Journal of Family Therapy - 2006 - Bertrando - Hypotheses Are Dialogues Sharing Hypotheses With Clients

r The Association for Family Therapy 2006.
Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington

Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Journal of Family Therapy (2006) 28: 370–387
0163-4445 (print); 1467-6427 (online)
Hypotheses are dialogues: sharing hypotheses

with clients
Paolo Bertrandoa and Teresa Arcellonia
The use of systemic hypotheses in therapy has been criticized on the

ground that it promotes the expert position of the therapist and tends to
underplay the role of the client in the therapeutic process. In this article,
we propose to view the systemic hypothesis as a collaborative action,
involving the dialogue between therapists and clients. This interactive
hypothesis is created by the very interaction of all participants in the
therapeutic dialogue, and as such it may be considered a dialogue in itself.
The article articulates a way of hypothesizing that is consistent with both
systemic and dialogic premises, and presents some examples of the
process in action.
The systemic hypothesis is but one example of a process which is

probably universal in therapy: the process of making sense of what
happens both within the therapeutic encounter and in the lives of
clients (see Frank and Frank, 1991). In the pages that follow, we will
deal mostly with this kind of therapeutic hypothesis, which shows a
number of distinctive features. The most important is that, according
to the concept of systemic hypothesis proposed by the original Milan
Team, it is impossible to know the reality of a person or a family. We
may just make a hypothesis about it, which ‘is, per se, neither true nor
false, it is simply either more or less useful’ (Selvini Palazzoli et al.,
1980, p. 215). Although we still use the hypothesizing process in our
clinical practice, the sense we give to hypotheses, and the very way of
formulating them, has undergone a change. The extent and origins of
such a change are the subject of this article.
Ezio, or the hypothetical partner

Our way of hypothesizing changed for two main reasons, one ethical
and the other practical. We would like to give an example of the
a
Episteme Centre, Turin, Italy
Corresponding address: Paolo Bertrando, MD, Ph.D., Piazza S.Agostino, 22, 20123 Milan, Italy.
E-mail: gilbert@fastwebnet.it.
r 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation r 2006 The Association for Family Therapy and Systemic Practice
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Hypotheses are dialogues 371
former reason, through a clinical encounter, which happened during
a training course in systemic therapy held by one of us.
The encounter with Ezio comes from aborted couple therapy: his
wife declined to participate, and the result was an individual therapy
centred on a couple problem, although according to Ezio: ‘The
problem it’s me . . . my difficult disposition.’ Apparently, Ezio is
burdened by such a huge responsibility. He is tense and restless,
playing unceasingly with his wedding ring while he asks for ‘advice’
about what he should do. Divorce? Reconcile? Stay together for his
daughter’s sake? Cohabitate with his wife as ‘separated at home’? The
therapists – two women in training – ask hypothetical questions about
the future, about the characteristics a woman with whom he would
like to share his life should have. ‘I would like her . . . to be single’,
answers Ezio, a little puzzled. Behind the mirror, the atmosphere is
red hot. The therapeutic team, mostly constituted of young female
trainees, cannot restrain its indignation towards this 40-year-old man
with such a scarce consideration of women.
The idea emerges, however, that our client is emotionally blocked,
and that the block is now extending to the therapists. We decide that
the female teacher (the second author) will enter the therapy room in
order to ‘embody the emotions’. She enters and sits beside a surprised
Ezio, almost turning her back on the two colleagues. Ezio, bewildered
but interested, listens to her: ‘Behind the mirror,’ she says, ‘we were
struck by the non-motives you talked about. It is like there were some
emotional knots you put aside, substituting for them something more
rational. How do you feel with those knots? We feel a strong suffering
you hardly talk about . . . you say you married a woman you were
never very involved with . . . maybe your wife helps you to dampen
your emotion and suffering. Our prejudice is that a man always looks
for something in a woman, but maybe for you it is too painful to say
what you were looking for in your wife?’ Ezio is more and more
puzzled. His eyes go from one woman to the other in the room, as if
he cannot understand the supervisor’s point.
In the discussion behind the mirror, we feel the need to share with
Ezio the process that dictated the intervention. Without such a
sharing, the therapy appears incomplete to everybody. A colleague
says: ‘It is like we laid an ambush for him. That’s not fair, he must
know our intentions!’ We decide that the teacher will go back to Ezio,
together with the two therapists, to tell him openly that, with her
presence, she was supposed to ‘embody the emotions’ in order to
bring into the room the parts of his stories which for some reason he
372 Paolo Bertrando and Teresa Arcelloni
tended to omit. Ezio listens attentively to these words; then, with some
relief, he says: ‘A kind of shock therapy, isn’t it?’
What happened here tended to happen more and more frequently.
The idea was that unveiling the whole hypothesizing process to clients
could make the power balance between therapists and clients more
ethical, solving, at the same time, some stuck situations as the one we
presented here. The training context was instrumental in bringing
forth the change, because trainees tend to be extremely attentive to
the unfolding of interactions between therapists and clients.
Gradually, this way of working spread in our everyday practice,
because it also responded to a practical need, especially for individual
therapy. And this process led us to a further step, which is sharing the
hypothesizing process with the clients at the moment it happens. But
to fully understand such evolution, we must first turn to the relation-
ship between the hypothesis and therapeutic dialogue and to the
different versions of it.
The therapist and her hypothesis

