826609 Family Therapy Concepts and Methods

eTextbook 978-0133826609 Family
Therapy: Concepts and Methods

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/etextbook-978-0133826609-family-therapy-concepts-
and-methods/
Contents vii
Family Narratives 64
Gender 65
Culture 66
SUMMARY 67
PART TWO THE CLASSIC SCHOOLS OF FAMILY THERAPY

4 Bowen Family Systems Therapy 69
Sketches of Leading Figures 70
Theoretical Formulations 70
Differentiation of Self 71
Emotional Triangles 71
Multigenerational Emotional Processes 72
Emotional Cutoff 72
Societal Emotional Process 73
Family Dynamics 73
Normal Family Functioning 73
Development of Behavior Disorders 74
Mechanisms of Change 76
Goals of Therapy 76
Conditions for Behavior Change 77
Therapy 77
Assessment 77
Therapeutic Techniques 80
Evaluating Therapy Theory and Results 85
SUMMARY 87
5 Strategic Family Therapy 89

Family Dynamics 93
Goals of Therapy 95
Therapy 95
Assessment 95
SUMMARY 109
6 Structural Family Therapy 111

viii Contents
Family Dynamics 115

Goals of Therapy 118
Therapy 119
Assessment 119
SUMMARY 129
7 Experiential Family Therapy 131

Family Dynamics 133
Therapy 135
Assessment 135
SUMMARY 147
8 Psychoanalytic Family Therapy 149

Freudian Drive Psychology 151
Self Psychology 152
Object Relations Theory 152
Family Dynamics 154
Therapy 159
Assessment 159
SUMMARY 166
Contents ix
9 Cognitive-Behavioral Family Therapy 167

Family Dynamics 169
Therapy 173
Behavioral Parent Training 173
Behavioral Couples Therapy 177
The Cognitive-Behavioral Approach to Family Therapy 180
Treatment of Sexual Dysfunction 184
SUMMARY 187
PART THREE RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN FAMILY THERAPY

10 Family Therapy in the Twenty-First Century 189
Challenges to Traditional Family Systems Models 189
Erosion of Boundaries 189
Postmodernism 190
The Feminist Critique 190
Feminist Family Therapy 191
Social Constructionism and the Narrative Revolution 194
Multiculturalism 195
Race 195
Poverty and Social Class 196
Gay and Lesbian Rights 197
New Frontiers 198
Advances in Neuroscience 198
Sex and the Internet 199
Spirituality and Religion 203
Tailoring Treatment to Populations and Problems 204
Single-Parent Families 205
African American Families 207
Gay and Lesbian Families 209
Home-Based Services 212
Psychoeducation and Schizophrenia 213
Medical Family Therapy 215
Relationship Enrichment Programs 215
SUMMARY 216
x Contents
11 Solution-Focused Therapy 219

Family Dynamics 221
Normal Family Development 221
Therapy 222
Assessment 222
Taking a Break and Giving Feedback 232
Later Sessions 233
Interviewing Children 235
SUMMARY 237
12 Narrative Therapy 239

Family Dynamics 242
Therapy 245
Assessment 245
SUMMARY 255
PART FOUR THE EVALUATION OF FAMILY THERAPY

13 Comparative Analysis 257
Families as Systems 257
Stability and Change 258
Process/Content 259
Monadic, Dyadic, and Triadic Models 259
Boundaries 260
Family Dynamics 261
Contents xi

Inflexible Systems 262
Pathologic Triangles 263
Therapy 264
Assessment 264
Decisive Interventions 264
Integrative Models 268
Eclecticism 268
Selective Borrowing 268
Specially Designed Integrative Models 269
Integrative Problem-Centered Metaframeworks (IPCM) Therapy 269
The Narrative Solutions Approach 270
Integrative Couples Therapy 271
Dialectical Behaviorism 272
Other Integrative Models 273
Community Family Therapy 274
SUMMARY 275
14 Research on Family Intervention 276

Research and Practice: Worlds Apart 276
Methodological Issues in Studying the Effectiveness of Family Therapy 277
Research Findings on the E ffectiveness of Family-Focused Interventions 279
Family Interventions for Childhood Problems 279
Family Interventions for Adult Disorders 281
Family Interventions for Relationship Difficulties 283
Family Therapy Process Research 284
Common Factors 285
The Therapeutic Alliance 285
Critical Change Events in Family Therapy 286
Future Directions 288
Appendix A Chapter-by-Chapter Recommended Readings 290

Appendix B Selected Readings in Family Therapy 296
Appendix C Glossary 298
References 305
Index 342
This page intentionally left blank
The Stages of the Family Life Cycle
Family Life-Cycle Stage Emotional Process of Second-Order Changes in Family Status Required
Transition: Key Principles to Proceed Developmentally
Leaving home: single Accepting emotional and a. Differentiation of self in relation to family of origin
young adults financial responsibility b. Development of intimate peer relationships
for self c. Establishment of self in respect to work and financial
independence
The joining of families Commitment to new a. Formation of marital system
through marriage: the system b. Realignment of relationships with extended families
new couple and friends to include spouse
Families with young Accepting new members a. Adjusting marital system to make space for children
children into the system b. Joining in childrearing, financial and household tasks
c. Realignment of relationships with extended family to
include parenting and grandparenting roles
Families with adolescents Increasing flexibility of a. Shifting of parent–child relationships to permit ado-
family boundaries to lescent to move into and out of system
permit children’s b. Refocus on midlife marital and career issues
independence and c. Beginning shift toward caring for older generation
grandparents’ frailties
Launching children and Accepting a multitude of a. Renegotiation of marital system as a dyad
moving on exits from and entries b. Development of adult-to-adult relationships
into the family system c. Realignment of relationships to include in-laws and
grandchildren
d. Dealing with disabilities and death of parents (grand-
parents)
Families in later life Accepting the shifting a. Maintaining own and/or couple functioning and
generational roles interests in face of physiological decline: exploration
of new familial and social role options
b. Support for more central role of middle generation
c. Making room in the system for the wisdom and expe-
rience of the elderly, supporting the older generation
without overfunctioning for them
d. Dealing with loss of spouse, siblings, and other peers
and preparation for death
xiii
Major Events in the History
of Family Therapy
Social and Political Context Development of Family Therapy

1945 F.D.R. dies, Truman becomes president Bertalanffy presents general systems theory
World War II ends in Europe (May 8) and the
Pacific (August 14)
1946 Juan Perón elected president of Argentina Bowen at Menninger Clinic
whitaker at Emory
Macy Conference
Bateson at Harvard
1947 India partitioned into India and Pakistan
1948 Truman reelected U.S. president Whitaker begins conferences on schizophrenia
State of Israel established
1949 Communist People’s Republic of China Bowlby: “The Study and Reduction of Group
established Tensions in the Family”
1950 North Korea invades South Korea Bateson begins work at Palo Alto V.A.
1951 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg sentenced to Ruesch & Bateson: Communication: The Social
death for espionage Matrix of Society
Sen. Estes Kefauver leads Senate probe into Bowen initiates residential treatment of mothers and
organized crime children
Lidz at Yale
1952 Eisenhower elected U.S. president Bateson receives Rockefeller grant to study
communication in Palo Alto Wynne at NIMH
1953 Joseph Stalin dies Whitaker & Malone: The Roots of Psychotherapy
Korean armistice signed
1954 Supreme Court rules school segregation Bateson project research on schizophrenic
unconstitutional communication
Bowen at NIMH
1955 Rosa Parks refuses to move to the back of the Whitaker in private practice, Atlanta, Georgia.
bus; Martin Luther King, Jr., leads boycott Satir begins teaching family dynamics in Chicago
in Montgomery, Alabama
1956 Nasser elected president of Egypt Bateson, Jackson, Haley, & Weakland: “Toward a
Soviet troops crush anti-Communist rebellion Theory of Schizophrenia”
in Hungary Bowen at Georgetown
(continued)
xv
xvi Major Events in the History of Family Therapy

1957 Russians launch Sputnik I Jackson: “The Question of Family Homeostasis”
Eisenhower sends troops to Little Rock, Ackerman opens the Family Mental Health Clinic of
Arkansas, to protect school integration Jewish Family Services in New York
Boszormenyi-Nagy opens Family Therapy
Department at EPPI in Philadelphia
1958 European Common Market established Ackerman: The Psychodynamics of Family Life
1959 Castro becomes premier of Cuba MRI founded by Don Jackson
Charles de Gaulle becomes French president
1960 Kennedy elected U.S. president Family Institute founded by Nathan Ackerman
(renamed the Ackerman Institute in 1971)
Minuchin and colleagues begin doing family therapy
at Wiltwyck
1961 Berlin Wall erected Bell: Family Group Therapy
Bay of Pigs invasion Family Process founded by Ackerman and Jackson
1962 Cuban Missile Crisis Bateson’s Palo Alto project ends Haley at MRI
1963 Kennedy assassinated Haley: Strategies of Psychotherapy
1964 Johnson elected U.S. president Satir: Conjoint Family Therapy
Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Martin Luther Norbert Wiener dies (b. 1894)
King, Jr.
1965 Passage of Medicare Minuchin becomes director of Philadelphia Child
Malcolm X assassinated Guidance Clinic
Whitaker at University of Wisconsin
1966 Red Guards demonstrate in China Brief Therapy Center at MRI begun under director-
Indira Gandhi becomes prime minister of ship of Richard Fisch
India Ackerman: Treating the Troubled Family
1967 Six-Day War between Israel and Arab states Watzlawick, Beavin, & Jackson: Pragmatics of Human
Urban riots in Cleveland, Newark, and Detroit Communication
Dicks: Marital Tensions
1968 Nixon elected U.S. president Don Jackson dies (b. 1920)
Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., Satir at Esalen
assassinated
1969 Widespread demonstrations against war in Bandura: Principles of Behavior Modification
Vietnam Wolpe: The Practice of Behavior Therapy
1970 Student protests against Vietnam War result Masters & Johnson: Human Sexual Inadequacy
in killing of four students at Kent State Laing & Esterson: Sanity, Madness and the Family
1971 Twenty-Sixth Amendment grants right to vote Nathan Ackerman dies (b. 1908)
to 18-year-olds
1972 Nixon reelected U.S. president Bateson: Steps to an Ecology of Mind
Wynne at University of Rochester
1973 Supreme Court rules that states may not Center for Family Learning founded by Phil Guerin
prohibit abortion Boszormenyi-Nagy & Spark: Invisible Loyalties
Energy crisis created by oil shortages
1974 Nixon resigns Minuchin: Families and Family Therapy
Gerald Ford becomes 39th president Watzlawick, Weakland, & Fisch: Change
Major Events in the History of Family Therapy xvii

