Expanding the Limits of Individual and Family Therapies A Critical Realist Approach

This book invites individual therapists to think systemically (including issues of social justice) and family therapists to explore a deeper understanding of the individual in contexts, including the domain of the unconscious. Using a critical realist framework, it promotes multiple perspectives—often novel combinations from dissimilar psychotherapy traditions—to expand holistic understanding and provide a richer variety of resources to bring to co-constructed therapeutic encounters. It uses a critical examination of the often-unspoken philosophical underpinnings of psychotherapy practices to re-vision a range of theory and practice considerations—theory choice, the role of science, knowing and not-knowing, emotion in the system, power and autonomy, collaboration and change, and sameness and otherness. All the preceding elements of the book are then brought together in the clinical topics of triangulation, aggressive out-of-control behaviour, and self-harm. Numerous brief case vignettes and longer case examples ensure that theory is always grounded in practice.

1. Introduction.- 2. What Is Real? What Is Knowledge?.- 3. Pluralism.- 4. Knowing and Not-Knowing.- 5. Theory Choice.- 6. Emotion in the System.- 7. Collaboration and Change.- 8. Sameness and Otherness.- 9. Who to See, and Other Choices.- 10. Triangles.- 11. Aggressive, Out-of-Control Behaviour.- 12. Self-Harm and Suicidality.- 13. Critical Realism: Why Bother?.

David Pocock is a systemic family therapist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist in independent practice in Wiltshire, UK. He is the co-editor, with Carmel Flaskas, of Systems and Psychoanalysis: Contemporary Integrations in Family Therapy, (Karnac, 2009), and a series editor of the Palgrave Texts in Counselling and Psychotherapy series.