First of all, we think it is impossible not to have hypotheses within any
dialogue, especially if the conversation deals with a certain problem.
As semiologist Charles Sanders Peirce (1931–1958) puts it, we tend to
create hypotheses when confronted with something difficult to under-
stand. When something does not fit with our frame of reference, we
build a hypothesis in order to deal with it. Peirce calls this process
‘abduction’. Not all hypotheses are the same, though. We can distin-
guish, first, between ontological and relational hypotheses: the first
ones refer to the being of individuals, the second ones to the relation-
ship between them (e.g. one person may be considered ‘aggressive’,
or her aggressive behaviour may be considered within its interper-
sonal context). We choose to call ontological hypotheses ‘ideas’, leaving
the term ‘hypothesis’ to relational ones. Another distinction is between
explicative and process hypotheses. We may say that the former refers
to ‘why’, the latter to ‘how’ (see Rober, 2002). In systemic therapy,
which is the field of our clinical work, the therapist should ideally
formulate relational and process hypotheses, although it is impossible
to abstain completely from ontological and explicative ones.
Another distinction concerns the use of hypotheses within the
dialogue. Everybody, in a dialogue, has a point of view, and tends to
allow that point of view to enter the discourse (the world) of the other.
We can say, thus, that it is impossible to enter a dialogue without ideas
or hypotheses. Even within the most open dialogue, the speakers
strive to confirm their hypotheses, consciously or not. In a therapeutic
dialogue, this interplay between discourses can have very different
characteristics. Some therapists use their hypotheses in order to drive
the conversation, trying to steer in a predefined direction. Others use
their hypotheses to open the conversation, introducing and stressing
differences. The first position was prevalent in the early years of
systemic therapies, the second in later years. In a way, the evolution of
systemic therapy is the evolution in the role of hypotheses.
Strategic therapists had explicative hypotheses, considered as
approximations to actual reality (Haley, 1976; Selvini Palazzoli et al.,
1978). Although the hypothesis of the early Milan team (Selvini
Palazzoli et al., 1980) was explicative, it was also provisional, ‘neither
true or false’, without any possibility of reading the actual ‘reality’ of a
family or client. In Luigi Boscolo’s and Gianfranco Cecchin’s version
of the Milan hypothesis (see Boscolo et al., 1987), it becomes a process
hypothesis, derived from team interaction, but it remains secret: the
team builds up an explanation that must stay secret in order to ‘cure’.
The therapist presents herself as a person who knows but does not say.
Clients react to an intervention based on a hypothesis, and not directly
to the hypothesis (which, to them, remains unknown). The systemic
hypothesis belongs solely to the therapeutic team.
Tom Andersen (1987), introducing his reflecting team, makes a
crucial move in the evolution of the therapeutic dialogue. For the
first time ever, the therapeutic team opens to clients its sancta
sanctorum leaving secrecy behind. The team dialogue becomes
open, while the process of listening comes to the forefront. Listening
to each other, all the actors in the double dialogue become more
respectful, and abandon the tendency to immediate action that
systemic therapy had inherited from its strategic predecessors. In
the public discussion of the team, the tone of comments changes. The
therapists become more respectful towards clients, and, at the same
time, more ready to acknowledge the positive aspects of the presented
situations. Such a practice, though, leads to an eclipse of the hypo-
thesis. Within the reflecting team, therapists talk, discuss, but do not
try to build systemic hypotheses. They offer, mostly, opinions about
what clients said, with the aim of making them feel understood
and legitimized, putting forward different points of view. According
to Andersen: ‘One way to achieve this was to avoid to have any
ideas beforehand. Hypotheses were omitted if possible’ (Andersen,
1991, p. 13).
Conversational therapists (Anderson and Goolishian, 1992; Ander-
son, 1997) are the most straightforward followers of the postmodern
imperative: give voice to clients and diminish the (hierarchical)
differences between them and the therapist. Conversational therapy
eliminates both hypothesizing process and team discussion, and
theorizes a ‘not-knowing’ position for the therapist. This is a seminal
innovation,1 but it has sometimes been interpreted (even against their
originators’ intention) as an exhortation to the therapist to abstain
from any definite idea or hypothesis.
Probably most reflecting team and conversational therapists are
averse to hypotheses because they consider hypotheses as strategic
instruments to drive the client in a pre-established direction, and at
the same time a way of defining a presumably ‘objective’ reality once
and for all. We believe, instead, that a hypothesis can be used that way,
but that it can also be used – as we use it – as a way to create a
conversational field, where the main subject is relationships. Our
hypotheses tend to be process hypotheses, related to how (in which
kind of possible world) the issues presented in the dialogue exist.
Hypotheses of this kind do not close the dialogue finding a cause and
a problem-solving strategy, but rather they open it, although with
some limits: they select some discourse fields rather than others. For
example, systemic hypotheses tend to create relational discourses, and
it may sometimes be better to abandon them and use non-systemic
hypotheses instead.
Hypotheses, teams, dialogues