1975 Vietnam War ends Mahler, Pine, & Bergman: The Psychological Birth of
the Human Infant
Stuart: “Behavioral Remedies for Marital Ills”
1976 Carter elected U.S. president Haley: Problem-Solving Therapy
Haley to Washington, D.C.
1977 President Carter pardons most Vietnam War Family Institute of Westchester founded by Betty
draft evaders Carter
American Family Therapy Academy (AFTA) estab-
lished
1978 Camp David Accords between Egypt and Hare-Mustin: “A Feminist Approach to Family
Israel Therapy”
U.S. and People’s Republic of China establish Selvini Palazzoli et al.: Paradox and Counterparadox
diplomatic relations
1979 England’s Margaret Thatcher becomes West’s Founding of Brief Therapy Center in Milwaukee
first woman prime minister Bateson: Mind and Nature
Iranian militants seize U.S. Embassy in Tehran
and hold hostages
1980 Reagan elected U.S. president Haley: Leaving Home
U.S. boycotts summer Olympic Games in Milton Erickson dies (b. 1901)
Moscow Gregory Bateson dies (b. 1904)
1981 Sandra Day O’Connor becomes first woman Hoffman: The Foundations of Family Therapy
justice of Supreme Court Madanes: Strategic Family Therapy
Egyptian president Sadat assassinated Minuchin & Fishman: Family Therapy Techniques
1982 Equal Rights Amendment fails ratification Gilligan: In a Different Voice
Falklands war Fisch, Weakland, & Segal: Tactics of Change
The Family Therapy Networker founded by
Richard Simon
1983 U.S. invades Grenada Doherty & Baird: Family Therapy and Family
Terrorist bombing of Marine headquarters in Medicine
Beirut Keeney: Aesthetics of Change
1984 Reagan reelected U.S. president Watzlawick: The Invented Reality
U.S.S.R. boycotts summer Olympic Games in Madanes: Behind the One-Way Mirror
Los Angeles
1985 Gorbachev becomes leader of U.S.S.R. de Shazer: Keys to Solution in Brief Therapy
Gergen: “The Social Constructionist Movement in
Modern Psychology”
1986 Space shuttle Challenger explodes Anderson et al.: Schizophrenia and the Family
Selvini Palazzoli: “Towards a General Model of
Psychotic Family Games”
1987 Congress investigates the Iran–Contra affair Tom Andersen: “The Reflecting Team”
Guerin et al.: The Evaluation and Treatment of
Marital Conflict
Scharff & Scharff: Object Relations Family Therapy
1988 George H. W. Bush elected U.S. president Kerr & Bowen: Family Evaluation
Virginia Satir dies (b. 1916)
(continued)
xviii Major Events in the History of Family Therapy

1989 The Berlin Wall comes down Boyd-Franklin: Black Families in Therapy
1990 Iraq invades Kuwait Murray Bowen dies (b. 1913)
White & Epston: Narrative Means to Therapeutic
Ends
1991 Persian Gulf War against Iraq Harold Goolishian dies (b. 1924)
1992 Clinton elected U.S. president Family Institute of New Jersey founded by Monica
McGoldrick
1993 Ethnic cleansing in Bosnia Israel Zwerling dies (b. 1917)
Los Angeles police officers convicted in Minuchin & Nichols: Family Healing
Rodney King beating
1994 Republicans win majority in Congress David and Jill Scharf leave Washington School of
Nelson Mandela elected president of South Psychiatry to begin the International Institute of
Africa Object Relations Therapy
1995 Oklahoma City federal building bombed Carl Whitaker dies (b. 1912)
John Weakland dies (b. 1919)
Salvador Minuchin retires
Family Studies Inc. renamed The Minuchin Center
1996 Clinton reelected U.S. president Edwin Friedman dies (b. 1932)
Eron & Lund: Narrative Solutions in Brief Therapy
Freedman & Combs: Narrative Therapy
1997 Princess Diana dies in auto accident Michael Goldstein dies (b. 1930)
Hong Kong reverts to China
1998 President Clinton impeached by House of Minuchin, Colapinto, & Minuchin: Working with
Representatives Families of the Poor
1999 President Clinton acquitted in impeachment Neil Jacobson dies (b. 1949)
trial John Elderkin Bell dies (b. 1913)
Mara Selvini Palazzoli dies (b. 1916)
2000 George W. Bush elected U.S. president Millennium Conference, Toronto, Canada
2001 September 11 terrorist attacks James Framo dies (b. 1922)
2002 Sex abuse scandal in Catholic Church Lipchik: Beyond Techniques in Solution-Focused
Corporate corruption at Enron Therapy
2003 U.S. invades Iraq Greenan & Tunnell: Couple Therapy with Gay Men
2004 George W. Bush reelected U.S. president Gianfranco Cecchin dies (b. 1932)
2005 Hurricane Katrina devastates New Orleans Steve de Shazer dies (b. 1940)
2006 Democrats regain control of U.S. House and Minuchin, Nichols, & Lee: Assessing Families and
Senate Couples
2007 Shootings at Virginia Tech Jay Haley dies (b. 1923)
Lyman Wynne dies (b. 1923)
Insoo Kim Berg dies (b. 1934)
Albert Ellis dies (b. 1913)
Thomas Fogarty dies (b. 1927)
2008 Barack Obama elected U.S. president Michael White dies (b. 1949)
Major Events in the History of Family Therapy xix

