Of “errors” and “alternatives”

When I work on adolescent problems — a third of my consultations —, I do so fundamentally with two systems: the adolescent himself and his family.

Looking up the definition of “error” in the dictionary, I found two senses which, to my mind, are closely linked. One: “a mistaken concept or false judgement”; the other: “an ill-advised or erroneous action”. Linked, because a mistaken concept leads to an ill-advised action. But how are we to define the concept of “mistaken”? One way occurs to me: because the action it sets in motion is ill-advised. And why might it be so? Because the aim pursued is not attained.

In consultations for adolescents from the middle classes of Buenos Aires, families usually arrive with a strong sense of “failure”, above all at the parental level, which often leads them to ask themselves:

“What error have we made?” The error is defined by the results: this child is not the way we wanted him to be, nor what we wanted him to be; or worse still: he is not happy. There are usually conceptions of what it is to be a good parent, which lead to “ill-advised” actions but which nonetheless go on repeating themselves, because, from the point of view of what one “ought to be”, that is what good parents “ought to do” today.

For his part, the adolescent most often has a far less tragic view of the situation: he does not consider himself party to any programming error, still less to an error coming from himself. “Is everything all right?” — “Everything is all right.” Everything. Absolutely EVERYTHING.

But for the parents: EVERYTHING is going badly. We systemic therapists are in the habit of reading the relational construction of these definitions.

And so, faced with such a consultation: what might be the paths that would lead us into error? Here are a few:

• Believing the two versions separately, or believing neither of them.
• Believing ourselves “experts” faced with “inexperienced” parents, or believing ourselves “inexperienced” faced with “highly expert” parents.
• Reinforcing the incapacity of the parents or that of the adolescent.
• Centring ourselves solely on the problem, or solely on the solutions.
• Building no hope at all, or building hopes that cannot be realised.
• Growing desperate or growing uninterested.
• Forgetting the theoretical referent, or being its prisoner.
• Seeing everything as “relational”, or seeing everything “from the subject”.
• Imputing everything to the context, or forgetting that it exists.
• Narrowing the system too far, or widening it excessively.
• Joining ourselves too closely to the family, or remaining too distant.
• Overstating the problem, or underestimating it.
• Forgetting feelings, or making them the permanent centre of our interest.
• Always privileging doing, or leaving it aside.
• Having no certainties at all, or having too many. (And, surely, a good many others besides.)

Going through this list, I tell myself that the path of error is a path of extreme options. At least one of the possible paths; certainly not the only one.

We systemic therapists understand diagnosis as the system’s response to our interventions. From this standpoint, an error would not be defined as such a priori, but by the feedback in response to the therapeutic act.

So which responses would be the indicators of an error? A few come to mind…