Abstract

Some years ago now, the intellectual community felt a jolt, not without irritation, at certain provocative formulations by Fukuyama (1992), at a time when a faltering communism was giving ground on every front to a victorious and irresistible capitalism. In a book with an expressive title, The End of History and the Last Man, he claimed that historical processes had culminated in the enthronement of a universal capitalist order. And he is certainly not the only author to have had the audacity to decree the end of History.

There is indeed, in Western thought – and surely not in it alone – a temptation to place oneself above time, as the survival of the most varied millenarianisms, religious and political, bears witness. We may see in this an effective defence against the anxiety aroused by the limits, the vulnerability and even, let us say it, the insignificance of the human being; never, on the other hand, a stimulus for the development of Science or Philosophy.

The rare combination of pride and modesty that characterises the scientist and the philosopher requires them to assume their historical dimension, situating their work in a continuum whose roots reach into the most distant past and which projects itself, necessarily, into an uncertain future.

There is therefore no room for “here I have arrived, and here I stay”, just as it is absurd to think that a “paradigm shift” amounts to a revolution sprung from nothing and owing nothing to the past. Scientists and philosophers cannot allow themselves such ingratitude, which is common currency among politicians and religious figures.

Realism versus subjectivism

One of the possible ways of understanding the evolution of human thought in the West consists in seeing it as a succession of alternating stages as regards the capacity to apprehend reality.

In Greece, the Presocratic philosophers of nature looked around them, trying to explain what they saw. For Thales, all things derived from water, while Anaximander claimed that man, like the other animals, came from fish. Anaximenes considered air to be the fundamental substance. These are all hypotheses compatible with the viewpoints of modern positivist thought.

Conversely, Heraclitus believed in perpetual change: panta rhei, everything flows, one does not bathe twice in the same river, the sun is new each day. Beneath such statements, reality vanishes. And what of Parmenides who, not believing in the possibility of change, distrusted reality even more than Heraclitus did, since he held the senses to be purveyors of deception and illusion. For him, in a certain sense, it was words that determined reality – a deceptive reality, of course.

But with Democritus, realism returns. For him, everything is made up of indivisible atoms moving at random, as in the modern kinetic theory of gases. In his exploratory gaze beats a causalist inspiration: the “mechanical question” which, for Russell (1946), leads to scientific knowledge. And indeed the author of the Principia Mathematica, who so dazzled Bateson, laments that from Democritus until the Renaissance, philosophers replaced the “mechanical question” with the “teleological question”, the “why” with the “what for”.

There is nonetheless no cause for regret if one considers that philosophers, after taking an interest in what was happening around them, were bound to take an interest in what was happening within them. And this change does indeed answer to a turn in the object of philosophy’s reflection which, from Protagoras and the other sophists – Socrates included – until the Renaissance, abandons nature in order to concern itself preferentially with man. It is as though subjectivism, after the brief trial run that Heraclitus and Parmenides had constituted, embarked on a long flight, barely interrupted for eighteen centuries, only to end its crossing under the assaults of Copernicus and Galileo.

Throughout so long a period of ascendancy, subjectivist philosophy accumulated an immense heritage impossible to summarise here: splendours and miseries, which include great ontological and ethical constructions as well as vulgar scholastic sleights of hand. In any case, an impressive baggage, which ought to allay the anxieties of today’s subjectivists by guaranteeing the presence of their sensibilities in the history of humanity. And more than that, since the evolution has continued, with realist and subjectivist alternations, among them nothing less than the work of Kant or that of Hegel. Until at last, in reaction to a positivist modernism madly in love with reality, postmodernism arrives.

The journey was long and painstaking, and of the greatest interest to psychotherapists, who would do well to hurry up and learn philosophy. Not only is it enjoyable and enriching from the point of view of theoretical training, it may also serve as a protection against the threat issued by Marinoff (2000) in his best-seller Plato, not Prozac!: that philosophers may end up supplanting therapists. And what is surprising is that this last stage, the handover from modernism to postmodernism, proved laborious and imprecise, since it took place throughout the twentieth century.

Postmodernism in psychotherapy

So slow a process was not free of contradictions. For example: the postmodern impact in the natural sciences occurs very early, at the beginning of the century – quantum and relativity theories are there to prove it – whereas the human sciences and, in particular, psychology resist it for some decades.