2009 Worldwide economic recession Sprenkle, Davis, & Lebow: Common Factors in
Couple and Family Therapy
2010 Earthquake in Haiti LaSala: Coming Out, Coming Home
Dattilio: Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy with Couples
and Families
2011 Earthquake and tsunami in Japan Cose: The End of Anger
2012 Mass shootings in Newton CT Betty Carter dies (b. 1929)
Barack Obama reelected U.S. president
2013 Death of Nelson Mandela Alan Gurman dies (b. 1945)
Affordable Healthcare Act
2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa Donald Bloch dies (b. 1923)
Foreword
In this volume, Mike Nichols tells the story of family functioning of all human collectives. A major broad-
therapy—and tells it very well. It’s hard to imagine a side came from feminists who questioned the absence
more readable and informative guide to the field. of concepts of gender and power in systems thinking
Born in the late 1950s, family therapy seemed to and pointed to the distorting consequences of gender-
spring fully formed out of the heads of a group of less theory when focusing on family violence. The
seminal thinkers. Over six decades later, both theory other challenge concerned the connection between
and practice show the uncertainties and doubts that theory and practice: a challenge to the imposition of
define maturity. But in the beginning—as the story- systems theory as the basis for therapeutic practice.
tellers say—there was Gregory Bateson on the West The very techniques that once defined the field were
Coast, a tall, clean-shaven, angular intellectual, who called into question. Inevitably, the field began to re-
saw families as systems, carriers of ideas. On the East open for examination of its old taboos: the individual,
Coast was Nathan Ackerman, short, bearded, portly, intrapsychic life, emotions, biology, the past, and the
the quintessential charismatic healer, who saw fam- particular place of the family in culture and society.
ilies as collections of individuals struggling to bal- As is always characteristic of an official science,
ance feelings, irrationalities, and desires. Bateson and the field tried to preserve established concepts while
Ackerman complemented each other perfectly, the
a pragmatic attention to specific cases was demand-
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza of the family systems ing new and specific responses. As a result, today we
revolution. have an official family therapy that claims direct de-
For all the diversity of the 1960s that saw the new scendance from Bateson and a multitude of excellent
clinical practice called family therapy take a variety practitioners doing sensitive and effective work that is
of names—systemic, strategic, structural, Bowenian, frequently quite different from what systems theory
experiential—there was also a remarkable solidarity prescribes.
in the shared beliefs that defined the field. I see the therapeutic process as an encounter between
As family therapy succeeded and expanded, it distinct interpersonal cultures. Real respect for clients
was extended to encompass different client popula- and their integrity can allow therapists to be other than
tions, with specific interventions for various special fearfully cautious, can encourage them to be direct and
groups—clients with drug addictions, hospitalized authentic—respectful and compassionate—but also at
psychiatric patients, the welfare population, violent times honest and challenging.
families, and so on. All posed their own complexities. This conception of the therapist as an active
Practitioners responded to this expanded family ther- knower—of himself or herself and of the different
apy with an array of new approaches, some of which family members—is very different from the neutral
even questioned the fundamental allegiance to sys- therapist of the constructivists. But, of course, these
tems thinking. two prototypes are entirely too simplified. Most prac-
The challenges to systems theory (the official sci- titioners fall somewhere between these two poles of
ence of the time) took two forms. One was purely the- neutrality and decisiveness.
oretical: a challenge to the assumption that systemic The choice between action and interventionism,
thinking was a universal framework, applicable to the on the one hand, and meaning and conversation,
xxi
xxii Foreword
on the other, is but one of the questions the field is ideas and techniques that make family therapy such
grappling with today; there are many others. Are the an exciting enterprise. Dr. Nichols has managed to
norms of human behavior universal, or are they cultur- be comprehensive without becoming tedious. Per-
ally constructed products of political and ideological haps the secret is the engaging style of his writing,
constraint? How do we become experts? How do we or perhaps it is how he avoids getting lost in abstrac-
know what we know? Can we influence people? Can tion while keeping a clear focus on clinical practice.
we not influence them? How do we know that we are In any case, this superb book has long set the standard
not simply agents of social control? How do we know of excellence as the best introduction and guide to the
that we are accomplishing anything at all? practice of family therapy.
These questions and the rich history and contem-
porary practice of family therapy are explored in
Family Therapy: Concepts and Methods. It is a thor- Salvador Minuchin, M.D.
ough and thoughtful, fair and balanced guide to the Boca Raton, Florida
Preface
One thing that sometimes gets lost in academic dis- they click on the icon and the quiz appears. The
cussions of family therapy is the feeling of accom- first one prompts them to test their knowledge of
plishment that comes from sitting down with an chapter concepts by taking a multiple-choice quiz.
unhappy family and being able to help them. Begin-
The second quiz icon prompts them to apply their
ning therapists are understandably anxious and not
knowledge of chapter concepts by responding to
sure they’ll know how to proceed. (“How do you
open-ended questions by typing their response and
get all of them to come in?”) Veterans often speak
submitting it for immediate feedback. These self-
in abstractions. They have opinions and discuss big
assessments can reinforce understanding of key
issues—postmodernism, managed care, second-order
chapter concepts and support application of newly
cybernetics. While it’s tempting to use this space to
learned content.
say Important Things, I prefer to be a little more per-
sonal. Treating troubled families has given me the
greatest satisfaction imaginable, and I hope that the
same is or will be true for you. Content Changes in the
New Edition
♦ New section on the impact of the Affordable Care Act
New to This Edition ♦ Recommendations for establishing a fee-for-service
private practice
In this eleventh edition of Family Therapy: Concepts ♦ Revised and expanded section on attachment
and Methods, I’ve tried to describe the full scope of theory
family therapy—its rich history, the classic schools, ♦ Questions to ask when doing a genogram
the latest developments—but with increasing empha- ♦ More specific interventions from the MRI
sis on clinical practice. There are a lot of changes in approach
this edition: ♦ Detailed guidelines for making a structural family
therapy assessment
New Digital Enhancements ♦ New section with guidelines on using family
sculpting
in the Pearson eText ♦ More specific techniques used in object relations
family therapy
♦ Videos: Links to video clips of therapists have
♦ Expanded section on spirituality and religion
been embedded for students to view throughout
♦ Expanded and updated section on families and
the chapters of the Pearson eText. Students are
technology
prompted to reflect on and analyze the videos via
♦ Guidelines for therapeutic letter writing
an accompanying question.
♦ New research chapter including a discussion of
♦ Chapter Quizzes: At the end of each chapter why research has failed to influence practice and
Summary, students will find two self-assessments suggestions for bridging the research-practice gap
marked by a checkmark icon. In the Pearson eText, ♦ New case studies
xxiii
xxiv Preface
Instructor Supplements who went out of their way to help me prepare this
eleventh edition were Yvonne Dolan, Jerome Price,
An instructor’s manual, test bank, and PowerPoint Deborah Luepnitz, William Madsen, Frank Dattilio,
slides are available to accompany this text. They can be Vicki Dickerson, Douglas Breunlin, and Salvador
downloaded at www.pearsonhighered.com/educator. Minuchin. And I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Sean
Davis for his extensive and thoughtful contributions
to this edition. Sean has the rare combination of ac-
Acknowledgments ademic smarts and clinical sophistication that makes
his perspective so valuable. To paraphrase John, Paul,
Albert Einstein once said, “If you want to learn about George, and Ringo, I get by with a lot of help from my
physics, pay attention to what physicists do, not what friends—and I thank them one and all. I am especially
they say they do.” When you read about therapy, it can grateful to Julie Peters at Pearson for making a hard
be hard to see past the jargon and political packaging job easier.
to the essential ideas and practices. So in preparing Finally, I would like to thank my postgraduate
this edition, I’ve traveled widely to visit and observe instructors in family life: my wife, Melody, and my
actual sessions of the leading practitioners. I’ve also children, Sandy and Paul. In the brief span of forty-five
invited several master therapists to share some of their years, Melody has seen me grow from a shy young
best case studies with you. The result is a more prag- man, totally ignorant of how to be a husband and
matic, clinical focus. I hope you like it. father, to a shy middle-aged man, still bewildered and
So many people have contributed to my develop- still trying. My children never cease to amaze me. If
ment as a family therapist and to the writing of this in my wildest dreams I had imagined children to love
book that it is impossible to thank them all. But I would and be proud of, I wouldn’t even have come close to
like to single out a few. To the people who taught me children as fine as Sandy and Paul.
family therapy—Lyman Wynne, Murray Bowen, and
Salvador Minuchin—thank you. Some of the people M. P. N.
I n t r o d u c t i o n
T
here wasn’t much information on the
intake sheet. Just a name, Holly Roberts,
the fact that she was a senior in college, The
Foundations
and her presenting complaint: “trouble making
decisions.”
The first thing Holly said when she sat down
was, “I’m not sure I need to be here. You prob- of Family
ably have a lot of people who need help more
than I do.” Then she started to cry.
Therapy
It was springtime. The tulips were up, the
trees were turning leafy green, and purple Leaving Home
clumps of lilacs perfumed the air. Life and all its
possibilities stretched out before her, but Holly
was naggingly, unaccountably depressed.
The decision Holly was having trouble making
was what to do after graduation. The more she
tried to figure it out, the less able she was to
concentrate. She started sleeping late, missing
classes. Finally, her roommate talked her into
going to the counseling center. “I wouldn’t have
come,” Holly said. “I can take care of my own
problems.”
I was into cathartic therapy back then. Most
people have stories to tell and tears to shed.
Some of the stories, I suspected, were dramatized
to elicit sympathy. We seem to give ourselves
permission to cry only with some very accept-
able excuse. Of all the human emotions we’re
ashamed of, feeling sorry for yourself tops the list.
I didn’t know what was behind Holly’s depres-
sion, but I was sure I could help. I felt comforta-
ble with depression. Ever since my senior year in
high school when my friend Alex died, I’d been
a little depressed myself.
♦ ♦ ♦
After Alex died, the rest of the summer was a
dark blur. I cried a lot. And I got mad whenever any-
body suggested that life goes on. Alex’s minister said
that his death wasn’t really a tragedy because now
“Alex was with God in heaven.” I wanted to scream,
1
2 Part One: The Context of Family Therapy
but I numbed myself instead. In the fall, I went off Looking back, I don’t remember much that was
to college, and, even though it seemed disloyal to said in that first meeting. Both parents were worried
Alex, life did go on. I still cried from time to time, about Holly. “We’ll do whatever you think best,”
but with the tears came a painful discovery. Not all of Mrs. Roberts said. Holly’s stepfather, Mr. Morgan,
my grief was for Alex. Yes, I loved him. Yes, I missed said they could arrange for a good psychiatrist “to
him. But his death provided me the justification help Holly over this crisis.” But, Holly didn’t want to
to cry about the everyday sorrows of my own life. go home, and she said so with more energy than I’d
Maybe grief is always like that. At the time, though, heard from her in a long time. That was on Saturday.
it struck me as a betrayal. I was using Alex’s death to I said that there was no need to rush into a decision,
feel sorry for myself. so we arranged to meet again on Monday.
When Holly and her parents sat down in my
♦ ♦ ♦ office on Monday morning, it was obvious that some-
thing had happened. Mrs. Roberts’s eyes were red
What, I wondered, was making Holly so sad? In from crying. Holly glared at her and looked away.
fact, Holly didn’t have a dramatic story. Her feelings Mr. Morgan turned to me. “We’ve been fighting all
weren’t focused. After those first moments in my of- weekend. Holly heaps abuse on me, and when I try to
fice, she rarely cried. When she did, it was more an respond, Lena takes her side. That’s the way it’s been
involuntary tearing up than a sobbing release. She since day one of this marriage.”
talked about the future and not knowing what she The story that emerged was one of those sad his-
wanted to do with her life. She talked about not hav- tories of jealousy and resentment that turn ordinary
ing a boyfriend, but she didn’t say much about her love into bitter, injured feelings and, all too often, tear
family. If the truth be told, I wasn’t much interested. families apart. Lena Roberts was thirty-four when she
Back then, I thought home was a place you left in or- met Tom Morgan. He was a robust fifty-six. The sec-
der to grow up. ond obvious difference between them was money. He
Holly was hurting and needed someone to lean on, was a stockbroker who’d retired to run a horse farm.
but something made her hold back, as though she didn’t She was waitressing to support herself and her daugh-
quite trust me. It was frustrating. I wanted to help. ter. It was a second marriage for both of them.
A month went by, and Holly’s depression got Lena thought Tom could be the missing father fig-
worse. I started seeing her twice a week, but we ure in Holly’s life. Unfortunately, Lena couldn’t ac-
weren’t getting anywhere. One Friday afternoon, cept all the rules Tom wanted to enforce, and so he
Holly was feeling so despondent that I didn’t think became the wicked stepfather. He made the mistake
she should go back to her dorm alone. I asked her in- of trying to take over and, when the predictable ar-
stead to lie down on the couch in my office and, with guments ensued, Lena sided with her daughter. There
her permission, I called her parents. were tears and midnight shouting matches. Twice
Mrs. Roberts answered the phone. I told her that I Holly ran away for a few days. This triangle nearly
thought she and her husband should come to Rochester proved the marriage’s undoing, but things calmed
and meet with me and Holly to discuss the advis- down after Holly left for college.
ability of Holly taking a medical leave of absence. Holly expected to leave home and not look back.
Unsure as I was of my authority back then, I steeled She would make new friends. She would study hard
myself for an argument. Mrs. Roberts surprised me by and choose a career. She would never depend on a
agreeing to come at once. man to support her. Unfortunately, she left home
The first thing that struck me about Holly’s parents with unfinished business. She hated Tom for the way
was the disparity in their ages. Mrs. Roberts looked he treated her mother. He was always demanding
like a slightly older version of Holly; she couldn’t to know where her mother was going, who she was
have been much over thirty-five. Her husband looked going with, and when she would be back. If she was
sixty. It turned out that he was Holly’s stepfather. the least bit late, there would be a scene. Why did her
They had married when Holly was sixteen. mother put up with it?
Introduction The Foundations of Family Therapy 3
Blaming her stepfather was simple and satisfying. of techniques; it’s a whole new approach to under-
But another set of feelings, harder to face, was eat- standing human behavior—as fundamentally shaped
ing at Holly. She hated her mother for marrying Tom by its social context.
and for letting him be so mean to her. What had her
mother seen in him? Had she sold out for a big house
and a fancy car? Holly didn’t have answers to these The Myth of the Hero
questions; she didn’t even allow them into full aware-
ness. Unfortunately, repression doesn’t work like put- Ours is a culture that celebrates the uniqueness of
ting something away in a closet and forgetting about the individual and the search for an autonomous self.
it. It takes a lot of energy to keep unwelcome emo- Holly’s story could be told as a coming-of-age drama:
tions at bay. a young person’s struggle to break away from child-
Holly found excuses not to go home during col- hood and provincialism, to take hold of adulthood and
lege. It didn’t even feel like home anymore. She promise and the future. If she fails, we’re tempted to
buried herself in her studies. But rage and bitterness look inside the young adult, the failed hero.
gnawed at her until, in her senior year, facing an While the unbounded individualism of the hero
uncertain future, knowing only that she couldn’t go may once have been encouraged more for men than
home again, she gave in to hopelessness. No wonder women, as a cultural ideal it casts its shadow on us
she was depressed. all. Even if Holly cared about connection as well
I found the whole story sad. Not knowing about much as autonomy, she may be judged by the prevail-
family dynamics and never having lived in a step- ing image of accomplishment.
family, I wondered why they couldn’t just try to get We were raised on the myth of the hero: the Lone
along. Why did they have so little sympathy for each Ranger, Robin Hood, Wonder Woman. When we got
other? Why couldn’t Holly accept her mother’s right older, we searched for real-life heroes: Eleanor Roosevelt,
to find love a second time around? Why couldn’t Tom Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela. These men and
respect the priority of his wife’s relationship with her women stood for something. If only we could be a little
daughter? And why couldn’t Lena listen to her daugh- more like these larger-than-life individuals who seemed to
ter’s adolescent anger without getting so defensive? rise above their circumstances.
That session with Holly and her parents was my Only later did we realize that the circumstances we
first lesson in family therapy. Family members in wanted to rise above were part of the human condition—
therapy talk not about actual events but about re- our inescapable connection to our families. The roman
constructed memories that resemble the original ex- tic image of the hero is based on the illusion that
periences only in certain ways. Holly’s memories authentic selfhood can be achieved as an autonomous
resembled her mother’s memories very little, and individual. We do many things alone, including some of
her stepfather’s not at all. In the gaps between their our most heroic acts, but we are defined and sustained
truths, there was little room for reason and no desire by a network of human relationships. Our need to wor-
to pursue it. ship heroes is partly a need to rise above littleness and
Although that meeting may not have been terribly self-doubt, but it is perhaps equally a product of imag-
productive, it did put Holly’s unhappiness in perspec- ining a life unfettered by all those pesky relationships
tive. No longer did I think of her as a tragic young that somehow never quite go the way we want them to.
woman all alone in the world. She was that, of course, When we do think about families, it’s often in
but she was also a daughter torn between running negative terms—as burdens holding us back or as de-
away from a home she no longer felt part of and being structive elements in the lives of our patients. What
afraid to leave her mother alone with a man she didn’t catches our attention are differences and discord. The
trust. I think that’s when I became a family therapist. harmonies of family life—loyalty, tolerance, solace,
To say that I didn’t know much about families, and support—often slide by unnoticed, part of the
much less about how to help them, would be an un- taken-for-granted background of life. If we would be
derstatement. But family therapy isn’t just a new set heroes, then we must have villains.
These days there’s a lot of talk about dysfunctional It’s possible to look back on the days before fam-
families. Unfortunately, much of this amounts to lit- ily therapy and see those who insisted on segregating
tle more than parent bashing. People suffer because of patients from their families as exponents of a fos-
what their parents did: their mother’s career, their fa- silized view of mental disorder, according to which
ther’s unreasonable expectations—these are the causes psychiatric maladies are firmly embedded inside
of their unhappiness. Perhaps this is an advance on the heads of individuals. Considering that clinicians
stewing in guilt and shame, but it’s a long way from didn’t begin treating families together until the mid-
understanding what really goes on in families. 1950s, it’s tempting to ask, “What took them so
One reason for blaming family sorrows on the long?” In fact, there were good reasons for conducting
personal failings of parents is that it’s hard for the av- therapy in private.
erage person to see past individual personalities to the The two most influential approaches to psycho-
structural patterns that make them a family—a system therapy in the twentieth century, Freud’s psycho-
of interconnected lives governed by strict but unspo- analysis and Rogers’s client-centered therapy, were
ken rules. both predicated on the assumption that psychological
People feel controlled and helpless not because problems arise from unhealthy interactions with oth-
they are victims of parental folly and deceit but be- ers and can best be alleviated in a private relationship
cause they don’t understand the forces that tie hus- between therapist and patient.
bands and wives and parents and children together. Freud’s discoveries indicted the family, first as a
Plagued by anxiety and depression, or merely trou- breeding ground of childhood seduction and later as
bled and uncertain, some people turn to psychother- the agent of cultural repression. If people grew up a lit-
apy for help. In the process, they turn away from the tle bit neurotic—afraid of their own natural instincts—
irritants that propel them into therapy. Chief among who should we blame but their parents?
these are unhappy relationships—with friends and Given that neurotic conflicts were spawned in the
lovers, and with our families. Our disorders are pri- family, it seemed natural to assume that the best way to
vate ailments. When we retreat to the safety of a undo the family’s influence was to isolate relatives from
synthetic relationship, the last thing we want is to treatment, to bar their contaminating influence from the
take our families with us. Is it any wonder, then, that psychoanalytic operating room. Because psychoanaly-
when Freud ventured to explore the dark forces of sis focused on the patient’s memories and fantasies, the
the mind, he locked the family outside the consulting family’s presence would only obscure the subjective
room? truth of the past. Freud wasn’t interested in the living
family; he was interested in the family-as-remembered.
Psychotherapeutic Sanctuary
Psychotherapy was once a private enterprise. The con-
sulting room was a place of healing, yes, but it was
equally a sanctuary, a refuge from a troubled and trou-
bling world.
Buffeted about in love and work, unable to find
World History Archive/Newscom
solace elsewhere, adults came to therapy to find sat-

