How to be a postmodernist: a user’s guide to postmodern rhetorical practices

Abstract

Family therapists are being encouraged to adopt a postmodern approach to therapy and knowledge. Postmodernism is more than a set of beliefs that therapists can either accept or reject; it is an approach to the construction of truth that eschews many of the forms of argumentation, such as appeals to logic or evidence, characteristic of earlier writing in family therapy. In this paper we present some of the alternative rhetorical strategies used by contemporary family therapy and family therapy texts in the construction of novel truths. These strategies include: writing in the first person; making qualified or conditional assertions; implying rather than stating truths; ‘delegitimizing’ conflicting views; and ignoring disagreement. We discuss the value of these strategies in maintaining the authority of therapists and commentators on therapy in the face of the widespread incredulity towards metanarratives, such as science, that characterize postmodern society.

Honouring our great grandparents: towards a rhetorical analysis of family therapy

“…In recent years a number of writers have argued that psychotherapy can be enriched by (re)discovering its roots in rhetoric (Eng, 1974;Frank, 1995). Some writers within the systemic tradition have done likewise for family therapy by connecting it to classical rhetoric Rhetorical analysis of family therapy 133 (Martin, 1984;Bertram et al, 1993;Larner, 1994;Frusha, 2002); by suggesting a specifically systemic 'rhetoric of unpredictability' (Boscolo et al, 1993;Boscolo and Bertrando, 1996); and by finding hidden rhetorical devices in those therapies that claim to be postmodern, dialogical and somehow, by implication, non-rhetorical (Legg and Stagaki, 2002;Guilfoyle, 2003;Roy Chowdhury, 2003). The above writers, in spite of their different therapeutic orientations, share a common belief that the lens of rhetoric can bring into sharper focus some of the ways in which therapists' use of language brings about therapeutic change.…”