Southerly winds: Family therapy and Latin America

Abstract

This special edition has been long in the making and it is my honour and great pleasure to present it to you now.I will talk about the length of its making later since I would rather start with my excitement at its publication. This collection of articles showcases some of the complex work that has populated the world of family therapy in Latin America; 1 a work that, although aware of practices in the North, 2 has its own traditions and engagements with systemic ideas and its own unique geopolitical circumstances informing its own developments in theory and practice. In this sense then, and strictly speaking, this special issue is not just a post-colonial or a decolonial critique of the field since it also has a constructive element: it attempts to affirm difference by rescuing practices that, albeit highly complex and with a nuanced sense of what constitutes systemic work as I hope the reader will appreciate, it is grounded in a reality that is of the South, … of Latino America.

The outside and family therapy: A perspective from the relational thinking of Gilles Deleuze

“…Similarly, we can only enter into larger and more powerful individualities as parts. Thus, we find ourselves along this path with Bateson when he speaks of the ‘joy of being part of something much bigger’ (cited in Nichterlein, 2013, p. 306) and also with Yásnaya Aguilar when she maintains that ‘we are an ecosystem, we are correlated.’ It is not a question of a loss of individuality – as if there was an underlying and autonomous presence in what we say and do – but rather a common cause (Zourabichvili, 2012, p. 42) in our actions and those of our environment.…”

“…The notion of open system – inherited from Bateson, Maturana, Varela, Prigogine and Stengers – is taken to the field of immanence, allowing the addition of new dimensions, new perspectives and, we hope, a greater scope for the concept. Furthermore, this brings Deleuze and Guattari closer to Bateson in, as Nichterlein points out, a central and common project of ‘the articulation of immanent forms of organization’ (2013, p. 292). From this perspective, what has made it possible to open the systems is the power of the relational: it has allowed us to pass from a closed totality – a set that is not affected by the outside insofar as it responds to an instance that is prior and external to the experience – to what Deleuze and Guattari call a rhizome .…”

“…The exploration turns then to the territories, the routes and the trajectories, the ways that individuals and collectivities have of occupying the space (Deleuze, 1997, p. 63); all of which gives meaning to using a map or turning it into an intervention. As we will see, this practice is ‘closer to pragmatics and empiricism rather than to pre‐defined theoretical structures’ (Nichterlein, 2013, p. 311).…”

“…This concern is a key theme for French collaborators Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari who, in their joint work, Anti‐Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Volume 1 (1983), 1 articulate a profound questioning of psychoanalysis that challenges much orthodox family therapy in its attempt to explain human difficulties from the family oedipal triangle. We follow, then, the tracks of the path traced by the systemic family therapist Maria Nichterlein in her doctoral thesis, Recasting the Theory of Systemic Family Therapy: Reading Bateson through Foucault and Deleuze (2013), which has brought clinical thought closer to what she later calls ‘Deleuze's contributions for a psychology to come’ (Nichterlein, 2021; Nichterlein & Morss, 2017). Indeed, in Deleuze and Guattari we find a radical critique of both individualistic and family‐oriented types of treatment that aim at normalising the patient.…”

“…Although I do not address a direct criticism of any specific approach in this article, it needs to be observed at this point that we are dissatisfied with the proposals within family therapy that are based on social constructionism. As Nichterlein points out, the social constructionist accounts within family therapy present a reductionist vision of the social, insofar as, to a large extent, they reduce ‘the focus of the explanation only to the linguistic aspects of what takes place’ (2013, p. 291). With the perspective that I propose, I seek to identify possible reductionisms by which we could become trapped when attending to human problems from clinical practice.…”