Freud excluded
isfaction and meaning. Parents, worried about their
the family from
children’s behavior, sent them for guidance and di-
psychoanalysis to
rection. In many ways, psychotherapy displaced the help patients feel
family’s role in solving the problems of everyday life. safe to explore
Freud excluded the family from psychoanalysis the full range of
to help patients feel safe to explore the full range of their thoughts and
their thoughts and feelings. feelings.
By conducting treatment in private, Freud safe- understanding human behavior. Both have their
guarded patients’ trust in the sanctity of the therapeu- virtues. Individual therapy provides the concentrated
tic relationship and thus maximized the likelihood focus to help people face their fears and learn to
that they would repeat, in relation to the analyst, the become more fully themselves. Individual therapists
understandings and misunderstandings of childhood. have always recognized the importance of family life
in shaping personality, but they have assumed that
♦ ♦ ♦ these influences are internalized and that intrapsychic
dynamics become the dominant forces controlling
Carl Rogers also believed that psychological prob- behavior. Treatment can and should, therefore, be di-
lems stemmed from destructive family relations. Each rected at the person and his or her personal makeup.
of us, Rogers said, is born with an innate tendency Family therapists, on the other hand, believe that the
toward self-actualization. Left to our own devices, we dominant forces in our lives are located externally, in
tend to follow our own best interests. Unhappily, said the family. Therapy, in this framework, is directed at
Rogers, our instinct for actualization gets subverted by changing the organization of the family. When family
our craving for approval. We learn to do what we think organization is transformed, the life of every family
others want, even though it may not be what’s best member is altered accordingly.
for us. This last point—that changing a family changes
Gradually, this conflict between self-fulfillment the lives of its members—is important enough to
and need for approval leads to denial of our authen- elaborate. Family therapy isn’t predicated merely
tic selves—and even the feelings that signal them. We on changing the individual patient in context. Fam-
swallow our anger, stifle our exuberance, and bury ily therapy exerts change on the entire family; there-
our lives under a mountain of expectations. fore, improvement can be lasting because each family
The therapy Rogers developed was designed to member is changed and continues to exert synchro-
help patients uncover their real feelings. The Rogerian nous change on other family members.
therapist listens sympathetically, offering compassion Almost any human difficulty can be treated with
and understanding. In the presence of such an accept- either individual or family therapy, but certain prob-
ing listener, patients gradually get in touch with their lems are especially suited to a family approach,
own inner promptings. among them problems with children (who must, re-
Like the psychoanalyst, the client-centered ther- gardless of what happens in therapy, return home to
apist maintains absolute privacy in the therapeutic their parents), complaints about a marriage or other
relationship to avoid any possibility that patients’ intimate relationship, family feuds, and symptoms
feelings might be subverted to win approval. Only an that develop in an individual at the time of a major
objective outsider could be counted on to provide the family transition.
unconditional acceptance to help patients rediscover If problems that arise around family transitions
their real selves. That’s why family members had no make a therapist think first about the role of the
place in the process of client-centered therapy. family, individual therapy may be especially useful
when people identify something about themselves
that they’ve tried in vain to change while their so-
Family versus Individual cial environment remains stable. Thus, if a woman
Therapy gets depressed during her first year at college, a
therapist might wonder if her sadness is related to
As you can see, there were valid reasons for conduct- leaving home and leaving her parents alone with
ing psychotherapy in private. Although a strong claim each other. But if the same woman were to become
can be made for individual psychotherapy, equally depressed in her thirties, during a long period of sta-
strong claims can be made for family therapy. bility in her life, we might wonder if there was some-
Individual psychotherapy and family therapy thing about her approach to life that wasn’t working
each offer an approach to treatment and a way of for her. Examining her life in private—away from
troubled relationships—doesn’t, however, mean that work with what’s going on in the present. Although the
she should believe she can fulfill herself in isolation mother in the earlier example may only have started
from other people. reproaching her daughter when she started avoiding
The view of persons as separate entities, with fam- social activities, her continuing attempts to motivate
ilies acting on them, is consistent with the way we the girl with criticism may only serve to perpetuate a
experience ourselves. We recognize the influence of circular pattern of withdrawal-and-criticism.
others—especially as obligation and constraint—but When things go wrong in relationships, most of us
it’s hard to see that we are embedded in a network are generous in giving credit to other people. Because
of relationships, that we are part of something larger we look at the world from inside our own skins, it’s
than ourselves. easy to see other people’s contributions to our mutual
problems. Blaming is only natural. The illusion of
unilateral influence tempts therapists too, especially
when they hear only one side of a story. But once we
Thinking in Lines, Thinking understand that reciprocity is the governing principle
in Circles of relationships, we can begin to get past thinking in
terms of villains and victims.
Mental illness has traditionally been explained in Suppose that a father complains about his teenage
linear terms—medical or psychological. Both para- son’s behavior.
digms treat emotional distress as a symptom of inter-
Father: It’s my son. He’s rude and defiant.
nal dysfunction with historical causes.
Linear explanations take the form of A causes Therapist: Who taught him that?
B. This works fine for some things. If you’re driv- Instead of accepting the father’s perspective that
ing along and your car suddenly sputters to a stop, he’s a victim of his son’s villainy, the therapist’s ques-
go ahead and look for a simple explanation. Maybe tion invites him to look for patterns of mutual influ-
you’re out of gas. If so, there’s a simple solution. Hu- ence. The point isn’t to shift blame from one person
man problems are usually a bit more complicated. to another but to get away from blame altogether. As
Individual therapists think in terms of linear cau- long as he sees the problem as his son’s doing, the fa-
sality when they explore what happened to make in- ther has little choice but to hope the boy will change.
dividuals behave the way they do. If a young woman (Waiting for other people to change is like planning
has low self-esteem, perhaps it’s because her mother your future around winning the lottery.) Learning to
constantly criticizes her. Family therapists prefer to think in circles rather than lines empowers us to look
think in terms of circular causality and consider peo- at the half of the equation we can control.
ple’s mutual influence on each other. Thus, the young
woman’s moping around the house might be a re-
sponse to her mother’s fault-finding—and the moth-
er’s finding fault might be a response to the young The Power of Family Therapy
woman’s moping around the house. The more the
mother criticizes, the more the young woman with- The power of family therapy derives from bringing
draws, and the more the young woman withdraws, parents and children together to transform their in-
the more the mother criticizes. teractions. Instead of isolating individuals from the
The term circular causality calls attention to the cy- emotional origins of their conflict, problems are ad-
cles of interaction in relationships. But in fact the term dressed at their source.
is somewhat of a misnomer, because the focus is not on What keeps people stuck is their inability to see
causality—how something got started—but on the on- their own participation in the problems that plague
going transactions that sustain it. In some cases, maybe them. With eyes fixed firmly on what recalcitrant oth-
something in the past did trigger an unhappy pattern ers are doing, it’s hard for most people to see the pat-
of interaction. But the past is over; therapists can only terns that bind them together. The family therapist’s
job is to give them a wake-up call. When a husband Bob tried to shift responsibility back to Shirley.
complains that his wife nags, and the therapist asks “Doesn’t she have to kiss me first?”
how he contributes to her doing that, the therapist is “No,” the therapist said. “In real life, you have to
challenging the husband to see the hyphenated him- earn that.”
and-her of their interactions.
♦ ♦ ♦
♦ ♦ ♦
In the opening of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy wrote:
When Bob and Shirley came for help with marital “All happy families resemble one another; each un-
problems, her complaint was that he never shared his happy family is unhappy in its own way.” Every un-
feelings; his was that she always criticized him. This happy family may be unhappy in its own way, but
is a classic trading of complaints that keeps couples everyone stumbles over the same familiar challenges
stuck as long as they fail to see the reciprocal pattern of family life. It’s no secret what those challenges
in which each partner provokes in the other precisely are—learning to live together, dealing with difficult
the behavior he or she can’t stand. So the therapist relatives, chasing after children, coping with ado-
said to Bob, “If you were a frog, what would you be lescence, and so on. What not everyone realizes,
like if Shirley changed you into a prince?” When Bob however, is that a relatively small number of sys-
countered that he doesn’t talk with her because she’s tems dynamics, once understood, illuminate those
so critical, it seemed to the couple like the same old ar- challenges and enable families to move successfully
gument—but the therapist saw this as the beginning of through the predictable dilemmas of life. Like all
change—Bob starting to speak up. One way to create healers, family therapists sometimes deal with bizarre
an opening for change in rigid families is to support the and baffling cases, but much of their work is with or-
blamed person and help bring him back into the fray. dinary human beings learning life’s painful lessons.
When Shirley criticized Bob for complaining, he Their stories, and the stories of the men and women
tried to retreat, but the therapist said, “No, continue. of family therapy who have undertaken to help them,
You’re still a frog.” are the inspiration for this book.
c h a p t e r 1
I
n this chapter, we explore the antecedents and
early years of family therapy. There are two
The Evolution compelling stories here: one of personalities,
of Family
one of ideas. The first story revolves around
the pioneers—visionary iconoclasts who broke
Therapy the mold of seeing life and its troubles as a