How can the hypotheses be articulated in the therapeutic dialogue?
To understand this, we must keep in mind two dimensions: setting
and process. From the point of view of setting, the issue is the
separation between therapeutic (i.e. therapist–client) dialogue and
team dialogue. From the point of view of process, the issue is whether
or not to use ideas and hypotheses (or, better, to do it explicitly).
In the classic systemic model, the dialogue between therapist and
client is separated from the dialogue within the therapeutic team.
Therapists are not only allowed to make hypotheses, they are advised
and even forced to make them, but strictly within the team dialogue.
1
Although the historically minded reader could find in it echoes of Laing’s anti-
psychiatry (Laing, 1968), Italian critical psychiatry (Basaglia, 1968), and, on different grounds,
of Carl Rogers’ client-centred approach (see Anderson, 2001).
Clients are not allowed to participate in the team dialogue or to listen
directly to the hypotheses as such. The one-way mirror is a barrier
that only the active therapist can trespass, going back and forth, acting
as intermediary between team and clients. Here the mirror is, above
all, a metaphor – the important thing is the ‘inner’ mirror, which the
systemic therapist cannot, or does not want to, relinquish.
In comparison, the reflecting team model involves two distinct
dialogues (one between the active therapist and the clients, another
among the observers) but there is no direct communication between
the two sides of the mirror, since the active therapist always stays in the
therapy room. When the observers talk among themselves, the clients
and the therapist can only listen and, conversely, when they dialogue,
the observers stay silent. The clients listen to the observing team’s
words, as, in classic systemic therapy, they listen to the therapist’s final
intervention. The difference is that they listen to a discussion instead
of an intervention devised behind the mirror. They may afterwards
reflect on the team’s reflections, but they never can participate in them –
in other words, they cannot alter the course of the dialogue. From the
point of view of process, these therapists make a considerable effort in
order not to start from preconceived ideas or hypotheses.
In the conversational model, there are no mirrors. There is just one
dialogue between therapist(s) and client(s) where no hypothesis is
formulated and the therapist just ‘keeps open the conversation’
(Anderson and Goolishian, 1988). Apparently, to be on an equal
footing with the client, the therapist should not have ideas – especially
in the form of definite hypotheses – which could influence clients or
‘suggest’ to them what to do.2 What we find problematic in such a
position is the possibility for the therapist, in this open dialogue
stance, not to have hypotheses. We could say that the therapist needs
to build a sort of inner mirror in order not to see the ideas and
hypotheses she is unwittingly constructing.
Our goal is to eliminate the separateness of dialogues (the real and
metaphoric mirrors), while at the same time keeping the hypothesiz-
ing process. This we try to obtain by sharing our hypotheses with the
clients. What emerges in the therapist’s mind is shared with the client
in the very moment of its emergence. This means that clients become
more active in directing the course of therapy. This has radical
2
Rober (2002) brings back the hypothesis in conversational therapy, but refers just to the
‘inner dialogue’ of the therapist – the hypothesis cannot be an issue to discuss between
therapists and clients.
consequences in the relationship between therapists and clients, from
the point of view not only of ethics, but also of the therapeutic process.
This means, in fact, that within the therapeutic conversation a
hypothesis emerges that I, as therapist, suggest on the basis of some
element provided by the clients. Then I, together with the clients,
improve it, until the final hypothesis (if it emerges) becomes a sort
of common heritage for all of us. What emerges from this process
is still a hypothesis, not a truth, for both clients and therapists. This
is the main difference from an analytical interpretation, which is
grounded in a firm authority principle.3
By co-evolving hypotheses in this way, the client could learn (or
deutero-learn, following Bateson, 1942) a systemic way of reasoning.
We may well define this kind of hypothesis as a dialogical hypo-
thesis; that is, a hypothesis which lives and exists as a dialogue. The
hypothesis does not follow from the dialogue, it is the dialogue (and vice
versa). In systemic individual therapy (see Boscolo and Bertrando,
1996), when I build my hypothesis together with the client, I am
teaming up with her, as if we are a reflecting team without other fellow
therapists. In other words, I pass from one side of the mirror to the
other. Although the client is asked to be very active in the hypothesiz-
ing process, it is still the therapist who should have an idea of how to
lead the dialogue (I should have some idea, as far as possible, of what I
am doing and where I am going). We could summarize the change by
saying that in the beginning we, as systemic therapists, had a real team
with us; then, we had an internalized team (Boscolo et al., 1995); today,
we team up with our clients.
The hypothesis is a dialogue

