The Reflecting Team: Dialogue and Meta‐Dialogue in Clinical Work

Abstract

A "stuck" system, that is, a family with a problem, needs new ideas in order to broaden its perspectives and its contextual premises. In this approach, a team behind a one-way screen watches and listens to an interviewer's conversation with the family members. The interviewer, with the permission of the family, then asks the team members about their perceptions of what went on in the interview. The family and the interviewer watch and listen to the team discussion. The interviewer then asks the family to comment on what they have heard. This may happen once or several times during an interview. In this article, we will first describe the way we interview the family because the interview is the source from which the reflections flow. We will then describe and exemplify the reflecting team's manner of working and give some guidelines because the process of observation has a tendency to magnify every utterance. Two case examples will be used as illustrations.

The Reflecting Team approach: convergent results of two exploratory studies

“…The Reflecting Team approach of family therapy developed by Andersen (1987) is consistent with the theoretical concepts of 'secondorder cybernetics', with contemporary constructivist thinking and with Maturana's considerations about the autopoietic organization of living systems. According to these theoretical assumptions families/ client systems are regarded as structurally determined, implying they cannot be changed from outside.…”

Inter-agency work in Open Dialogue: the significance of listening and authenticity

“…During the interviews, ALH wrote notes and made short verbal summaries of how their expressions were understood. During the last meetings, ALH and MH undertook some open re ection [36] with the aim of encouraging the professionals to con rm or correct their understandings. Immediately after the focus group, ALH made audiotaped summaries of how the focus groups had functioned, focusing on the conversation and group dynamics [34].…”

Working systemically with family violence: risk, responsibility and collaboration

“…Thus we are clear with them about our own moral position around the use of violence in family relationships, our use of social control procedures and in our use of reflecting processes (Andersen, 1987;Friedman, 1995;Smith and Kingston, Working systemically with family violence 383 1980). We always work together with family members, whether seeing them individually, in relationship or as a group.…”