Is that not paradoxical? Physicists were accepting uncertainty while psychiatrists and psychoanalysts went on betting on a future in which neurology would solve the enigmas of the mind. We had to wait for Lacan (1953) and his resolute claim for language as a creator of realities before psychoanalysis fell into step with postmodern times. And we had to wait for cognitivism to supplant behaviourism, relegating it to the chest of positivist memories, before, even in the great prairies of experimental psychology, a certain constructivism began to be breathed – a postmodern one. Kelly (1955), Bandura (1977) and Beck (1967), to name only a few, were the artisans of this transformation, starting from diverse positions and proposals that converged in today’s cognitivism, so close to certain systemic formulations.

It was in those same years that family therapy too was beginning its journey. And it did so, in fact, hand in hand with the communicationalism of Palo Alto which, beneath its pragmatic appearance, did not conceal its deep subjectivist filiation.

To focus on human communication, starting from the principle that it is inevitable; to understand that the relationship, in any communication, stands at a “meta” level with respect to content; to distinguish a digital language, serving content, from an analogical language, serving the relationship; to underline the decisive importance of punctuation in any communicational sequence, to the point of allowing diverse and equally legitimate readings of it; to consider that it is the mode of relationship, symmetrical or complementary, that determines the subject, and not the other way round…

Any student would recognise in these principles the axioms of human communication of Watzlawick (1967) and the Palo Alto team. But, in addition, one could without great effort hear them as a genuine postmodern manifesto, present at the communicationalist origins of the systemic model even before the term was coined, and well, well before Keeney (1982) and Dell (1982) took issue with the Palo Alto people, gently disqualifying them as “pragmatists”. Or might pragmatism be incompatible with postmodernism? If Watzlawick’s work as a whole answers with a resounding no, the evidence is greater still in one of his most cited books: How Real is Real? Anyone who wishes to declare themselves postmodern with a minimum of credibility has to say that sort of thing.

Then – and let me be permitted this irreverent paraphrase – “the flesh was made word and it dwelt among us”. We all converted to constructivism during the eighties and to socio-constructionism during the nineties, making the postmodern golden calf into an idol of politically correct thought. Improvisational and conversational practices took hold of family therapy, disdaining as pragmatic or as instructive the very people who, years earlier, had disdained Virginia Satir for being too emotional. Everything was in language, and in language alone. Only words – O prodigious discovery of Parmenides – could create pseudo-realities. But now politics was knocking insistently at the door of family therapy. Faced with problems of abuse and mistreatment that called into question the relations of power between the genders and between the generations, it was difficult to hold to the naïve neutrality of constructivism, which seemed to assume that everyone had the same capacity to create realities.

Social constructionism took up Foucault (1966), thirty years after his work appeared, to support a conversion of language into discourse. Speech thus incorporated relations of power, and conversation became narrative.

To say that “we all converted” to constructivism and social constructionism is in fact an exaggeration. The mass conversion was an essentially American phenomenon which, in Europe, touched only the Anglo-Germano-Scandinavian centre-north and a few small Latin islands: the Milan group of Boscolo and Cecchin is its most representative example. In the United States themselves, there were a few cases of resistance among the historical figures of family therapy, such as Haley and Minuchin. In fact, structural therapy, integrated into the common space of the systemic model, never had the postmodern stamp that characterised communicationalism from its origins; on the contrary, it represented the historical presence of a nucleus of realist stock in the field of family therapy. Another mythical figure, Selvini, after having broadened the limits of family therapy like no one else by exploring its most emblematic territories in depth, has taken her critical distance from the postmodern orientation of recent years, moving closer to the other great psychotherapeutic models and, in particular, to Bowlby’s psychoanalysis and to Guidano and Liotti’s cognitivism.

A necessary assessment

To define postmodernism in detail exceeds the possibilities of these pages, but even a light approach requires reference to the different fields of human activity. In the natural sciences, the acceptance of uncertainty is probably enough to earn the qualifier postmodern. In art, the definition passes through a certain eclectic mannerism, which goes beyond modern functionalism. And in the human sciences, and concretely in psychotherapy, the defining core is perhaps reflexivity, the inclusion of the observer in the system, which becomes self-observing, and the corresponding passage from a reality that can be discovered and known to a reality that is constructed and imposes itself, or that is the object of a consensus.