A hypothesis may catalyse possibilities for evolution when the hy-
pothesizing process happens within a therapeutic frame. But how is
such a frame defined? Or, better, what is the difference between a
therapeutic dialogue and a commonplace, everyday conversation? We
might say that the very definition of a therapeutic relationship is the
therapeutic frame. A therapy is a therapy because it is defined by a
relationship where the rules of everyday relationship are suspended
(Bertrando, 2006). What makes a therapy a therapy is exactly the
specificity of the conditions of a non-everyday dialogue.
3
For the concept of psychoanalytical interpretation, see Laplanche and Pontalis (1967).
For its use in transference analysis, see Gill (1982), Bertrando (2002). For some transcribed
examples, see Gill and Hoffman (1982).
The therapeutic dialogue, however, is also an everyday dialogue. If
it were not, what happens within the therapeutic frame would be real
only within that frame, and would not be transferred ‘outside’ (in
‘real’ life). We may say that a therapy is only successful when what
emerges within its frame is somewhat transferred to life outside the
therapy room. But the therapeutic frame, in turn, is not born in a
void. The actors of the therapeutic dialogue, namely therapists and
clients, bring their own respective ways of framing their worlds to the
conversation. Thus therapy is an encounter of frames, the one
brought by the therapist and the one brought by the client, because
all human beings live in a world made predictable by the rules defined
by a frame, but creativity and novelty may emerge only by going
outside of the known frames.
Cultural stability depends upon shared rules and frames, and if the rules
and frames are shared there will be no change. If the rules and frames
are not shared, there can be no communication. On the other hand, the
two person do not operate in vacuo and it is therefore possible that
operating upon shared rules and frames they reach a point at which they
stub their toes upon the environment. The rules and frames may than be
called in question. Moreover, two persons operating with discrepant
system of rules and/or discrepant frames, may be so frustrated in their
attempts to communicate that the rules of one or both person are
ultimately called in question.
(Bateson, 1953)
The above statement may not necessarily apply however, because

