The Sage Handbook of Social Constructionist Practice. Группа авторов
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11 Curiosity and Generativity: Welcome to Practices in the Therapeutic Professions
Sally St. George and Dan Wulff
‘Practices in the Therapeutic Professions’ is a deliciously inviting and inclusive title, embracing many initiatives under the moniker ‘practices’. The term ‘therapeutic professions’ also beckons a wide range of professional endeavors that fall within the purview of ‘therapeutic’. Given this big tent of possibilities, we are pleased to present nine intriguing practices that may be new to you, or for those of you who may be familiar with the work and writings of these authors, you may find some important developments to existing practices.
For us, social constructionism has always been a deep well we have turned to for expanding the arena of initiatives and practices that animate postmodern ideas into our everyday lives. We remember attending the inaugural international Taos conference in 1993 and attending a workshop by David Cooperrider (one of the Taos Institute founders) in which he had the participants (therapists and organizational development professionals) switch roles and use the skills they had developed in their own field and apply them in the others’ field. The therapists had to figure how to convene a meeting of world religious leaders to forge and build interfaith collaboration. The organizational development folks set about trying to help a family in therapy forge and build collaboration as the family dealt with succession planning for their family business. Both groups were initially flummoxed – the therapists felt that the group of religious leaders was too large to engage, and the organizational development practitioners thought a family was far too small to be able to use their skills to make a difference. With David's encouragement to think about our basic principles of valuing multiple realities and relationships, we all eventually stopped our grumbling and identified places where our skills were applicable in an additional context beyond what we had considered possible. We realized through our professional affiliations that we were languaging things differently, but with the same intent, hopes, and meanings. This experience of recognizing connections across seemingly disparate fields or applications illustrates the surprise and generativity that social constructionists cherish.
As editors of this part of the Handbook, we are very pleased to introduce you to the section on practices in the therapeutic professions. We both teach in a graduate school of social work and have been working with families as couple and family therapists and with student therapists as supervisors for a long time. And what we completely agree on, firmly believe in, and work at every day, is that conversations must be sustained for us to reasonably expect to improve our world. Stress and tension in our world seems to be increasing and the challenges to maintaining openness to alternative ideas feels particularly acute. These are the times when the abilities to grow collaborations are most needed. We rely on social constructionist ideas to spur us on beyond the usual points of polarization, collapse, and shut-down. We believe that when the conversation stops/discontinues, we are in big trouble, but when we can design ways to hold and facilitate the conversations beyond disagreements, beyond dichotomies, beyond evaluations, we can generate hope, interest, energy, and engaged commitment.
One could reasonably think that the grounding provided by social constructionist ideas would be warmly welcomed across time and place, but such has not been the case. The modernist traditions have created a firm stronghold across regions of the world and professions, resulting in a suspicion about ‘non-modernist’ understandings. Despite this modernist domination, we have continued to hold closely the fairness and utility of ideas such as multiple realities and multiple perspectives in our family therapy work, especially as demonstrated by individual family members in their interactions. Furthermore, we believe that multiple realities are particularly noticeable when we look at families in their sociocultural contexts. In each of the chapters in this section, you will be able to readily see attention to and appreciation of multiple realities as opportunities for understanding and moving forward in our work. The chapters relate social constructionism to all levels of human interaction – from the individual, families, groups, communities, and beyond; from the historical, to the present, and into the future.
When we listen to our clients talk, we repeatedly hear them talking about their relationships with each other. Relationships are our anchors to belonging, to hoping, to developing, to being valued, to dreaming, and to acting. Therefore, relational talk occupies our conversational space. Each of our authors in this section demonstrates their solidarity with this idea – you will read how each of them talks about generative conversation and transformative conversation. They show us why and how they keep the conversation going toward change, toward justice, toward difference and freshness – all to keep people connected to each other in ways that are fruitful and satisfying.
Introducing the Chapters Within
In this section on Practices in Therapeutic Professions, you will find ideas and examples from a variety of modalities of therapy from individual, family, group, and community, in supervision, and from the fields of psychology, social work, family therapy, and psychiatry. You will also find presentations talking about what ‘social’ means, creating conditions for collaborating, engaging many people at once at the community level, and looking at ways in which we can stretch, expand, and create many more possibilities for living preferred and satisfactory lives together through the theoretical and applied cross-fertilization of ideas.
From the field of social work, Stanley L. Witkin and Christopher Hall, who have been leaders of ‘social working’ from a constructionist stance, write about the crossovers and demarcations when social work practices are conducted from a social constructionist perspective (and when they are not). Their chapter draws attention to the word ‘social’ in social construction and in social work and how key that concept is to both. Despite their potential connections, the