function of individuals and their personalities.
Make no mistake: The shift from an individual to
A Revolutionary Shift in a systemic perspective was a revolutionary one,
Perspective providing those who grasped it with a powerful
tool for understanding and resolving human
problems.
The second story in the evolution of family
therapy is one of ideas. The restless curiosity of
the first family therapists led them to ingenious
new ways of conceptualizing the joys and
sorrows of family life.
As you read this history, stay open to surprises.
Be ready to reexamine easy assumptions—
including the assumption that family therapy
began as a benevolent effort to support the
institution of the family. The truth is, therapists
first encountered families as adversaries.
Learning Outcomes
♦♦ Describe the circumstances that led to The Undeclared War
the birth of family therapy.
Although we came to think of asylums as places of
♦♦ List the founders of family therapy and
cruelty and detention, they were originally built to
where they practiced.
rescue the insane from being locked away in family
♦♦ List the first family therapy theories and attics. Accordingly, except for purposes of footing
when they were popular. the bill, hospital psychiatrists kept families at arm’s
♦♦ Describe early family therapy theoretical length. In the 1950s, however, two puzzling devel-
concepts. opments forced therapists to recognize the family’s
power to alter the course of treatment.
Therapists began to notice that often when a pa-
tient got better, someone else in the family got worse,
almost as though the family needed a symptomatic
member. As in the game of hide-and-seek, it didn’t
seem to matter who “It” was as long as someone
played the part. In one case, Don Jackson (1954)
was treating a woman for depression. When she be-
gan to improve, her husband complained that she was
8
Chapter 1 The Evolution of Family Therapy 9
getting worse. When she continued to improve, the What this case dramatizes is how parents use
husband lost his job. Eventually, when the woman their children as a buffer to protect them from in-
was completely well, the husband killed himself. Ap- timacy. To the would-be Oedipus, Minuchin said,
parently this man’s stability was predicated on having “You’re scratching your eyes for your mother, so
a sick wife. that she’ll have something to worry about. You’re
a good boy. Good children sacrifice themselves for
Another strange story of shifting disturbance was
their parents.”
that patients often improved in the hospital only to get
worse when they went home.
Families are made of strange glue—they stretch
Case Study but never let go. Few blamed the family for outright
In a bizarre case of Oedipus revisited, Salvador malevolence, yet there was an invidious undercurrent
Minuchin treated a young man hospitalized for trying to these observations. The official story of family
to scratch out his eyes. The man functioned normally therapy is one of respect for the family, but maybe
in Bellevue but returned to self-mutilation each time none of us ever quite gets over the adolescent idea
he went home. He could be sane, it seemed, only in that families are the enemy of freedom.
an insane world.
It turned out that the young man was extremely Small Group Dynamics
close to his mother, a bond that grew even tighter
during the seven years of his father’s mysterious ab- Those who first sought to understand and treat fam-
sence. The father was a compulsive gambler who ilies found a ready parallel in small groups. Group
disappeared shortly after being declared legally dynamics were applicable to family therapy because
incompetent. The rumor was that the Mafia had group life is a complex blend of individual personali-
kidnapped him. When, just as mysteriously, the fa- ties and properties of the group.
ther returned, his son began his bizarre attempts at In 1920, the pioneering social psychologist
self-mutilation. Perhaps he wanted to blind himself
William McDougall published The Group Mind, in
so as not to see his obsession with his mother and
hatred of his father. which he described how a group’s continuity depends
But this family was neither ancient nor Greek, on boundaries for differentiation of function and on
and Minuchin was more pragmatist than poet. So customs and habits to make relationships predict-
he challenged the father to protect his son by be- able. A more scientific approach to group dynamics
ginning to deal directly with his wife, and then he was developed in the 1940s by Kurt Lewin, whose
challenged the man’s demeaning attitude toward field theory (Lewin, 1951) guided a generation of re-
her, which had driven her to seek her son’s protec- searchers. Drawing on the Gestalt school of percep-
tion. The therapy was a challenge to the family’s tion, Lewin developed the notion that a group is more
structure and, in Bellevue, working with the psychi- than the sum of its parts. The transcendent property of
atric staff to ease the young man back into the fam-
groups has obvious relevance to family therapists, who
ily, into the lion’s den.
must work not only with individuals but also with fam-
Minuchin confronted the father, saying, “As a
father of a child in danger, what you’re doing isn’t ily systems—and their famous resistance to change.
enough.” Analyzing what he called quasi-stationary social
“What should I do?” asked the man. equilibrium, Lewin pointed out that changing group
“I don’t know,” Minuchin replied. “Ask your behavior requires “unfreezing.” Only after something
son.” Then, for the first time in years, father and shakes up a group’s beliefs will its members be pre-
son began talking. Just as they were about to run pared to change. In individual therapy this process is
out of things to say, Dr. Minuchin commented to initiated by the unhappy experiences that lead people
the parents: “In a strange way, he’s telling you that to seek help. When someone decides to meet with a
he prefers to be treated like a child. When he was therapist, that person has already begun to unfreeze
in the hospital he was twenty-three. Now that he’s
old habits. When families come for treatment, it’s a
returned home again, he’s six.”
different story.
Richard T. Nowitz/Corbis
The first people to practice family therapy turned to group therapy for a model.
Family members may not be sufficiently unsettled Dependency masquerades as therapy when fami-
by one member’s problems to consider changing their lies allow therapists to subvert their autonomy in the
ways. Furthermore, family members bring their own name of problem solving. Pairing is seen in families
reference group with them, with all its traditions and when one parent colludes with the children to under-
habits. Consequently, more effort is required to un- mine the other parent.
freeze, or shake up, families before real change can The process/content distinction in group dy-
take place. The need for unfreezing foreshadowed namics had a major impact on family treatment.
early family therapists’ concern about disrupting fam- Experienced therapists learn to attend as much to
ily homeostasis, a notion that dominated family ther- how people talk as to the content of their discus-
apy for decades. sions. For example, a mother might tell her daugh-
Wilfred Bion was another student of group func- ter that she shouldn’t play with Barbie dolls because
tioning who emphasized the group as a whole, with she shouldn’t aspire to an image of bubble-headed
its own dynamics and structure. According to Bion beauty. The content of the mother’s message is,
(1948), most groups become diverted from their pri- “Respect yourself as a person.” But if the mother
mary tasks by engaging in patterns of fight–flight, expresses her point of view by disparaging the
dependency, and pairing. Bion’s basic assumptions daughter’s wishes, then the process of her message
are easily extrapolated to family therapy: Some is, “Your feelings don’t count.”
families skirt around hot issues like a cat circling a Unfortunately, the content of some discussions is
snake. Others use therapy to bicker endlessly, never so compelling that therapists get sidetracked from the
really contemplating compromise, much less change. process. Suppose that a therapist invites a teenager
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
DANCE ON STILTS AT THE GIRLS’ UNYAGO, NIUCHI
Newala, too, suffers from the distance of its water-supply—at least

the Newala of to-day does; there was once another Newala in a lovely
valley at the foot of the plateau. I visited it and found scarcely a trace
of houses, only a Christian cemetery, with the graves of several
missionaries and their converts, remaining as a monument of its
former glories. But the surroundings are wonderfully beautiful. A
thick grove of splendid mango-trees closes in the weather-worn
crosses and headstones; behind them, combining the useful and the
agreeable, is a whole plantation of lemon-trees covered with ripe
fruit; not the small African kind, but a much larger and also juicier
imported variety, which drops into the hands of the passing traveller,
without calling for any exertion on his part. Old Newala is now under
the jurisdiction of the native pastor, Daudi, at Chingulungulu, who,
as I am on very friendly terms with him, allows me, as a matter of
course, the use of this lemon-grove during my stay at Newala.
FEET MUTILATED BY THE RAVAGES OF THE “JIGGER”
(Sarcopsylla penetrans)
The water-supply of New Newala is in the bottom of the valley,

some 1,600 feet lower down. The way is not only long and fatiguing,
but the water, when we get it, is thoroughly bad. We are suffering not
only from this, but from the fact that the arrangements at Newala are
nothing short of luxurious. We have a separate kitchen—a hut built
against the boma palisade on the right of the baraza, the interior of
which is not visible from our usual position. Our two cooks were not
long in finding this out, and they consequently do—or rather neglect
to do—what they please. In any case they do not seem to be very
particular about the boiling of our drinking-water—at least I can
attribute to no other cause certain attacks of a dysenteric nature,
from which both Knudsen and I have suffered for some time. If a
man like Omari has to be left unwatched for a moment, he is capable
of anything. Besides this complaint, we are inconvenienced by the
state of our nails, which have become as hard as glass, and crack on
the slightest provocation, and I have the additional infliction of
pimples all over me. As if all this were not enough, we have also, for
the last week been waging war against the jigger, who has found his
Eldorado in the hot sand of the Makonde plateau. Our men are seen
all day long—whenever their chronic colds and the dysentery likewise
raging among them permit—occupied in removing this scourge of
Africa from their feet and trying to prevent the disastrous
consequences of its presence. It is quite common to see natives of
this place with one or two toes missing; many have lost all their toes,
or even the whole front part of the foot, so that a well-formed leg
ends in a shapeless stump. These ravages are caused by the female of
Sarcopsylla penetrans, which bores its way under the skin and there
develops an egg-sac the size of a pea. In all books on the subject, it is
stated that one’s attention is called to the presence of this parasite by
an intolerable itching. This agrees very well with my experience, so
far as the softer parts of the sole, the spaces between and under the
toes, and the side of the foot are concerned, but if the creature
penetrates through the harder parts of the heel or ball of the foot, it
may escape even the most careful search till it has reached maturity.
Then there is no time to be lost, if the horrible ulceration, of which
we see cases by the dozen every day, is to be prevented. It is much
easier, by the way, to discover the insect on the white skin of a
European than on that of a native, on which the dark speck scarcely
shows. The four or five jiggers which, in spite of the fact that I
constantly wore high laced boots, chose my feet to settle in, were
taken out for me by the all-accomplished Knudsen, after which I
thought it advisable to wash out the cavities with corrosive
sublimate. The natives have a different sort of disinfectant—they fill
the hole with scraped roots. In a tiny Makua village on the slope of
the plateau south of Newala, we saw an old woman who had filled all
the spaces under her toe-nails with powdered roots by way of
prophylactic treatment. What will be the result, if any, who can say?
The rest of the many trifling ills which trouble our existence are
really more comic than serious. In the absence of anything else to
smoke, Knudsen and I at last opened a box of cigars procured from
the Indian store-keeper at Lindi, and tried them, with the most
distressing results. Whether they contain opium or some other
narcotic, neither of us can say, but after the tenth puff we were both
“off,” three-quarters stupefied and unspeakably wretched. Slowly we
recovered—and what happened next? Half-an-hour later we were
once more smoking these poisonous concoctions—so insatiable is the
craving for tobacco in the tropics.
Even my present attacks of fever scarcely deserve to be taken
seriously. I have had no less than three here at Newala, all of which
have run their course in an incredibly short time. In the early
afternoon, I am busy with my old natives, asking questions and
making notes. The strong midday coffee has stimulated my spirits to
an extraordinary degree, the brain is active and vigorous, and work
progresses rapidly, while a pleasant warmth pervades the whole
body. Suddenly this gives place to a violent chill, forcing me to put on
my overcoat, though it is only half-past three and the afternoon sun
is at its hottest. Now the brain no longer works with such acuteness
and logical precision; more especially does it fail me in trying to
establish the syntax of the difficult Makua language on which I have
ventured, as if I had not enough to do without it. Under the
circumstances it seems advisable to take my temperature, and I do
so, to save trouble, without leaving my seat, and while going on with
my work. On examination, I find it to be 101·48°. My tutors are
abruptly dismissed and my bed set up in the baraza; a few minutes
later I am in it and treating myself internally with hot water and
lemon-juice.
Three hours later, the thermometer marks nearly 104°, and I make
them carry me back into the tent, bed and all, as I am now perspiring
heavily, and exposure to the cold wind just beginning to blow might
mean a fatal chill. I lie still for a little while, and then find, to my
great relief, that the temperature is not rising, but rather falling. This
is about 7.30 p.m. At 8 p.m. I find, to my unbounded astonishment,
that it has fallen below 98·6°, and I feel perfectly well. I read for an
hour or two, and could very well enjoy a smoke, if I had the
wherewithal—Indian cigars being out of the question.
Having no medical training, I am at a loss to account for this state
of things. It is impossible that these transitory attacks of high fever
should be malarial; it seems more probable that they are due to a
kind of sunstroke. On consulting my note-book, I become more and
more inclined to think this is the case, for these attacks regularly
follow extreme fatigue and long exposure to strong sunshine. They at
least have the advantage of being only short interruptions to my
work, as on the following morning I am always quite fresh and fit.
My treasure of a cook is suffering from an enormous hydrocele which
makes it difficult for him to get up, and Moritz is obliged to keep in
the dark on account of his inflamed eyes. Knudsen’s cook, a raw boy
from somewhere in the bush, knows still less of cooking than Omari;
consequently Nils Knudsen himself has been promoted to the vacant
post. Finding that we had come to the end of our supplies, he began
by sending to Chingulungulu for the four sucking-pigs which we had
bought from Matola and temporarily left in his charge; and when
they came up, neatly packed in a large crate, he callously slaughtered
the biggest of them. The first joint we were thoughtless enough to
entrust for roasting to Knudsen’s mshenzi cook, and it was
consequently uneatable; but we made the rest of the animal into a
jelly which we ate with great relish after weeks of underfeeding,
consuming incredible helpings of it at both midday and evening
meals. The only drawback is a certain want of variety in the tinned
vegetables. Dr. Jäger, to whom the Geographical Commission
entrusted the provisioning of the expeditions—mine as well as his
own—because he had more time on his hands than the rest of us,
seems to have laid in a huge stock of Teltow turnips,[46] an article of
food which is all very well for occasional use, but which quickly palls
when set before one every day; and we seem to have no other tins
left. There is no help for it—we must put up with the turnips; but I
am certain that, once I am home again, I shall not touch them for ten
years to come.
Amid all these minor evils, which, after all, go to make up the
genuine flavour of Africa, there is at least one cheering touch:
Knudsen has, with the dexterity of a skilled mechanic, repaired my 9
× 12 cm. camera, at least so far that I can use it with a little care.
How, in the absence of finger-nails, he was able to accomplish such a
ticklish piece of work, having no tool but a clumsy screw-driver for
taking to pieces and putting together again the complicated
mechanism of the instantaneous shutter, is still a mystery to me; but
he did it successfully. The loss of his finger-nails shows him in a light
contrasting curiously enough with the intelligence evinced by the
above operation; though, after all, it is scarcely surprising after his
ten years’ residence in the bush. One day, at Lindi, he had occasion
to wash a dog, which must have been in need of very thorough
cleansing, for the bottle handed to our friend for the purpose had an
extremely strong smell. Having performed his task in the most
conscientious manner, he perceived with some surprise that the dog
did not appear much the better for it, and was further surprised by
finding his own nails ulcerating away in the course of the next few
days. “How was I to know that carbolic acid has to be diluted?” he
mutters indignantly, from time to time, with a troubled gaze at his
mutilated finger-tips.
Since we came to Newala we have been making excursions in all
directions through the surrounding country, in accordance with old
habit, and also because the akida Sefu did not get together the tribal
elders from whom I wanted information so speedily as he had
promised. There is, however, no harm done, as, even if seen only
from the outside, the country and people are interesting enough.
The Makonde plateau is like a large rectangular table rounded off
at the corners. Measured from the Indian Ocean to Newala, it is
about seventy-five miles long, and between the Rovuma and the
Lukuledi it averages fifty miles in breadth, so that its superficial area
is about two-thirds of that of the kingdom of Saxony. The surface,
however, is not level, but uniformly inclined from its south-western
edge to the ocean. From the upper edge, on which Newala lies, the
eye ranges for many miles east and north-east, without encountering
any obstacle, over the Makonde bush. It is a green sea, from which
here and there thick clouds of smoke rise, to show that it, too, is
inhabited by men who carry on their tillage like so many other
primitive peoples, by cutting down and burning the bush, and
manuring with the ashes. Even in the radiant light of a tropical day
such a fire is a grand sight.
Much less effective is the impression produced just now by the
great western plain as seen from the edge of the plateau. As often as
time permits, I stroll along this edge, sometimes in one direction,
sometimes in another, in the hope of finding the air clear enough to
let me enjoy the view; but I have always been disappointed.
Wherever one looks, clouds of smoke rise from the burning bush,
and the air is full of smoke and vapour. It is a pity, for under more
favourable circumstances the panorama of the whole country up to
the distant Majeje hills must be truly magnificent. It is of little use
taking photographs now, and an outline sketch gives a very poor idea
of the scenery. In one of these excursions I went out of my way to
make a personal attempt on the Makonde bush. The present edge of
the plateau is the result of a far-reaching process of destruction
through erosion and denudation. The Makonde strata are
everywhere cut into by ravines, which, though short, are hundreds of
yards in depth. In consequence of the loose stratification of these
beds, not only are the walls of these ravines nearly vertical, but their
upper end is closed by an equally steep escarpment, so that the
western edge of the Makonde plateau is hemmed in by a series of
deep, basin-like valleys. In order to get from one side of such a ravine
to the other, I cut my way through the bush with a dozen of my men.
It was a very open part, with more grass than scrub, but even so the
short stretch of less than two hundred yards was very hard work; at
the end of it the men’s calicoes were in rags and they themselves
bleeding from hundreds of scratches, while even our strong khaki
suits had not escaped scatheless.
NATIVE PATH THROUGH THE MAKONDE BUSH, NEAR

