PAPERS Australian Crawl

PAPERS Australian Crawl

Aust. J. Fam. Ther., 5:1, pp. 3-9

Brian Stagoll*

Keynote Address, Fourth Australian Family Therapy Conference: 'Merging the Streams'; Brisbane, 1983.

I remember back to a few years ago when family therapy was a pleasant and friendly little creek, babbling away. Some of us had jumped in trying to find relief from the Big Dry of Australian mental health and psychotherapy. It was both a very simple and a very profound jump, into a recognition of the interconnectedness of all living things. We were looking for better ways, and fairer, of working with our clients. Besides, mucking around in the creek was fun. It wasn't at all respectable and you often met bad kids who you weren't supposed to talk to. There were lots of swapping yarns, trying out new ideas and stirring up the mud, and lots of new places to explore. It was all very public, informal, equal and sweet. Few of us viewed it as a value-laden or political enterprise. I guess we were committing ourselves to values of fairness, cooperation, mutuality and harmony, rather than to values of self-actualization, individual success and unlimited freedom. These last values are increasingly prominent in a culture that more and more seems to celebrate irresponsibility, self-indulgence, and isolation and detachment from the claims of others. "Family therapy" was moving in opposite ways.

But we never much thought about any of that in our fresh little creek. A lot of water has passed (or should I say, been passed) since then. "Family therapy" to (in the language of epistobabble) nominalize an ongoing flow, is now a turbulent flux with whirlpools, riptides, torrents, a vortex of currents deeper and more dangerous; the noise of many waters. It is much harder now to stay afloat or keep direction and one gets shoved and rolled every which way and a lot of the time you feel over your head. It's hard to know where all the currents are coming from or taking us ... out to sea or back up the creek or into sand or where?

Travelling down the stream, what has happened? Whatever came to pass in that little creek?

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More and more people have jumped in or joined from other streams until the river has gotten quite crowded. Some of course got out again quickly, claiming they didn't need to know how to swim anyway; they can sometimes be seen on the banks of the river, dried out and shrinking, occasionally pushing somebody over for us to try and rescue. It is still hard to explain to them what you mean by swimming.

But many others stayed in the water. These new swimmers stirred it up, thrashing around and making waves. They reminded us that we were not an exotic stream only vaguely related to the surrounding landscape, and that it wasn't enough to be just a bunch of larrikins (mainly male). They demanded the right to swim alongside; many of them were women who affirmed that they were natural swimmers and had been in the water much longer anyway.

Others began swimming in schools. They would break up in schools of four or six and got in the habit of watching each other closely, studying their respective strokes and sending messages to each other through the water. This led to the development of intricate and fascinating styles and even the fantastic notion of "paradoxical swimming". Here you try to appear not to swim at all. When this works well it is miraculous - walking on water. When it doesn't you sink to the bottom like a stone, or like Narcissus staring at his mirror image.

Others got jammed onto rocks, their howls sounding just like the screech of theoretical discourse. Sometimes they managed to climb from the rocks onto islands (this is called "achieving hierarchic superiority") where they dried out and further developed their theories. In time they could imagine that their little island was right in the middle of the

*Williams Rd Family Therapy Centre, 3 Williams Rd, Windsor 3181.

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mainstream. This was a dryly elegant reframe for being marooned.

Others just floated wherever the stream took them and justified this by babbling about Eastern Philosophy and metaphysics. They proposed they were "going with the flow" (just like dead fish do). They called this "not pushing the river". It had little effect on where things were going, finally.

Others got caught up in currents that went nowhere and were swept along in terror and uncertainty until they finally got washed up in muddy swamps or billabongs. There they resembled the character in Samuel Beckett's play "How It Is", who, crawling naked through the mud eternally, punctuates his unpunctuated recitation with the droning phrase "something wrong there . . . something wrong there".

Some swimmers got very concerned about water safety and how to train better swimmers. This was a laudable idea, but it is hard to teach people how to swim if you are nearly drowning yourself or not too sure of the river and its currents. These teachers grasped at whatever bits and pieces they could find floating along, and clinging to this wreckage they even began selling it to other swimmers. It was a bit like in Ogden Nash's poem -

"Want some flotsam I've gotsam.