The main drawback of the uniformising spread of postmodernism in the systemic field, draped in family therapists’ historic self-satisfaction at the “new way of thinking” (the “save the planet” that Johnson (2001) speaks of), has been the disconnection from the other therapeutic models and the loss of influence over once promising territories, such as the psychoses. A psychotherapeutic approach to schizophrenia and to other severe mental disorders ought to integrate biological bases and pharmacotherapy, but without giving up the development of the theoretical and practical resources that systemic family therapy possesses in abundance. We systemic therapists cannot consider ourselves brilliant revolutionaries when the revolution we advocate has been permanently postponed for fifty years.

Even if not everything flows in the sense of Heraclitus, things do move. For some time now, throughout the vast world of family therapy, signs of unease have been detectable at the very widespread presence of the postmodern ideological mantle. And that is logical, for the two movements of human thought, the realist and the subjectivist, cannot grant each other a truce and, still less, indefinitely cede to each other scientific and philosophical territories of any importance.

Perhaps, then, the moment is beginning to come to take stock of the results of one stage and to glimpse what is taking shape as the possible content of the one that will inevitably succeed it.

What might be the main contributions of postmodernism to family therapy, those that, in all probability, the orientations which succeed it will have to reinterpret but will not be able to ignore?

The first to be underlined is the calling into question of naïve objectivism, of the flawless expert position that second-order cybernetics has made impossible. The expert psychotherapist cannot deploy the same basic attitudes before the world of relations between subjects and before the world of things. The second is the stage of instrumental action, whereas the first envisages interpersonal, strategic or communicational action. Habermas (1981) dixit.

From this follows another point of interest: the legitimation of different therapeutic approaches to one and the same psycho-relational reality. Complexity makes dogmatism impossible; or, better said, dogmatism is born of the ignorance of complexity. On this terrain, it will probably be necessary to be more postmodern than the postmoderns, who often forget this sound precept in order to dictate what is correct and what is not in therapy.

There will also remain, with an irresistibly growing presence, the importance of diversity as against homogeneity. The good side of globalisation will be this growing difficulty of purities, whatever the ethnic cleansers and the whole brood of more or less brutal simplifiers may wish. In an ever more mixed, baroque and motley world, family therapy will have to adapt ever more to differences of gender, of culture, of generation, of social class, and so on. To differences, but also to mixtures, to combinations of heterogeneous ingredients, to complex equations.

Finally, and it is no less important for being paradoxical, family therapy will have to preserve a few precious technical contributions of postmodernism.

Take for example circular questions which, first described by Selvini (1980) and her Milan team before its division and before the constructivist turn of Boscolo and Cecchin, were then developed exhaustively by the latter and by other authors such as Tomm (1987). It is a precious technical resource, which adapts very well to the circular nature of relationship and which can enrich therapeutic conversation by being added to other communicational modalities.

If circular questions are an interesting constructivist technical contribution, externalisation is another resource arising from socio-constructionism. Accustomed to asking patients to internalise their conflicts and difficulties, therapists had not noticed that, often, the movement in the opposite direction could prove a very useful manoeuvre. White (1989) invented the way of getting patients to place their problems outside themselves, thereby stimulating them to fight them better. A relational therapist, aware that patients’ narratives are parasitised by powerful stories coming from elsewhere and that, in their turn, they too can parasitise other people’s narratives with their stories, will notably enrich his practice if he learns to work with internalisation and with externalisation, configuring between the two one of the axes along which the therapeutic dance can unfold.

And what might be the contributions to be expected from a future stage of family therapy, dialectically going beyond postmodernism?

Individual and family

Above all, the integration of the individual into the systemic model is an unresolved question, which will remain in suspense as long as a relational theory of the self has not been worked out. Gergen’s (1991) pleas, which deny the existence of the ego in favour of a vague social equivalent, are in no way sufficient.

Of course, a relational self cannot be understood as a massive and immovable agency, endowed with qualities per se, but as an individual reflection of a systemic environment that never stops producing chained stories, from birth to death.