MAHUTA
I see increasing reason to believe that the view formed some time
back as to the origin of the Makonde bush is the correct one. I have
no doubt that it is not a natural product, but the result of human
occupation. Those parts of the high country where man—as a very
slight amount of practice enables the eye to perceive at once—has not
yet penetrated with axe and hoe, are still occupied by a splendid
timber forest quite able to sustain a comparison with our mixed
forests in Germany. But wherever man has once built his hut or tilled
his field, this horrible bush springs up. Every phase of this process
may be seen in the course of a couple of hours’ walk along the main
road. From the bush to right or left, one hears the sound of the axe—
not from one spot only, but from several directions at once. A few
steps further on, we can see what is taking place. The brush has been
cut down and piled up in heaps to the height of a yard or more,
between which the trunks of the large trees stand up like the last
pillars of a magnificent ruined building. These, too, present a
melancholy spectacle: the destructive Makonde have ringed them—
cut a broad strip of bark all round to ensure their dying off—and also
piled up pyramids of brush round them. Father and son, mother and
son-in-law, are chopping away perseveringly in the background—too
busy, almost, to look round at the white stranger, who usually excites
so much interest. If you pass by the same place a week later, the piles
of brushwood have disappeared and a thick layer of ashes has taken
the place of the green forest. The large trees stretch their
smouldering trunks and branches in dumb accusation to heaven—if
they have not already fallen and been more or less reduced to ashes,
perhaps only showing as a white stripe on the dark ground.
This work of destruction is carried out by the Makonde alike on the
virgin forest and on the bush which has sprung up on sites already
cultivated and deserted. In the second case they are saved the trouble
of burning the large trees, these being entirely absent in the
secondary bush.
After burning this piece of forest ground and loosening it with the
hoe, the native sows his corn and plants his vegetables. All over the
country, he goes in for bed-culture, which requires, and, in fact,
receives, the most careful attention. Weeds are nowhere tolerated in
the south of German East Africa. The crops may fail on the plains,
where droughts are frequent, but never on the plateau with its
abundant rains and heavy dews. Its fortunate inhabitants even have
the satisfaction of seeing the proud Wayao and Wamakua working
for them as labourers, driven by hunger to serve where they were
accustomed to rule.
But the light, sandy soil is soon exhausted, and would yield no
harvest the second year if cultivated twice running. This fact has
been familiar to the native for ages; consequently he provides in
time, and, while his crop is growing, prepares the next plot with axe
and firebrand. Next year he plants this with his various crops and
lets the first piece lie fallow. For a short time it remains waste and
desolate; then nature steps in to repair the destruction wrought by
man; a thousand new growths spring out of the exhausted soil, and
even the old stumps put forth fresh shoots. Next year the new growth
is up to one’s knees, and in a few years more it is that terrible,
impenetrable bush, which maintains its position till the black
occupier of the land has made the round of all the available sites and
come back to his starting point.
The Makonde are, body and soul, so to speak, one with this bush.
According to my Yao informants, indeed, their name means nothing
else but “bush people.” Their own tradition says that they have been
settled up here for a very long time, but to my surprise they laid great
stress on an original immigration. Their old homes were in the
south-east, near Mikindani and the mouth of the Rovuma, whence
their peaceful forefathers were driven by the continual raids of the
Sakalavas from Madagascar and the warlike Shirazis[47] of the coast,
to take refuge on the almost inaccessible plateau. I have studied
African ethnology for twenty years, but the fact that changes of
population in this apparently quiet and peaceable corner of the earth
could have been occasioned by outside enterprises taking place on
the high seas, was completely new to me. It is, no doubt, however,
correct.
The charming tribal legend of the Makonde—besides informing us
of other interesting matters—explains why they have to live in the
thickest of the bush and a long way from the edge of the plateau,
instead of making their permanent homes beside the purling brooks
and springs of the low country.
“The place where the tribe originated is Mahuta, on the southern
side of the plateau towards the Rovuma, where of old time there was
nothing but thick bush. Out of this bush came a man who never
washed himself or shaved his head, and who ate and drank but little.
He went out and made a human figure from the wood of a tree
growing in the open country, which he took home to his abode in the
bush and there set it upright. In the night this image came to life and
was a woman. The man and woman went down together to the
Rovuma to wash themselves. Here the woman gave birth to a still-
born child. They left that place and passed over the high land into the
valley of the Mbemkuru, where the woman had another child, which
was also born dead. Then they returned to the high bush country of
Mahuta, where the third child was born, which lived and grew up. In
course of time, the couple had many more children, and called
themselves Wamatanda. These were the ancestral stock of the
Makonde, also called Wamakonde,[48] i.e., aborigines. Their
forefather, the man from the bush, gave his children the command to
bury their dead upright, in memory of the mother of their race who
was cut out of wood and awoke to life when standing upright. He also
warned them against settling in the valleys and near large streams,
for sickness and death dwelt there. They were to make it a rule to
have their huts at least an hour’s walk from the nearest watering-
place; then their children would thrive and escape illness.”
The explanation of the name Makonde given by my informants is
somewhat different from that contained in the above legend, which I
extract from a little book (small, but packed with information), by
Pater Adams, entitled Lindi und sein Hinterland. Otherwise, my
results agree exactly with the statements of the legend. Washing?
Hapana—there is no such thing. Why should they do so? As it is, the
supply of water scarcely suffices for cooking and drinking; other
people do not wash, so why should the Makonde distinguish himself
by such needless eccentricity? As for shaving the head, the short,
woolly crop scarcely needs it,[49] so the second ancestral precept is
likewise easy enough to follow. Beyond this, however, there is
nothing ridiculous in the ancestor’s advice. I have obtained from
various local artists a fairly large number of figures carved in wood,
ranging from fifteen to twenty-three inches in height, and
representing women belonging to the great group of the Mavia,
Makonde, and Matambwe tribes. The carving is remarkably well
done and renders the female type with great accuracy, especially the
keloid ornamentation, to be described later on. As to the object and
meaning of their works the sculptors either could or (more probably)
would tell me nothing, and I was forced to content myself with the
scanty information vouchsafed by one man, who said that the figures
were merely intended to represent the nembo—the artificial
deformations of pelele, ear-discs, and keloids. The legend recorded
by Pater Adams places these figures in a new light. They must surely
be more than mere dolls; and we may even venture to assume that
they are—though the majority of present-day Makonde are probably
unaware of the fact—representations of the tribal ancestress.
The references in the legend to the descent from Mahuta to the
Rovuma, and to a journey across the highlands into the Mbekuru
valley, undoubtedly indicate the previous history of the tribe, the
travels of the ancestral pair typifying the migrations of their
descendants. The descent to the neighbouring Rovuma valley, with
its extraordinary fertility and great abundance of game, is intelligible
at a glance—but the crossing of the Lukuledi depression, the ascent
to the Rondo Plateau and the descent to the Mbemkuru, also lie
within the bounds of probability, for all these districts have exactly
the same character as the extreme south. Now, however, comes a
point of especial interest for our bacteriological age. The primitive
Makonde did not enjoy their lives in the marshy river-valleys.
Disease raged among them, and many died. It was only after they
had returned to their original home near Mahuta, that the health
conditions of these people improved. We are very apt to think of the
African as a stupid person whose ignorance of nature is only equalled
by his fear of it, and who looks on all mishaps as caused by evil
spirits and malignant natural powers. It is much more correct to
assume in this case that the people very early learnt to distinguish
districts infested with malaria from those where it is absent.
This knowledge is crystallized in the
ancestral warning against settling in the
valleys and near the great waters, the
dwelling-places of disease and death. At the
same time, for security against the hostile
Mavia south of the Rovuma, it was enacted
that every settlement must be not less than a
certain distance from the southern edge of the
plateau. Such in fact is their mode of life at the
present day. It is not such a bad one, and
certainly they are both safer and more
comfortable than the Makua, the recent
intruders from the south, who have made USUAL METHOD OF
good their footing on the western edge of the CLOSING HUT-DOOR
plateau, extending over a fairly wide belt of
country. Neither Makua nor Makonde show in their dwellings
anything of the size and comeliness of the Yao houses in the plain,
especially at Masasi, Chingulungulu and Zuza’s. Jumbe Chauro, a
Makonde hamlet not far from Newala, on the road to Mahuta, is the
most important settlement of the tribe I have yet seen, and has fairly
spacious huts. But how slovenly is their construction compared with
the palatial residences of the elephant-hunters living in the plain.
The roofs are still more untidy than in the general run of huts during
the dry season, the walls show here and there the scanty beginnings
or the lamentable remains of the mud plastering, and the interior is a
veritable dog-kennel; dirt, dust and disorder everywhere. A few huts
only show any attempt at division into rooms, and this consists
merely of very roughly-made bamboo partitions. In one point alone
have I noticed any indication of progress—in the method of fastening
the door. Houses all over the south are secured in a simple but
ingenious manner. The door consists of a set of stout pieces of wood
or bamboo, tied with bark-string to two cross-pieces, and moving in
two grooves round one of the door-posts, so as to open inwards. If
the owner wishes to leave home, he takes two logs as thick as a man’s
upper arm and about a yard long. One of these is placed obliquely
against the middle of the door from the inside, so as to form an angle
of from 60° to 75° with the ground. He then places the second piece
horizontally across the first, pressing it downward with all his might.
It is kept in place by two strong posts planted in the ground a few
inches inside the door. This fastening is absolutely safe, but of course
cannot be applied to both doors at once, otherwise how could the
owner leave or enter his house? I have not yet succeeded in finding
out how the back door is fastened.
MAKONDE LOCK AND KEY AT JUMBE CHAURO