different frames are successfully shared. If they are not, building real
systemic hypotheses becomes impossible. It is easier to organize ideas
in hypotheses if we develop the ability to listen to what our inter-
locutors have to say. Indeed, it is impossible to organize them when
the interlocutors are deaf to each other. We often see such a process in
the teamwork of very inexperienced systemic trainees. Rather than
hypotheses, it is easy to hear gossip or individual bravura pieces that
are not caught by anybody else and can hardly coalesce into hypo-
theses.
In this sense, any real systemic hypothesis is a dialogue. A therapist
who builds hypotheses on her own relies on her inner dialogue
(see Rober, 2002). But the inner dialogue is in itself monodic rather
than polyphonic. The different voices of the inner dialogue always
tend to be fused in one single voice which will originate ideas
(ontological hypotheses) rather than relational hypotheses. Here, to
share and discuss our own hypotheses with the clients – while
accepting, of course, the clients’ hypotheses – means to open our
frame, accepting that the language (the world) of the other will enter
into ours.
According to Mikhail Bakhtin (1935/1981), the world of language
(or, better, of languages) is characterized by a twofold dimension. In
any time and place, there is a centripetal force that drives language
towards unification and uniformity. At the same time, however, a
centrifugal force exists that leads to a condition Bakhtin names
‘heteroglossia’ (raznorecie), that is to say the co-presence of different
languages: ‘A diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diver-
sity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices. . . this internal
stratification [is] present in any language at any given moment of its
historical existence’ (Bakhtin, 1935/1981, pp. 262–263).
Heteroglossia guarantees the vitality of languages, which are alive
only in dialogue, and would die (become still and fruitless) in
uniformity. The important thing is ‘dialogization’, which means,
rather than a dialogue between persons, a dialogue between different
languages (which, to Bakhtin, means different conceptions and
experiences of the world). This constitutes not a unity, but a poly-
phony of speech genres, where speech genres concern the different
social groups, the ways of speaking and writing, the idiosincratic
individual discourses, which give form to shared speech (Bakhtin,
1935/1981, pp. 288–289; see also Bakhtin, 1986).
We may define our therapy as ‘dialogic’ only if the therapeutic
conversation acquires the characteristics of dialogue according to
Bakhtin (see also Seeikkula, 2003); that is, a polyphonic cohabitation
of different discourses and different visions, from which possibly a
new vision (a new language) may emerge, but where the difference of
discourses is accepted anyway. The striving to persuade the inter-
locutor to accept my point of view is substituted with the nurture of an
active understanding on his part, in the sense that anything that is said
is assimilated by the listener in a new conceptual system.
The speaker strives to get a reading on his own word, and on his own
conceptual system that determines this word, within the alien conceptual
system of the understanding receiver; he enters into dialogical relation-
ship with certain aspects of this system. The speaker breaks through the
alien conceptual horizon of the listener, constructs his own utterance on
alien territory, against his, the listener’s, apperceptive background.
(Bakhtin, 1935/1981, p. 282)
The therapist not only works on the relationships the client is
embedded in, but also on her inner dialogue (or her ability to have
an inner dialogue). For the client who is stuck in her ideas and
explanations, the hypothesis organizes such ideas through a dialogue
with the therapist, thus also allowing the development of her own
inner dialogue. This means that sharing hypotheses with clients may
be necessary, in systemic individual therapy, because the client is the
only possible interlocutor, and she may cure us of solipsism – a
professional malaise which all therapists risk.
Although in distinct spheres, Bateson and Bakhtin raise a similar
problem; that is, how can we evade the tendency to uniformity and
repetition? One solution is dialogue. This is why the hypothesis, a
constitutive part of the therapeutic dialogue, should enter explicitly
into the conversation. It is necessary that the visions and experiences
of the world of therapist and client can meet, maybe even clash, and
bring forward the emergence of novelty not completely guided
(submitted to conscious purpose) by the one, nor by the other.4 ‘Not
knowing’ may thus become ‘knowing together’. Of course, the
therapist must be aware, within this process, of her responsibility
(Bianciardi and Bertrando, 2002), of her unavoidable position within
a power system (Foucault, 2003; White, 1995; see also Guilfoyle
(2003) for an analysis of power in dialogical therapy), of her pre-
judices (Cecchin et al., 1994). Here a substantial difference remains
between therapist and client. The latter may well be unaware of all
these dimensions, especially at the beginning of therapy. However, the
dialogical work around her hypotheses and those of her therapist may
make her aware of prejudices, positions, emotion, which she did not
know beforehand, took for granted, or did not fully understand.
A clinical case: Diana

