Family Organization as an Ecology of Ideas: An Alternative to the Reification of Family Systems

Abstract

The argument of this paper is that current structuralist and quasi-organismic models of family organization are descriptions masquerading as explanations. They correctly assert, but do not account for, the fact that the behavior of each member of a family is related to that of every other member. An adequate account must begin by assuming that people behave according to how they define the situations in which they are actors, and that such definitions of the situation are generalizations learned through repeated interaction with others. Family organization is regarded within this framework as the outcome of an evolutionary process by which some ideas are encouraged or confirmed and others suffer a kind of death or extinction, so that the ideas of each family member lead him or her to behave in ways that confirm or support the ideas of every other family member. That is what is meant by the slogan "family organization as an ecology of ideas." This view of family organization requires a demystified account of resistance in psychotherapy, a bare outline of which is provided in the previous section. The overall conception of the psychotherapeutic process presented here is closest to that of the Palo Alto Brief Therapy Project, though I offer as a conjecture that the effective operations of all the psychotherapies can be explained within this framework.