Whitaker is a family therapist, which means he does therapy only within family systems as a whole and not with individuals. He feels it is generally not as effective to work with an individual alone, as we are all fragments of families. His writing is autobiographical as well as mentoring for psychotherapists as to his methods and suggestions.

Quotes:

“One of the most difficult tricks is to avoid the process of diagnosis. …Gregory Bateson’s statement in Mind and Nature, “I am a verb” – meaning, “You can’t pin me down.” Whenever you start pinning somebody down, the person disappears and you’re dealing with your own fantasy.”

“It has been my sad experience to observe the withering of a number of creative, innovative people because they began to worship the school, the idea, the invention, the orientation which was significant to them. … One of the ways of dying is to become an addict of interpersonal relating. It is as though the process of examining life becomes a substitute for living. The individual…becomes less and less available to other encounters and even to his own creativity.”

“The experience we are aiming for is one of being repeatedly surprised at oneself. Secondarily, we are aiming to avoid the listening mode of educational hypnosis – that altered state of consciousness in which we accumulate data with the hope that someday we can use it… The effort, therefore, is to activate interpersonal evolution, and secondly, to actively protest and offer alternatives to all experience.”

“…the family…is an organism, with all that is implied by the use of such a term. I found myself intrigued by the assumption that there is no such thing as a person, that a person is merely the fragment of a family. … This led to the obvious inference that marriage is not really a combination of two persons; rather, it is the product of two families who send out a scapegoat to reproduce themselves. Then the struggle for a lifetime begins: whether they are going to reproduce his family or her family – a war which is never settled.”

Eight dialectics of a healthy family:
1. belonging and individuating
2. cognition and intuition
3. roles and personhood
4. control and impulse
5. public relations and personal relations
6. love and hate
7. craziness and trickiness – high level of individuation and high level of adaptation. Craziness is a process of nonrestrained expression. Trickiness is an expression of massive adaptive capacity.
8. stability and change

“…love could be defined as the affective union between two persons resulting in a sense of self-fulfillment or self-fullness. This kind of love facilitates a loss of self-consciousness and the discovery of self-awareness. It includes a kind of increasing union and, therefore, increasing individuation. This kind of paradoxical change is characteristic of an expanding marriage.
On still another level, love could be considered an experience in which one is able to be more with oneself because of the presence of another who is with himself or herself. This is an old definition of friendship: one with whom you can be alone. That is, your own beingness is increased by the beingness of the other.”

“Marriage is absurd. It is growthful to the extent that it is countercultural. It is an experience which threatens one’s being and wrenches one down to the roots. Like hypnosis, marriage is an altered state of consciousness. The deeper one goes, the more possible it is for things to happen. One note of caution: If you can’t stand loneliness, do not marry.”

7/9/2007 ( )