Diana, 33, is an architect who works for a public agency. An only child
and single, she lives with her parents,5 and has an official fiancé,
Maurizio, although she has rather frequent affairs with other men.
She has been in therapy with the first author for almost a year, for
what she defines as her inability to feel emotion, to be deeply moved
4
For a criticism of conscious purpose, see Bateson (1968a, 1968b), and Harries-Jones
(1995).
5
Such a condition is rather common in Italy, where this therapy was conducted, and it is
not to be considered an anomaly, as it would probably be in most Anglo-Saxon countries.
by something, to feel her own desires. More than once, to the
therapist’s question: ‘What do you really want?’ she has answered: ‘I
don’t know, if I knew I would not be here.’ She is a ‘good client’, always
punctual for her hour, but every time she appears distressed, because,
she states, she has absolutely nothing to say. During the therapy, the
therapist tackled her emotional anaesthesia, connecting it to her
relationship with her parents, a couple she perceived as cold but
unstable, needing her calm, unemotional presence to stay together.
During an encounter in an advanced phase of the therapy, Diana
puts some themes on the table. She has to decide whether to accept a
possible house to rent or whether to go and live with Maurizio, who
appears, as usual, not to be convinced of her commitment to him.
Diana insists on her general difficulty in making a choice. Her feeling
of unsteadiness surfaces, together with her reflections about her
relationship with her fiancé, and the feeling of a connection between
her reaction to Maurizio’s proposals and her past experience with her
parents. This is not a clear-cut hypothesis, but rather a dim idea of
how she feels. We will now offer a transcription of a lengthy part of the
session, leaving our comments for later.
Diana [D]: Well, I was thinking about an image from my childhood.
There are scenes I remember with my mother. My mother has three
sisters, so I grew up with my cousins, their siblings. I remember, well,
it was not a class thing, but when there was a birthday, there was a
little party, etcetera, and my mother had this ability of making me
have something different from them, the presents, the party, and I
hated not being the same as my cousins. Sometimes I hated her
presence, a real broody hen, though I was with my aunts, my cousins,
when we went around. I remember some red slacks, that my mother told
one of my aunts to buy for my birthday, because she liked them, and I
was wondering why I could not receive the same things, the same
presents as my cousins. This feeling of being different, because my
mother . . .
Therapist [T]: You mean . . . ? The same things, for example, what?
D: Toys, nothing special. But the fact is, my mother made me feel
different, because she said they had to give me those red slacks instead of
. . . other things. It was irritating. I am starting to think about those
years, now. She seemed convinced that she knew me, I don’t know . . .
T: I feel it wasn’t that your mother was convinced she knew you, but that
she was convinced she knew better than you what was good for you. This
is the common factor in all the three episodes you told me [in previous
sessions]. In all of them, it was the same: I know it’s better for you not to
become a professional swimmer, I know you have to study every day, and
I know what’s the colour you like for your trousers.
D: Sure! It’s a continuing . . . [pause]
T: Apparently, apart from how your mother really was as a person, what
she left in your memory is this thing of not being able to understand you.
And to be convinced, instead, that she could understand you perfectly,
that she could decide in your place. On the one hand, every time you
think about it, you get mad at your mother, on the other . . .
D: There was this photo of the two of us on the couch, and I still remem-
ber how much I was nervous, at that time, because I didn’t want to do it.
My mummy, instead, loved to take pictures on the beach, or at birth-
days parties, etcetera. I remember making a comment about it some
years ago, when we were watching these pictures, taken when I was 6 or
7: ‘Mummy, do you know how I hated to be photographed?’ When I say
this kind of thing, she’s always taken aback, because she doesn’t under-
stand. She didn’t understand and she didn’t see my point, and maybe I
wonder whether it was me, the person incapable of transmitting my
opinion, my advice. Maybe I accepted it all, I remained silent, and she
had good reasons to believe that I agreed. This is the implication, this is
why the anger is always directed towards her, because she was thinking
things, and believing she knew my taste, or . . . and, on the other hand,
the anger towards myself, because when this kind of thing happens at
work, afterwards I say to myself: ‘Why didn’t I say it, why didn’t I do it,
why didn’t I express it?’ But I know that I’m stuck with that sort of
internal block, and I can’t.
...
T: Here the common factor between what you tell about the past and
what you tell about the present is that you are blocked. There are these
things and you don’t speak for yourself. In the past, I don’t hear your
voice very much, I hear your mother’s.
D: Sure, and it’s the same today. My feeling is, if I manage to say
something, usually it’s whispered. I don’t speak up, I ask for approval.
Yes, generally, this is my approach. I can’t discuss, I whisper. Even
when I know that the person on the other side is wrong, if he tells
me ‘No, it’s like this and this and this’, I can’t. I won’t say I don’t have
the strength, but . . . I don’t know what I lack inside. This creates
some problems at work, because afterwards they tell me: ‘Why didn’t
you tell him?’ There are things that I should say, but . . . they don’t come
out.
T: Why couldn’t you react against your mother? You were not afraid of
your mother, I feel, the thing’s different. I was wondering (I make my
fantasies, then you tell me if they make sense) . . . I was trying to put
together this and what you told me about your family at the very beginning
of your therapy: everything was centred around your father, he was the
disturbing figure for you. . . . Now, why did your father make things
difficult, more for your mother than for you? My idea is, if you had to
protect your mother at any cost, then you couldn’t possibly confront her.
D: But that happened afterwards!
T: Afterwards chronologically?
D: Yes, sure, because there . . . today we’re talking about primary school,
maybe the fifth or sixth grade.
T: At primary school there wasn’t this thing with your father?
D: No, sometimes my mother had something to complain about, but it

