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ABSTRACT
Drawing on fieldwork conducted in a clinical setting in China, this article makes a contribution to the special issue’s examination of the ambiguity of kinship’s mutuality by engaging systemic family therapy. Family therapists are no strangers to the negative in family life. ‘We-ness’ could be a suffocating embrace and potentially the nourishing condition for even the most severe of psychiatric diagnoses. While practitioners understand the purpose of treatment in terms ‘individuation’, I argue for seeing family therapy as a technology of kin therapeutics for working on relational tangles that have caused someone to take responsibility for something she or he cannot control. While systemic therapy may appear to valorise a self-determined, rational subject, I highlight instead what practitioners themselves know all too well – that human lives are interconnected, and I underscore the existential import of their concern for the entangled adolescent therapeutic action works to set ‘free’.
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Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Robert Desjarlais, Susan Reynolds Whyte, Karin Zachmann and Susan McKinnon, who, at different venues, served as discussants of early versions of this paper; colleagues and students at the CUHK anthropology Friday Seminar in which I presented a longer version; and fellow participants at the Gynotech Workshop organised by HKU’s HKIHSS, and the ‘Living Well in China’ conference hosted by the Long U.S.-China Institute at UC Irvine. Susan McKinnon and Horacio Ortiz read full versions of the manuscript and provided feedback I will continue to think with. Thanks to Lotte Meinert and Lone Grøn for putting this special issue together. Finally, I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for helping me sharpen the argument, and most especially, the clinical director of the Institute, for the precious opportunity to study systemic thinking and engage in inter-disciplinary conversation.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Kangzhou is a pseudonym for a metropolitan city in the People’s Republic of China.
2 The ‘sub-social’ is a concept I once played with in a conference paper, and I failed to define it in a clear and concrete way. I thank Cheryl Mattingly for encouraging me to take up this concept again, in the context of a written commentary that mentions this earlier conference paper (Citation2017).
3 The literal translation is ‘rivers and lakes’, but the term has long been a trope in the Chinese cultural imagination. Huang has summarised its long 2000 year-history as such:
Writers across different genres have associated it with a variety of themes: hermitic existence beyond the mundane world, the vagabond way of life, the underworld of secret societies, and more recently in martial arts (wuxia) fiction and films, the fantastic world in which heroes with kungfu skills compete with their opponents. (Citation2017: 10)
4 Comparison between therapy and ritual have been made before: the practice of occupational therapy in a spinal cord unit in an American hospital has been analyzed as a kind of secular ritual that deploys aesthetic devices to facilitate a transition from despair to hope, from being estranged in one’s own body to feeling at home (Mattingly Citation1998); the ritual practice of zar possession amongst Hofrayati women in Sudan has been compared to psychotherapy and the pursuit of ‘insight’ (Boddy Citation1988), which recently inspired a comparison going in the other direction, Internal Family Systems therapy (IFS) at a eating disorders clinic in the United States has been likened to the way the Zar cult provides to distressed Hofrayati women a language and a means to live with the zairan that possessed them (Lester Citation2017).
5 Structural family therapy is also systemic in its orientation but it differs in emphasising the confusion of roles as the problem to be worked on, for example, a son who has become a mother’s confidante or emotional caretaker.
6 Lee’s protocol has been recognised by the American Family Therapy Academy (AFTA), earning her an award in 2014. Murray Bowen was AFTA’s first president.
7 Nyole people often interpreted the misfortunes of women and children as a consequence of somebody else’s problematic relation to an agent, for example, the conflict a husband has with his agnates. Whyte, citing an earlier publication, has called this the ‘“innocent victim” pattern’ (Citation1997: 32).
8 This is a term I borrow from Bowen, who used ‘clumps’ to describe the factions that would form at his clinic over the sharing of gossip (Citation1978: 485).
9 To be more specific, clinical material revealing ‘we-ness’ is usually found in what systemic therapists call ‘patterns of transaction’, translated as hudong moshi in China. I leave the discussion of this for another occasion because there are many types to go through, and also an intellectual history to trace – one that, interestingly enough, goes back to Gregory Bateson’s explanation of gender difference in Naven.
10 See for example Jarrín’s research on plastic surgery in Brazil (Citation2017: 159–160).
11 The Conflict Discussion is partly intended to serve this function, i.e. allow for naturalistic observation, as the assisting therapists in the room are only there to give instructions and keep time.
12 The term ‘outsourced’ comes from a discussion I had with the junior therapist leading my study group in which I shared about the Azande’s use of oracles to deal with social tensions.
13 This of course does not mean that family therapy is not interpreted in culturalist terms in China’s psycho-boom, the Institute only happens to be unusually strict in its training.
14 The great paradox of family therapy consists of its anti-individualist understanding of a psychiatric condition on the one hand, and its valorisation of objectivity and detachment on the other.