an adolescent uses cocaine (a bad behavior), is caught by the police in a public setting, and is charged with possession and use. His father declares that he “cannot handle this crazy family anymore” and disappears, leaving the mother and son to cope on their own. Change has occurred as a result of a positive feedback loop—even though all of the people in this system may feel lousy. In a different family system facing the same problem with their adolescent, two parents who are on the verge of divorce may pull together enough to focus on and try to address their child’s problems. In this case, the system maintains itself through a negative feedback loop—even though we may think that staying together for the adolescent is really a positive thing. Cybernetics therefore is actually the science of communication, and it can be applied to machines or humans with equal success.
Gregory Bateson (1972) was the first person to outline the ways in which cybernetic thinking could be applied to human communications and psychopathology. Bateson suggested that very often superficial changes, what we would now call first-order changes, were simply ways in which a family system stayed the same, “an effort to maintain some constancy” (p. 381) or homeostasis and balance in the system. He was more concerned with the possibility of second-order changes, or changes in the family system that endured and transformed family process altogether. Even though Bateson would never practice family counseling himself, he influenced the practitioners, Don Jackson, Jay Haley, and John Weakland, who founded MRI in Palo Alto, California. There they would study families that included identified patients with schizophrenia. Applying the principles of cybernetics to the family system, they came to see schizophrenic families as locked in transactional no-win/no-escape processes they described as double binds (Bateson et al., 1956).
Bateson’s team described a mother’s visit to her hospitalized schizophrenic son: The mother’s body tightened up when the boy attempted to hug her. When he withdrew, the mother asked, “Don’t you love me anymore?” The boy’s face reddened, and the mother said, “Dear, you must not be so easily embarrassed and afraid of your feelings.” The mother-son relationship was a no-escape relationship, and this interaction constituted a set of directives in which the boy could not win. One such experience can be tolerated or dismissed; however, the MRI group posited that schizophrenic families were engaged in relatively constant double binds.
Double-bind theory would prove inadequate for addressing schizophrenia as a whole. It launched the field of family counseling, however, through its attempt to understand symptoms as meaningful within the systems that support and maintain them.
Because cybernetics grew out of the structures applied in mathematics and the computer sciences, there has been a tendency to look at systems mechanically. Machines are almost always closed systems: They have a certain structure, function in a certain way, and produce a given and predicted outcome. Biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968) developed general systems theory from his study of living systems, a systems model that describes families and human systems as both open and contextual. Living systems develop and grow. They act in an effort to become, rather than merely to exist, and to resist or initiate change. Almost every living system is made up of subsystems. Similarly, every system is a subsystem of larger systems.
Most families have spousal, parental, and sibling subsystems, which we consider more fully in Chapter 9 on structural family therapy. A nuclear family is also a subsystem of extended families, ancestral families, churches, communities, cultures, governments, and the global community. Families also act in and interact with the physical and social environments they encounter. Like all living systems, families are by definition open systems, in which all of the parts contribute to all of the rest of the parts. Family members are not locked into a singular outcome by a fixed structure (as machines are) but have the capacity for what von Bertalanffy (1968) called equifinality, or the ability to achieve a desired end in many different ways. Children bring new ideas and resources to family life and can enrich parents as much as parents can anticipate children’s needs and provide care and developmental opportunities for their youngsters. Personal growth does not really exist, because the growth in any one person almost always affects the growth of everyone else in the system. Parents may have a significant influence on the development of their youngest child, but it is equally possible that the influence of siblings is more important and/or has made a major contribution to the growth of that child. This is equifinality within a family system: two or more ways to get to or account for the same observable end.
von Bertalanffy reminded family therapists who focused on the nuclear family and the principle of homeostasis that they were, in effect, reducing the family system to a closed machine (Davidson, 1983). In addition to emphasizing the concept of equifinality, von Bertalanffy’s theory insisted that systems were more than the sum of their parts; that systems should be viewed holistically, having systems within and interacting with larger systems in the environment; that human (living) systems were ecological, not mechanical; and that living systems engage in spontaneous activity rather than merely react.
When cybernetics is applied to machines, a kind of first-order cybernetic stance is actually possible: Structure, patterns of interaction and organization, feedback, and systemic function can all be observed objectively without necessarily affecting the performance of the inanimate object. The observer and that which is being observed are separate; the observer can carry out changes in the system without becoming part of the system. This is called first-order cybernetics. The principles of general systems theory applied to living organisms called into question the possibility of an independent observer. Indeed, anyone attempting to observe and change a family participates in it and becomes part of an actual living system: The observer both influences and is influenced by the family. This is called second-order cybernetics (I. Goldenberg et al., 2017). As we will see in Chapter 12 on social constructionism, some postmodern therapists have come to distrust the power imbalance inherent in modernism and first-order cybernetics. They have adopted a not-knowing or decentered position in an attempt to focus on the client as expert and all but remove the therapist from imposing personal or professional influence on the family. von Bertalanffy, however, believed that it was impossible for therapists not to influence the family system; he noted that not all values, positions, and perspectives were of equal value. Indeed, some positions—even those held by the family—can cause damage to the system and the environment. It is therefore essential that therapists study and understand the values, assumptions, and convictions that have been adopted in their own lives and evaluate their theories and practices in relation to the impact these will have on the family, the commu nity, and the culture. This is a position that we consider further when we look at Bowen’s multigenerational family therapy.
Jay Haley
Born in Montana with an early childhood spent in Wyoming, Jay Haley moved with his family to Berkeley, California, when he was 4 years old. Jay had two sisters and a brother, and despite living in California, he was proud of his rural roots. He earned a bachelor’s degree in theater from the University of California, Los Angeles, and later completed a master’s degree in communication at Stanford University. It was while he was at Stanford that he met Gregory Bateson, who invited him to be part of the project that would study systems theory applied to families. This invitation came on the basis of a single conversation—an argument really—that Haley had while consulting Bateson about film analysis. What Haley brought to the Bateson communications project was an ability to take very complicated ideas and articulate them in a clear, direct manner, a gift that first manifested itself in a seminal article of the 1950s (Bateson et al., 1956).
In 1953, members of the Bateson project started to become interested in the hypnotherapy of Milton Erickson. Both Jay Haley and John Weakland attended a workshop offered by Erickson and then followed up with multiple visits to interview him. The conversations were all taped and became the basis for several of Haley’s early books. It is from Erickson that Haley incorporated the use
