Emotions as ecosystemic adaptations

Abstract

Despite Gregory Bateson's interest in emotion and culture, the potential for understanding emotion systemically and culturally was lost very early in the mainstream development of family therapy, partly as a reaction to the dominant psychiatric‐psychoanalytic paradigm of North America at the time. In those pioneering years, to take emotion seriously was to risk appearing stuck in a one‐person psychology. In an interesting paradox, it is relational psychoanalysts and parent–infant researchers such as Beatrice Beebe and Frank Lachmann who have recently turned to systems theory to give a fuller account of emotions and emotional regulation in self and relationships. The author draws on their ideas together with the work of Peter Fonagy, Patricia Crittenden, Jessica Benjamin, Britt Krause and others to sketch briefly an ecosystemic theory of emotional expression. This sketch is used to give contextual meaning to two contrasting clinical topics in relation to anger: self‐harm and conduct ‘disorder’.

Client crying in the context of family therapy: an exploratory study

“…Therefore, a combination of specific elements related to culture and gender may have an influence on the frequency and impact that crying has had on the therapeutic process in this study. Nevertheless, this small‐scale study points to the value of crying in family therapy contexts and contributes once more to the re‐evaluation of emotion as a systemic concept (Pocock ).…”

The promise of EMDR in family and systemic psychotherapy: a clinical complement to Field and Cottrell

“…On two occasions he had attacked men in the street if he perceived they were being unfair to their girlfriends or partners. The overwhelming affect was, at other times, managed by destructive self‐regulation (Beebe and Lachmann, 2002; Pocock, 2010b) in the form of drinking and self‐harm. To paraphrase Crittenden (2008), the only information this boy needed was information about how to make sense of the present but, in the absence of integration, the only information available was what he had experienced in the past.…”

Calling the context: towards a systemic and cross‐cultural approach to emotions

“…In this way the emotions affected the interaction but there was nothing certain about which way this would unfold. Pocock refers to this as an emotional ecosystem (Pocock, 2008), and points out that this system contains real, remembered or fantasized relations and plays an active role in influencing these relations. It seems to me that these different dimensions of past, present and future are not so much a system as they are the context which emotions help to call (Crapanzano, 1992) and that this also was Bateson's point about schismogenesis in the naven ritual.…”

“…Culture, then, is another way of talking about expectations and about context as involving not just the present but also the past and the future. Expectations play a role in interactions and in any learning situation and one of Bateson's most fascinating insights was that this may involve reversals, an idea that is also central to approaches that focus on patterns of attachment across generations in family therapy (Byng‐Hall, 1995) and in attachment research with adolescents (Crittenden, 2000; Pocock, 2008).…”