was nothing special. My father became a burden afterwards, from the
ninth grade up to secondary school. My parents gave me problems at
different times.
T: At different times. But I feel, however, that you had somehow to sup-
port your mother, to think she was right. It was a kind of an absolute duty.
D: No. It’s just that my mother had always been more practical, so when
my father kind of lost his head, it was easier for me to cling to her,
because I felt she could hold it all together. Maybe I feel the anger
coming now that things are quieter, so I am more detached, I don’t see
her in this role anymore.
T: Maybe this thing, of having to show your solidarity to your mother,

because of your father’s disorientation, prevented you from rebelling
against her afterwards. You never showed rebellion in adolescence. I
won’t say you should have, but most people do rebel in adolescence. You
had your reasons not to do it. You gave in as a child, as a young girl, at 15
you could not get angry, because there was this other problem, I think . . .
D: Yes, probably I didn’t want to add more problems . . .
T: . . . or you couldn’t. I think it was not a decision on your part. It’s like
you felt you couldn’t do it. Like it disappeared from your awareness, it
never occurred to you that you could get angry towards your mother
because she was so coercing.
D: I would say it didn’t even cross my mind at the time. It’s terrible.
T: It didn’t cross your mind, maybe, because at the time it was so vital
that you and your mother clung to each other . . . how I imagine it, it
wasn’t just you clinging to your mother, but both of you clinging to each
other. You gave me the impression that you didn’t see your mother as a
rock to grasp, but that the two of you were like two logs trying to stay
afloat in a fast flowing river.
D: In a sense it’s like that. I didn’t choose. Maybe today, after all these
years, these memories resurface and they are stronger. If things had
been different, when I reached adolescence I would have started to
assert myself . . . I said to myself: ‘What’s the use in saying anything?’
since she didn’t get anything . . . so I accepted. But now I start
remembering it all . . .
T: It’s as if today, after talking a lot about it, you allow yourself to
remember things that hurt you, but that have been buried for a long
time, that did not cross your mind straightaway.
D: No, my father was the most immediate, the most obvious problem.
My mother, for better or worse, has always been a stronger point of
reference than my father, and therefore, notwithstanding what I’ve just
said, she’s always been more of a security.
T: Yes, but, from what you’re saying, after a while she became too
strong a security, too strong a point of reference. It’s like you were
saying, ‘She was too strong a security, and it somehow led me to lose my
personal bearings. I don’t know where are my points of reference
anymore.’
D: Sure.
T: That’s probable. I think that, for you, the issue is to make peace with
the mother you carry inside you. The actual mother you have now is not
so similar anymore to the mother of the past . . . and maybe the mother
you carry inside you was never so alike the mother you had in reality.
But you have to settle scores with that one, the one you have inside.
D: How can I do it?
T: You’re doing it already. I think it’s a slow process, you cannot think
that one day you remember some things, and those things just snap, and
you’re changed. It’s not like that. You can see, now, how you gradually
discover or rediscover things that were not obvious at all. It took some
time for you to bring them out.
D: Some memories, sometimes. But it’s not a burden, maybe . . .
T: Maybe you couldn’t see that those memories had strong links to what’s
happening to you now. They are not just memories, they are memories
that show you some facets of yourself that are still there. Rather than
memories, they are ways of being with other people that you still have to
overcome, and are not so easy to overcome. Maybe some day you will
even be able to talk this over with your mother.
In this dialogue, the therapist has to reorganize his hypothesis. At the