Want some jetsam? I'll getsam:"

The question of water rights, irrigation and preventing the stream from breaking its banks (which some would call a "discontinuous change") were raised. There was talk that the water was getting too crowded and that access to the water should be regulated and that the water should be made to flow along neat channels, managed by the proper authorities and with no illegal swimming permitted. Dams, locks and purification programs were urged. It was said that each State should have the right to control their share of the water, but coordinated by a federal program. Others opposed these ideas, arguing that such programs were expensive and there were dangers of stagnation and increased salinity, and the creation of elite specialist swimmers. This would be to disregard all the people who were in the water anyway, and had been there a long time. It remains to be seen whether 1983 is the year of No Dams for family therapy.

And finally, some managed to keep afloat. For example, in Adelaide techniques for white water swimming were perfected. Economical strokes necessary for long-distance swimming were developed as well as fast strokes when currents were changing rapidly. These swimmers managed to keep their heads above

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water and duck when a dangerous wave was coming and eluded the sharks that sometimes came in with the international tide.

These swimmers are still not quite sure about how all this was done, but they do know that it is harder and trickier than they once thought it was. The troubled waters are more dangerous and subject to stronger and colder currents. But the flux and the torrents have also been a reminder of the water, which is only too easy to forget when things are flowing smoothly and warmly. I still don't know where the river is flowing, straight out to sea or into sand, or over the banks to nourish and enrich the dry land.

At this point, I should probably stop. If I did, I would say that "all rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full". I would point to the impossibility of stepping into the same river twice (or once), then I would apologize for my deluge of words, now evaporating into a drizzle of thought and express my hope that the next 4 days goes swimmingly.

However ... it is hard to resist the temptation to editorialize in a literal way. So I would like to say something about the situation of Australian family therapy and the streams that are merging (and emerging and submerging and purging).

I would particularly like to focus on Australian culture and aspects of male/female relations in the culture as they relate to family therapy; then look at the relationship between our "local" cultures and "universal" Science, exemplified by systems theory, and then speculate on ways of responding and staying afloat in the cruel crawling foam of life in the 1980's.

The rise of family therapy in the '70's and '80's is related to turbulent changes in Australian society and the need for new professional definitions and solutions in response to these changes. Over this period there was an unparalleled questioning and loosening of a dominant traditional form of family life, with its associated rigid patterns of male/female interaction that had been in existence in Australia for over a century and that formed the foundations for social and family life in Australia.

Family therapy did not arise out of nothing: it was both a symptom of and an answer to new social demands and doubts appearing in Australian life, and an attempt to solve and modify problems and conflicts surfacing in the society. It is here that the central dilemma for family therapy lies, and a much more painfully obvious dilemma now than it was in those early days up the creek, when family therapy was good unclean fun and mud-stirring that didn't seem 4o have that much to say about larger social and political issues.

A./.FT. Vol. 5, No. 1, 1984

Our dilemma: Is family therapy a conservative and palliative response maintaining the basic social and family order of the culture? - or - Will it go on from an early tradition of questioning and disrupting established patterns, towards the building of richer and more differentiated family and social life in this country?

This is a vital question for all those professional activities that go on under the rubric of "therapy" in our so called "Therapeutic State" (Lasch, 1977). But it is an especially sensitive one for family therapy, which places major emphasis on how a person's symptoms both hide and signify destructive interactions and contradictions in the social order, and how systems change and resist change. To put this into the prevailing jargon; has family therapy as a social movement really been "anti-homeostatic", or, as is more usual, a "first order change". How much has it been a question of "the more things change, the more they stay insane".

I believe that we can't avoid an historical overview here. There is a particular tendency in Australian culture, mirrored in its family therapy, to shun historical understanding for a heightened focus on here-and-now interaction. This tendency can easily end in maintaining the status quo. So some history.

Looking back over 200 years I would argue that the early days of White settlement in Australia left a distinct stamp. They were times of hardship, isolation and brutality in a country that was stranger than any the early settlers had ever experienced, a country of harsh elements, floods, droughts and fires in lonely bush and under a vast sky that in Manning Clark's words, "breathes indifference to men's strivings" (Clark, 1981). In the first 50 years of settlement, Australia was a prison where Irish and Cockneys struggled with their Royal English guardians and betters, with both sides joining to annihilate the indigenous population. Patrick White (1977) has described it as "the land of whips and thorns". It was a male-dominated society with a few women around regarded as "damned whores" (to use Anne Summer's appellation) (1975)*. In this harsh landscape, the settlers held on and finally prevailed, developing characters to match. They were sceptical and informal, practical and finally optimistic, if a little fatalistic.