This is the general way of closing a house. The Makonde at Jumbe
Chauro, however, have a much more complicated, solid and original
one. Here, too, the door is as already described, except that there is
only one post on the inside, standing by itself about six inches from
one side of the doorway. Opposite this post is a hole in the wall just
large enough to admit a man’s arm. The door is closed inside by a
large wooden bolt passing through a hole in this post and pressing
with its free end against the door. The other end has three holes into
which fit three pegs running in vertical grooves inside the post. The
door is opened with a wooden key about a foot long, somewhat
curved and sloped off at the butt; the other end has three pegs
corresponding to the holes, in the bolt, so that, when it is thrust
through the hole in the wall and inserted into the rectangular
opening in the post, the pegs can be lifted and the bolt drawn out.[50]
MODE OF INSERTING THE KEY
With no small pride first one householder and then a second

showed me on the spot the action of this greatest invention of the
Makonde Highlands. To both with an admiring exclamation of
“Vizuri sana!” (“Very fine!”). I expressed the wish to take back these
marvels with me to Ulaya, to show the Wazungu what clever fellows
the Makonde are. Scarcely five minutes after my return to camp at
Newala, the two men came up sweating under the weight of two
heavy logs which they laid down at my feet, handing over at the same
time the keys of the fallen fortress. Arguing, logically enough, that if
the key was wanted, the lock would be wanted with it, they had taken
their axes and chopped down the posts—as it never occurred to them
to dig them out of the ground and so bring them intact. Thus I have
two badly damaged specimens, and the owners, instead of praise,
come in for a blowing-up.
The Makua huts in the environs of Newala are especially
miserable; their more than slovenly construction reminds one of the
temporary erections of the Makua at Hatia’s, though the people here
have not been concerned in a war. It must therefore be due to
congenital idleness, or else to the absence of a powerful chief. Even
the baraza at Mlipa’s, a short hour’s walk south-east of Newala,
shares in this general neglect. While public buildings in this country
are usually looked after more or less carefully, this is in evident
danger of being blown over by the first strong easterly gale. The only
attractive object in this whole district is the grave of the late chief
Mlipa. I visited it in the morning, while the sun was still trying with
partial success to break through the rolling mists, and the circular
grove of tall euphorbias, which, with a broken pot, is all that marks
the old king’s resting-place, impressed one with a touch of pathos.
Even my very materially-minded carriers seemed to feel something
of the sort, for instead of their usual ribald songs, they chanted
solemnly, as we marched on through the dense green of the Makonde
bush:—
“We shall arrive with the great master; we stand in a row and have
no fear about getting our food and our money from the Serkali (the
Government). We are not afraid; we are going along with the great
master, the lion; we are going down to the coast and back.”
With regard to the characteristic features of the various tribes here
on the western edge of the plateau, I can arrive at no other
conclusion than the one already come to in the plain, viz., that it is
impossible for anyone but a trained anthropologist to assign any
given individual at once to his proper tribe. In fact, I think that even
an anthropological specialist, after the most careful examination,
might find it a difficult task to decide. The whole congeries of peoples
collected in the region bounded on the west by the great Central
African rift, Tanganyika and Nyasa, and on the east by the Indian
Ocean, are closely related to each other—some of their languages are
only distinguished from one another as dialects of the same speech,
and no doubt all the tribes present the same shape of skull and
structure of skeleton. Thus, surely, there can be no very striking
differences in outward appearance.
Even did such exist, I should have no time
to concern myself with them, for day after day,
I have to see or hear, as the case may be—in
any case to grasp and record—an
extraordinary number of ethnographic
phenomena. I am almost disposed to think it
fortunate that some departments of inquiry, at
least, are barred by external circumstances.
Chief among these is the subject of iron-
working. We are apt to think of Africa as a
country where iron ore is everywhere, so to
speak, to be picked up by the roadside, and
where it would be quite surprising if the
inhabitants had not learnt to smelt the
material ready to their hand. In fact, the
knowledge of this art ranges all over the
continent, from the Kabyles in the north to the
Kafirs in the south. Here between the Rovuma
and the Lukuledi the conditions are not so
favourable. According to the statements of the
Makonde, neither ironstone nor any other
form of iron ore is known to them. They have
not therefore advanced to the art of smelting
the metal, but have hitherto bought all their
THE ANCESTRESS OF
THE MAKONDE
iron implements from neighbouring tribes.
Even in the plain the inhabitants are not much
better off. Only one man now living is said to
understand the art of smelting iron. This old fundi lives close to
Huwe, that isolated, steep-sided block of granite which rises out of
the green solitude between Masasi and Chingulungulu, and whose
jagged and splintered top meets the traveller’s eye everywhere. While
still at Masasi I wished to see this man at work, but was told that,
frightened by the rising, he had retired across the Rovuma, though
he would soon return. All subsequent inquiries as to whether the
fundi had come back met with the genuine African answer, “Bado”
(“Not yet”).
BRAZIER
Some consolation was afforded me by a brassfounder, whom I

came across in the bush near Akundonde’s. This man is the favourite
of women, and therefore no doubt of the gods; he welds the glittering
brass rods purchased at the coast into those massive, heavy rings
which, on the wrists and ankles of the local fair ones, continually give
me fresh food for admiration. Like every decent master-craftsman he
had all his tools with him, consisting of a pair of bellows, three
crucibles and a hammer—nothing more, apparently. He was quite
willing to show his skill, and in a twinkling had fixed his bellows on
the ground. They are simply two goat-skins, taken off whole, the four
legs being closed by knots, while the upper opening, intended to
admit the air, is kept stretched by two pieces of wood. At the lower
end of the skin a smaller opening is left into which a wooden tube is
stuck. The fundi has quickly borrowed a heap of wood-embers from
the nearest hut; he then fixes the free ends of the two tubes into an
earthen pipe, and clamps them to the ground by means of a bent
piece of wood. Now he fills one of his small clay crucibles, the dross
on which shows that they have been long in use, with the yellow
material, places it in the midst of the embers, which, at present are
only faintly glimmering, and begins his work. In quick alternation
the smith’s two hands move up and down with the open ends of the
bellows; as he raises his hand he holds the slit wide open, so as to let
the air enter the skin bag unhindered. In pressing it down he closes
the bag, and the air puffs through the bamboo tube and clay pipe into
the fire, which quickly burns up. The smith, however, does not keep
on with this work, but beckons to another man, who relieves him at
the bellows, while he takes some more tools out of a large skin pouch
carried on his back. I look on in wonder as, with a smooth round
stick about the thickness of a finger, he bores a few vertical holes into
the clean sand of the soil. This should not be difficult, yet the man
seems to be taking great pains over it. Then he fastens down to the
ground, with a couple of wooden clamps, a neat little trough made by
splitting a joint of bamboo in half, so that the ends are closed by the
two knots. At last the yellow metal has attained the right consistency,
and the fundi lifts the crucible from the fire by means of two sticks
split at the end to serve as tongs. A short swift turn to the left—a
tilting of the crucible—and the molten brass, hissing and giving forth
clouds of smoke, flows first into the bamboo mould and then into the
holes in the ground.
The technique of this backwoods craftsman may not be very far
advanced, but it cannot be denied that he knows how to obtain an
adequate result by the simplest means. The ladies of highest rank in
this country—that is to say, those who can afford it, wear two kinds
of these massive brass rings, one cylindrical, the other semicircular
in section. The latter are cast in the most ingenious way in the
bamboo mould, the former in the circular hole in the sand. It is quite
a simple matter for the fundi to fit these bars to the limbs of his fair
customers; with a few light strokes of his hammer he bends the
pliable brass round arm or ankle without further inconvenience to
the wearer.
SHAPING THE POT
SMOOTHING WITH MAIZE-COB
CUTTING THE EDGE