beginning, after the first two exchanges, he tries to organize data he
gathered in previous sessions, in order to give some sense both to the
mother’s behaviour, Diana’s responses, and her present feelings.
Since Diana’s first answers are reassuring, the therapist cooperates
with her to improve the hypothesis. The idea is that the mother’s voice
became so loud it suffocated Diana’s, thus fostering her basic un-
certainty about her own feelings. The therapist is quite straightfor-
ward in putting forward his hypothesis (‘In the past, I don’t hear your
voice very much, I hear your mother’s’). Diana not only accepts it, but
goes on and enriches it. Then, the therapist proposes (although in a
tentative fashion: ‘I make my fantasies, then you tell me if they make
sense’) a new hypothesis, to explain why the target of Diana’s anger, in
the entire first part of the therapy, had been her father. This time,
Diana contradicts the hypothesis. The triangle hypothesized by the
therapist (Diana who confronted her father to gain support and love
by her extremely demanding mother) does not persuade her. The
therapist, now, must find something different, some new elements to
help Diana build a hypothesis that may make sense for her. At this
point, therapist and client start working together, each of them adding
little bits of ideas. At last, they agree on a new relational hypothesis.
Then, the therapist modifies it slightly in order to retrospectively give
Diana a more active and competent role towards a less powerful and
terrible mother. Now Diana can choose what to decide, whether to
speak or stay silent, whether to look for her peace or not. And the
therapist suggests she has already started to choose to rediscover her
memories and give them new meanings.
Conclusions
In the conversation with Diana, the therapist is collaborative and
smooth. He asks many questions, proposes some reframings, but
without becoming openly directive. This is not necessarily always the
style of this therapist. With other clients he may be more passive and
attentive, or more active and structuring. In a dialogical therapy it is
not the therapist’s style that dictates what happens in the dialogue but
the opposite; that is, the dialogue dictates the therapist’s style within
that dialogue. If the therapist really participates in the dialogue, and
does not set it up as a monologue where she tries to impose herself on
the client, or as a monologue of the client’s, where she just listens with
sparse comments to what the client has to say, then the dialogue
becomes an environment where the therapist may allow one of a
number of possible styles to come to the surface. The therapist’s
discourse may blend smoothly with the client’s, as in this case, or may
contrast it. But it is always in a dialogical relationship with the client’s
discourse, accepting it and its specificity. In this process, a respectful
therapist should not be afraid of her ideas and beliefs. We believe it is
indispensable for the therapist to bring himself, what he thinks, and
his hypothesis, within the dialogue, facing dialogically the client’s
discourse.
So far we have largely discussed individual therapy, and clearly the
context of a single therapist vis-à-vis a single client favours dialogical
hypotheses. But we believe that also in the more complex context of
family therapy, where a team faces a family, hypotheses may enter the
dialogue. This implicates a polyphonic process, and asks of the team
(not just the active therapist) some humility and the definitive
rejection of any therapeutic omnipotence. If the clients are the
experts of their own stories (Anderson and Goolishian, 1992), then
they are also the privileged interlocutors for building hypotheses on
those stories.
The final crucial point is that, in this perspective, the therapist must be
aware of her own responsibility (Bianciardi and Bertrando, 2002). This
means that the therapist is ethically responsible for everything she brings
to the dialogue, and that the fact of participating in the dialogue on equal
terms does not erase her responsibility. On the contrary it increases it,
because the therapist is responsible for the very reality she tends to build
in the dialogue, and for her role within it. Maybe the responsibility of the
therapist in the dialogical process is to keep open several different
hypotheses, to avoid simple linear explanations, to introduce the idea
that several possibilities exist in the telling of one’s story, and to be open
to discuss and accept the client’s responses to this proposal.
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Journal of Family Therapy - 2006 - Bertrando - Hypotheses Are Dialogues Sharing Hypotheses With Clients

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r The Association for Family Therapy 2006.

Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington

Hypotheses are dialogues: sharing hypotheses

Paolo Bertrandoa and Teresa Arcellonia

The use of systemic hypotheses in therapy has been criticized on the

The systemic hypothesis is but one example of a process which is

Ezio, or the hypothetical partner

The therapist and her hypothesis

Hypotheses, teams, dialogues

The hypothesis is a dialogue

The above statement may not necessarily apply however, because

A clinical case: Diana

D: Sure! It’s a continuing . . . [pause]

D: But that happened afterwards!

T: At primary school there wasn’t this thing with your father?

D: No, sometimes my mother had something to complain about, but it

T: Maybe this thing, of having to show your solidarity to your mother,

D: Yes, probably I didn’t want to add more problems . . .

D: Some memories, sometimes. But it’s not a burden, maybe . . .

In this dialogue, the therapist has to reorganize his hypothesis. At the

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