*There can be difficulties with this analysis, which can readily slide into perpetuating the position of womens' experience outside the mainstream of Australian history. Jools (1983) for example, has recently pointed out that "the Colony was also founded by single mothers" (p. 200), as much as the convict men of popular history. Jool's point is a reminder too, that so called "deviant family forms" have always been part of our social history and are not "new".

This is all expressed in the great Australian reassurance "She'll be right, mate' (not, note "He'll be right"). Australians clung on to myths of democracy, egalitarianism and a "fair go", at least for White males. Much of this was ambivalent opposition to the shadow of British Imperialism and later Yankee Power. Australians were both skeptical of and bedazzled by imported things, something that continues to this day and is reflected in our family therapy.

The most highly valued social relationship was mateship amongst men. We can see this in the evolution of Australian English, a sardonic, colourful and funny language and the base for great geniality of male intercourse (Wilkes, 1978). It is a language that sends up all pretensions, including its own. Les Murray (1981) calls it the "Wang Wang" language, with its fractured consonants and jagged vowels. It has a rather limited emotional range and inner depth, with a slight tune of the whinge, the depressive falling note, and a pessimistic, fatalistic beat, the Hanrahan note: "We'll all be rooned" (Murray, 1983). In all of this it is the tongue of the Australian male. There has also always been an Australian family speech, a domestic slang for women and children, but it has remained private, and publicly neglected. Nancy Keesing's recent book "Lily on the Dustbin" (1982) is a first collection of this "family speak" or "Sheila speak", lighter and more emotionally resonant. "No wocking furries". (This is all over the page like a drunken spider.)

It is after the first 50 years of settlement and the arrival of "free settlers" that the typical Australian family can be seen emerging. It has been described as "born modern" in Patricia Grimshaw's terms (1981), from her studies of Colonial family history. Family networks and traditional lifestyles were left behind in the Old World and the husband and wife alone faced the tasks of establishing and building family life - the family was nuclear and modern from the start. Women had been brought out to fulfill men's needs and uplift and settle the new country. Their role was very much seen as that of moral arbiters - to use Anne Summer's terms (1975): "God's Police". While the men worked, the women were handed the social tasks around domestic life and looking after the family. The texture of life outside the family remained very strongly masculine, a pattern which has continued largely until recently. Men have traditionally been protectors and women nurturers. Australian men seem to have great tendencies to evoke, or demand, excessively maternal responses from Australian women. One historian has spoken of Australian women as "the doormats of the Western World" (Dixson, 1975). Another has speculated that "there is a symbiotic relationship between the

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Australian male dream and the Australian women's suburban nightmare". (Stretton, 1983). This is our history, or a lot of it.

However others have argued, and I think plausibly, that within the family women have never been subordinate in Australian life but very much in charge. From the 19th Century on, observers consistently commented on the solidarity and inclusiveness of the modern Australian family unit, with its major emotional investment in the home, the central place of the children and the intense engagement in domesticity by women, who stayed very much in control in this domain (Grimshaw 1981). This pattern is still very strong, as Margaret Topham noted at the Adelaide Conference two years ago (Topham 1982). Margaret was referring to what I call the "great Australian matridux,/'. "Matriduxy' refers to this powerful leadership function of the mothers within the family (Bryson 1975). Margaret challenged Australian family therapists to confront these recurring historical patterns. They were demonstrated in studied by American sociologists in the 1950's (Adler 1965) who noted the dominant role of women in family life and activity in Australia and the consistently lower activities of fathers, much less prominent for example than in American families. It still applies. We can depict Australian family life at its extreme, if I want to touch some raw nerves: a picture of laconic men left outside or isolated from the realm of family life, taking refuge in self-conscious masculinity around sport, "ockerdom" and alcohol, offset by talkative women excluded from public life, taking revenge and/or solace in Valium, headaches and maternal overcontrol.

All of this is very awkward stuff, not quite what we thought we might come across when we started swimming down out of that creek. But we can't talk about "family therapy" without questioning the "naturalness" of the modern Australian family and the places that men and women have been given in it in Australia. This "ideologic" family: inwardfocussed, child-centred, matriductal and private, has dominated Australian history and social policies. Not questioning or seeing this "typical family" in its historical context can result in what some writers have called "familialism", or seeing the family as a private institution, somewhat removed from and above society. (Barrett and Mclntosh 1982). It can result in an inward family therapy that sees a family's dysfunction as essentially an interior private concern. This easily leads to, for example, blaming the "over-protective, enmeshing mother" or the "isolated, peripheral father" as if they were acting deliberately or free of any cultural expectations or constraints. Sometimes