FINISHING THE BOTTOM
LAST SMOOTHING BEFORE

BURNING
FIRING THE BRUSH-PILE

LIGHTING THE FARTHER SIDE OF
THE PILE
TURNING THE RED-HOT VESSEL
NYASA WOMAN MAKING POTS AT MASASI

Pottery is an art which must always and everywhere excite the
interest of the student, just because it is so intimately connected with
the development of human culture, and because its relics are one of
the principal factors in the reconstruction of our own condition in
prehistoric times. I shall always remember with pleasure the two or
three afternoons at Masasi when Salim Matola’s mother, a slightly-
built, graceful, pleasant-looking woman, explained to me with
touching patience, by means of concrete illustrations, the ceramic art
of her people. The only implements for this primitive process were a
lump of clay in her left hand, and in the right a calabash containing
the following valuables: the fragment of a maize-cob stripped of all
its grains, a smooth, oval pebble, about the size of a pigeon’s egg, a
few chips of gourd-shell, a bamboo splinter about the length of one’s
hand, a small shell, and a bunch of some herb resembling spinach.
Nothing more. The woman scraped with the
shell a round, shallow hole in the soft, fine
sand of the soil, and, when an active young
girl had filled the calabash with water for her,
she began to knead the clay. As if by magic it
gradually assumed the shape of a rough but
already well-shaped vessel, which only wanted
a little touching up with the instruments
before mentioned. I looked out with the
MAKUA WOMAN closest attention for any indication of the use
MAKING A POT. of the potter’s wheel, in however rudimentary
SHOWS THE a form, but no—hapana (there is none). The
BEGINNINGS OF THE embryo pot stood firmly in its little
POTTER’S WHEEL
depression, and the woman walked round it in
a stooping posture, whether she was removing
small stones or similar foreign bodies with the maize-cob, smoothing
the inner or outer surface with the splinter of bamboo, or later, after
letting it dry for a day, pricking in the ornamentation with a pointed
bit of gourd-shell, or working out the bottom, or cutting the edge
with a sharp bamboo knife, or giving the last touches to the finished
vessel. This occupation of the women is infinitely toilsome, but it is
without doubt an accurate reproduction of the process in use among
our ancestors of the Neolithic and Bronze ages.
There is no doubt that the invention of pottery, an item in human
progress whose importance cannot be over-estimated, is due to
women. Rough, coarse and unfeeling, the men of the horde range
over the countryside. When the united cunning of the hunters has
succeeded in killing the game; not one of them thinks of carrying
home the spoil. A bright fire, kindled by a vigorous wielding of the
drill, is crackling beside them; the animal has been cleaned and cut
up secundum artem, and, after a slight singeing, will soon disappear
under their sharp teeth; no one all this time giving a single thought
to wife or child.
To what shifts, on the other hand, the primitive wife, and still more
the primitive mother, was put! Not even prehistoric stomachs could
endure an unvarying diet of raw food. Something or other suggested
the beneficial effect of hot water on the majority of approved but
indigestible dishes. Perhaps a neighbour had tried holding the hard
roots or tubers over the fire in a calabash filled with water—or maybe
an ostrich-egg-shell, or a hastily improvised vessel of bark. They
became much softer and more palatable than they had previously
been; but, unfortunately, the vessel could not stand the fire and got
charred on the outside. That can be remedied, thought our
ancestress, and plastered a layer of wet clay round a similar vessel.
This is an improvement; the cooking utensil remains uninjured, but
the heat of the fire has shrunk it, so that it is loose in its shell. The
next step is to detach it, so, with a firm grip and a jerk, shell and
kernel are separated, and pottery is invented. Perhaps, however, the
discovery which led to an intelligent use of the burnt-clay shell, was
made in a slightly different way. Ostrich-eggs and calabashes are not
to be found in every part of the world, but everywhere mankind has
arrived at the art of making baskets out of pliant materials, such as
bark, bast, strips of palm-leaf, supple twigs, etc. Our inventor has no
water-tight vessel provided by nature. “Never mind, let us line the
basket with clay.” This answers the purpose, but alas! the basket gets
burnt over the blazing fire, the woman watches the process of
cooking with increasing uneasiness, fearing a leak, but no leak
appears. The food, done to a turn, is eaten with peculiar relish; and
the cooking-vessel is examined, half in curiosity, half in satisfaction
at the result. The plastic clay is now hard as stone, and at the same
time looks exceedingly well, for the neat plaiting of the burnt basket
is traced all over it in a pretty pattern. Thus, simultaneously with
pottery, its ornamentation was invented.
Primitive woman has another claim to respect. It was the man,
roving abroad, who invented the art of producing fire at will, but the
woman, unable to imitate him in this, has been a Vestal from the
earliest times. Nothing gives so much trouble as the keeping alight of
the smouldering brand, and, above all, when all the men are absent
from the camp. Heavy rain-clouds gather, already the first large
drops are falling, the first gusts of the storm rage over the plain. The
little flame, a greater anxiety to the woman than her own children,
flickers unsteadily in the blast. What is to be done? A sudden thought
occurs to her, and in an instant she has constructed a primitive hut
out of strips of bark, to protect the flame against rain and wind.
This, or something very like it, was the way in which the principle
of the house was discovered; and even the most hardened misogynist
cannot fairly refuse a woman the credit of it. The protection of the
hearth-fire from the weather is the germ from which the human
dwelling was evolved. Men had little, if any share, in this forward
step, and that only at a late stage. Even at the present day, the
plastering of the housewall with clay and the manufacture of pottery
are exclusively the women’s business. These are two very significant
survivals. Our European kitchen-garden, too, is originally a woman’s
invention, and the hoe, the primitive instrument of agriculture, is,
characteristically enough, still used in this department. But the
noblest achievement which we owe to the other sex is unquestionably
the art of cookery. Roasting alone—the oldest process—is one for
which men took the hint (a very obvious one) from nature. It must
have been suggested by the scorched carcase of some animal
overtaken by the destructive forest-fires. But boiling—the process of
improving organic substances by the help of water heated to boiling-
point—is a much later discovery. It is so recent that it has not even
yet penetrated to all parts of the world. The Polynesians understand
how to steam food, that is, to cook it, neatly wrapped in leaves, in a
hole in the earth between hot stones, the air being excluded, and
(sometimes) a few drops of water sprinkled on the stones; but they
do not understand boiling.
To come back from this digression, we find that the slender Nyasa
woman has, after once more carefully examining the finished pot,
put it aside in the shade to dry. On the following day she sends me
word by her son, Salim Matola, who is always on hand, that she is
going to do the burning, and, on coming out of my house, I find her
already hard at work. She has spread on the ground a layer of very
dry sticks, about as thick as one’s thumb, has laid the pot (now of a
yellowish-grey colour) on them, and is piling brushwood round it.
My faithful Pesa mbili, the mnyampara, who has been standing by,
most obligingly, with a lighted stick, now hands it to her. Both of
them, blowing steadily, light the pile on the lee side, and, when the
flame begins to catch, on the weather side also. Soon the whole is in a
blaze, but the dry fuel is quickly consumed and the fire dies down, so
that we see the red-hot vessel rising from the ashes. The woman
turns it continually with a long stick, sometimes one way and
sometimes another, so that it may be evenly heated all over. In
twenty minutes she rolls it out of the ash-heap, takes up the bundle
of spinach, which has been lying for two days in a jar of water, and
sprinkles the red-hot clay with it. The places where the drops fall are
marked by black spots on the uniform reddish-brown surface. With a
sigh of relief, and with visible satisfaction, the woman rises to an
erect position; she is standing just in a line between me and the fire,
from which a cloud of smoke is just rising: I press the ball of my
camera, the shutter clicks—the apotheosis is achieved! Like a
priestess, representative of her inventive sex, the graceful woman
stands: at her feet the hearth-fire she has given us beside her the
invention she has devised for us, in the background the home she has
built for us.
At Newala, also, I have had the manufacture of pottery carried on
in my presence. Technically the process is better than that already
described, for here we find the beginnings of the potter’s wheel,
which does not seem to exist in the plains; at least I have seen
nothing of the sort. The artist, a frightfully stupid Makua woman, did
not make a depression in the ground to receive the pot she was about
to shape, but used instead a large potsherd. Otherwise, she went to
work in much the same way as Salim’s mother, except that she saved
herself the trouble of walking round and round her work by squatting
at her ease and letting the pot and potsherd rotate round her; this is
surely the first step towards a machine. But it does not follow that
the pot was improved by the process. It is true that it was beautifully
rounded and presented a very creditable appearance when finished,
but the numerous large and small vessels which I have seen, and, in
part, collected, in the “less advanced” districts, are no less so. We
moderns imagine that instruments of precision are necessary to
produce excellent results. Go to the prehistoric collections of our
museums and look at the pots, urns and bowls of our ancestors in the
dim ages of the past, and you will at once perceive your error.
MAKING LONGITUDINAL CUT IN
BARK
DRAWING THE BARK OFF THE LOG
REMOVING THE OUTER BARK

BEATING THE BARK
WORKING THE BARK-CLOTH AFTER BEATING, TO MAKE IT

SOFT
MANUFACTURE OF BARK-CLOTH AT NEWALA

To-day, nearly the whole population of German East Africa is
clothed in imported calico. This was not always the case; even now in
some parts of the north dressed skins are still the prevailing wear,
and in the north-western districts—east and north of Lake
Tanganyika—lies a zone where bark-cloth has not yet been
superseded. Probably not many generations have passed since such
bark fabrics and kilts of skins were the only clothing even in the
south. Even to-day, large quantities of this bright-red or drab
material are still to be found; but if we wish to see it, we must look in
the granaries and on the drying stages inside the native huts, where
it serves less ambitious uses as wrappings for those seeds and fruits
which require to be packed with special care. The salt produced at
Masasi, too, is packed for transport to a distance in large sheets of
bark-cloth. Wherever I found it in any degree possible, I studied the
process of making this cloth. The native requisitioned for the
purpose arrived, carrying a log between two and three yards long and
as thick as his thigh, and nothing else except a curiously-shaped
mallet and the usual long, sharp and pointed knife which all men and
boys wear in a belt at their backs without a sheath—horribile dictu!
[51]
Silently he squats down before me, and with two rapid cuts has
drawn a couple of circles round the log some two yards apart, and
slits the bark lengthwise between them with the point of his knife.
With evident care, he then scrapes off the outer rind all round the
log, so that in a quarter of an hour the inner red layer of the bark
shows up brightly-coloured between the two untouched ends. With
some trouble and much caution, he now loosens the bark at one end,
and opens the cylinder. He then stands up, takes hold of the free
edge with both hands, and turning it inside out, slowly but steadily
pulls it off in one piece. Now comes the troublesome work of
scraping all superfluous particles of outer bark from the outside of
the long, narrow piece of material, while the inner side is carefully
scrutinised for defective spots. At last it is ready for beating. Having
signalled to a friend, who immediately places a bowl of water beside
him, the artificer damps his sheet of bark all over, seizes his mallet,
lays one end of the stuff on the smoothest spot of the log, and
hammers away slowly but continuously. “Very simple!” I think to
myself. “Why, I could do that, too!”—but I am forced to change my
opinions a little later on; for the beating is quite an art, if the fabric is
not to be beaten to pieces. To prevent the breaking of the fibres, the
stuff is several times folded across, so as to interpose several
thicknesses between the mallet and the block. At last the required
state is reached, and the fundi seizes the sheet, still folded, by both
ends, and wrings it out, or calls an assistant to take one end while he
holds the other. The cloth produced in this way is not nearly so fine
and uniform in texture as the famous Uganda bark-cloth, but it is
quite soft, and, above all, cheap.
Now, too, I examine the mallet. My craftsman has been using the
simpler but better form of this implement, a conical block of some
hard wood, its base—the striking surface—being scored across and
across with more or less deeply-cut grooves, and the handle stuck
into a hole in the middle. The other and earlier form of mallet is
shaped in the same way, but the head is fastened by an ingenious
network of bark strips into the split bamboo serving as a handle. The
observation so often made, that ancient customs persist longest in
connection with religious ceremonies and in the life of children, here
finds confirmation. As we shall soon see, bark-cloth is still worn
during the unyago,[52] having been prepared with special solemn
ceremonies; and many a mother, if she has no other garment handy,
will still put her little one into a kilt of bark-cloth, which, after all,
looks better, besides being more in keeping with its African
surroundings, than the ridiculous bit of print from Ulaya.
MAKUA WOMEN

Etextbook 978 0133826609 Family Therapy Concepts and Methods

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Etextbook 978 0133826609 Family Therapy Concepts and Methods

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

eTextbook 978-0133826609 Family

Therapy: Concepts and Methods

PART TWO THE CLASSIC SCHOOLS OF FAMILY THERAPY

5 Strategic Family Therapy 89

6 Structural Family Therapy 111

Family Dynamics 115

7 Experiential Family Therapy 131

8 Psychoanalytic Family Therapy 149

9 Cognitive-Behavioral Family Therapy 167

PART THREE RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN FAMILY THERAPY

11 Solution-Focused Therapy 219

12 Narrative Therapy 239

PART FOUR THE EVALUATION OF FAMILY THERAPY

Development of Behavior Disorders 262

14 Research on Family Intervention 276

Appendix A Chapter-by-Chapter Recommended Readings 290

Social and Political Context Development of Family Therapy

Social and Political Context Development of Family Therapy

Social and Political Context Development of Family Therapy

Social and Political Context Development of Family Therapy

Social and Political Context Development of Family Therapy

solace elsewhere, adults came to therapy to find sat-

Therapy the mold of seeing life and its troubles as a

Newala, too, suffers from the distance of its water-supply—at least

The water-supply of New Newala is in the bottom of the valley,

NATIVE PATH THROUGH THE MAKONDE BUSH, NEAR

MAKONDE LOCK AND KEY AT JUMBE CHAURO

MODE OF INSERTING THE KEY

With no small pride first one householder and then a second

Some consolation was afforded me by a brassfounder, whom I

SMOOTHING WITH MAIZE-COB

CUTTING THE EDGE

LAST SMOOTHING BEFORE

FIRING THE BRUSH-PILE

TURNING THE RED-HOT VESSEL

NYASA WOMAN MAKING POTS AT MASASI

DRAWING THE BARK OFF THE LOG

REMOVING THE OUTER BARK

WORKING THE BARK-CLOTH AFTER BEATING, TO MAKE IT

MANUFACTURE OF BARK-CLOTH AT NEWALA

You might also like