Seventy years of Family Therapy, from Bateson until now. What's new?

Over 70 years ago, cybernetic thinking helped create a radical shift in psychiatry when birthing a new branch of therapy called family therapy. Yet, today, this revolutionary way of understanding human healing, thinking, behavior, relations and “social” systems, floats on the margins of our mental health systems. As one family therapist from decades gone by suggested, family therapy quickly became more like a stillborn child whose fascinating ideas and practices disappeared almost as soon as they arrived. Why is that?
Some say, family therapy was ahead of its time, in an attempt to understand people and their pathologies in context with the systems in which we live. We seem unable to comprehend that we do the only thing we can do in accordance with our biology and epistemology.
One cannot not have an epistemology, only a bad one. - Gregory Bateson
So, what have we learned after 70 years of family theories and therapies? Where do family therapists stand in regard to these issues today? What is the role of a family therapist, and in what domains? How can cybernetic ideas orient family therapists as change agents?
During this conversation, held on March 20th, we explore, with a new generation of family therapists, how they shifted back to many of the original concepts associated with family therapy and cybernetics, such as Bateson’s ideas about power and inequality. We also explore more recent concepts associated with cybernetics that orient this movement, and how we might shift the structures that generate intersectional systems of oppression that perpetuate pathologies.

[@korpiz]

Many thanks for this conversation and upload!

[@hazel2075]

Please reconsider your language in relation to like a 'stillborn child' - for many parents who have experienced the loss of an infant, a stillborn child has not disappeared as soon as they have arrived, they continue to be part of their family, their life, their whole selves. This is not a comparison that should be made lightly; I would have hoped that family therapists would have more awareness of the potential impact of their language and the meanings this may create.

[@korpiz]

I suggest you stop trying to police language and develop some differentiation, or as it’s more often called maturity.