Conversation, Language and Possibilities. A Postmodern Approach to Therapy

HARLENE ANDERSON: Conversation, Language and Possibilities. A Postmodern Approach to Therapy. New York: Basic Books, 1997, xIx + 307 pp., $38.00 ISBN 0-465-03805-0. We have looked for years to the Houston Galveston Institute in Texas and its main authors Harlene Anderson and Harold A. Goolishian to demonstrate the implications of postmodern thinking for the process of psychotherapy. Harold Goolishian died recently and Anderson dedicates Conversation, Language and Possibilities, which summarizes their common work with its innovative ideas, to his memory, as her "friend, colleague and mentor. " It is a book worthy of his memory. Conversation-is framed by the story of a family that had unsatisfactory family therapy and it could almost be viewed as an answer to the challenges and criticisms raised by this family. Actually, all along, Anderson as a seasoned educator, poses questions and then proceeds to answer them, appropriately reflecting the central importance of good questions in therapy, discussed later in the book. Several important questions, as well as answers, are presented through client stories. The author solves the difficult issues of confidentiality by using only cases that were already in the public domain, such as videotapes of consultations and live interviews during conferences and workshops. Questions are chosen to lead us from one theoretical principle to the next, in a welcome linear fashion, but many concepts also reappear several times in different contexts, adding some unnecessary redundancy, yet lending the circular feeling of psychotherapy to the book. Conversation, Language and Possibilities starts with an historical review of the development of therapy within the modernist paradigm. It leads us through the gradual transformation of psychodynamic thinking, starting with the radical innovations of the systemic approach, giving a nod to communication theory and first- and second-order cybernetics until it lands at contemporary hermeneutics and social constructionism as the two philosophical movements Anderson considers most representative of the postmodern paradigm. In the first 50 pages of Part I: Creating the Space. The Give and Take of Theory and Practice, we are treated to the entire context for the new approach to helping people, yet another "the medium is the message" move, since contextual understanding is a central postmodern axiom-"[U]understanding is linguistically, historically, and culturally situated" (p. 39) and "meanings are context-dependent" (p. 206). Part II-with a title that is too cumbersome to reproduce-introduces, or else re-emphasizes and carefully explains the most important therapeutic ideas we have learned about through the author's many articles. A tentative incomplete list includes the concept of a problem-determined system with a shifting and fluid membership; approaching a client from a "not knowing" position; therapy as a collaborative partnership; problems as linguistic events that are socially constructed; the client as conversational partner and teacher; the therapist as a welcome guest. Central is the view of therapy as a process of internal and external dialogical conversations. Anderson defines a "dialogical conversation . [as] a generative process in which new meanings-different ways of understanding, making sense of, or punctuating one's lived experiences-emerge and are mutually constructed" (p. 109). The author draws an interesting contrast between dialogical conversations in which new meaning emerges and monological conversations in which this is not the case, a distinction that pervades all our social encounters. Important here is the concept of "shared inquiry" (p. 112) and "talking with . rather than to each other" (p. 112). Part III, Searching for Meanings in Meanings returns to, and expands on, the philosophical basis of this whole approach and its interface with psychotherapy. …