Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

A therapist is neither an artist nor a scientist. And yet the therapist's activity involves both art and science. The therapist knows how to negotiate a way between knowledge and skill, and appreciates what he or she must not try to explore. Thus, somewhat contradictorily no doubt, the therapist must know the contexts in which it is best not to intervene as well as the points where it is proper to do so. The therapist has to act locally, while, at the same time, thinking globally enough for what he or she is doing to be pertinent. Family therapy arose out of problems of clinical practice in psychiatry, linked to the pragmatic dead ends in which certain practitioners found themselves in their daily reality; it emerged as a response to inextricable problems. It established a connection between the semiology of the body and mind, on the one hand, and the modes of behaviour, emotion and thinking of suffering family microcosms, on the other, by creating events that were singular in time and space and, at that level, modifying the spontaneous development of the family. Thus therapists are born without knowing that they are therapists, caught up, beyond their desires to care and cure, in the necessity of performing therapeutic acts, without necessarily knowing ‘theoretically’ all the relevant parameters which contribute to the accomplishment of such acts. The relationship between clinical ... log in or subscribe to read full text