The concept of narrative proves useful for designating this set of stories in which the individual describes himself and everything that happens to him, conferring on them a coherence that is at once cultural and personal. But narrative would become a dormitive notion, good for justifying any argument whatever, if it lacked structure, that is to say if stories dissolved within it, stripped of any hierarchy. Experience, in its infinite complexity, confers meaning on individual narrative, and the axis around which this meaning is articulated is relational nurturing, something like the love story that has been lived. Maturana (1996) says that we are loving animals and that interference with love makes us ill. We might add that our love story sets our narrative on healthy or unhealthy paths. And it does so, among other possible mechanisms, by engendering a determinate identity.

Why do some situations change easily and others not? How are we to understand the varying degrees of severity and the tendency to chronicity of certain mental disorders? Resistance to change cannot be explained solely by the inexperience of therapists, as some of the most prestigious systemic voices have so often claimed. There are no doubt biological factors at work, especially in psychosis and in other severe disorders, but nothing proves that their influence is exclusive. Complexity obliges us to consider relational aspects as well, and this is where identity can become a useful reference: an identity that is not an absolute good, but a necessary infrastructure, built with elements such as recognition, valuing and tenderness, which are ingredients of love. An excess of identity can prove a heavy burden and a serious obstacle to change.

Identity can be understood as that part of narrative in which a subject recognises himself, to the point of hardly accepting any negotiation on the matter. It is in the relation between identity and narrative as a whole, of which it forms part, that mental health is at stake from this individual point of view. A balanced identity, neither stunted nor hypertrophied, one that serves as an anchorage for varied and supple narrative constructions, is the best guarantee against psychopathology. And this balance can be sustained only by a rich love story, that is to say by a relational nurturing that is secure, recognising and valuing, full of tenderness and a vehicle of adequate sociability.

The concept of narrative is thus useful for linking the self to the relational world, but it gains from being articulated with the concept of identity, which emanates from it to the point of differing from it substantially.

Moreover, if families are systems composed of individuals endowed with a narrative and an identity (Linares, 1996), how can such individual attributes be embedded at a different logical level, that of the family?

There is no room for dogmatism in the face of a problem such as this one, presided over by uncertainty. Not only every author, but every therapist is entitled to develop his own theory and, in fact, does so. In the perspective one is attempting to set out here, the individual narratives of the members of a family (or of any other relational system: the point holds equally for the members of a football club) converge in a common space, which is family mythology. It is a space peopled with consensual stories, the myths, in which, unlike what happens with narratives, identity inscribes itself only with difficulty. There is therefore no sense in speaking of family identity, any more than in representing the family as an organism capable of thinking, feeling or acting. These are functions proper to the individual, which can never be exercised by a relational system, however high the consensus reached by its myths. In fact, the concept of collective identity (family, associative or national) is in itself a myth that can become dangerous (Maalouf, 1998), as the history of political nationalisms shows, but one that is dismantled with relative ease: a system can change its mythology and remain itself.

But although they neither think, nor feel, nor act, families take part, just as individuals do, in the cognitive, emotional and pragmatic universes. Family mythologies have a cognitive component, values and beliefs; a pragmatic component, rituals; and an affective component, the emotional climate in which all this takes place. Complex myths, then, products of narrative consensus and relatively free of identity charge. This is one of the family spaces in which individual “selfs” are embedded. The other is organisation.

If mythology, as a space of narrative dialogue, represents the old domain of interest of communicationalism, organisation does not conceal its structural stock. The two great roots of family therapy thus take part in the conceptual anchoring of the individual in the family.

Organisation is equivalent to the evolution of structures through time and it is what most resembles the identity of a relational system; but, resulting from a consensual confluence of individuals, it is far more supple and negotiable than individual identity. In organisation, the classical structural concepts find their place, endowed with a historical dimension: cohesion and disengagement, hierarchy and boundaries, distance and closeness, triangulation, and so on.

If the individual is called to occupy a more recognised place in tomorrow’s systemic theory, it seems evident that a few concepts of individual stock that have recently fallen into disuse will also have to be recovered, such as will, duty and responsibility. Will, which implies a movement of self-affirmation by the subject, has found itself supplanted by motivation which, as Marina (2000) points out, seems to present the subject as constantly subjected to external forces and pressures. Rights reign, omnipresent, in the media, stifling duties; and although the latter do appear in questions of great social scope, such as mistreatment, they do so, as Lipovetsky (1992) makes clear, applied to parents alone. As if the duties of today’s children were not those of tomorrow’s parents! Responsibility, finally, which makes it possible to go beyond the tension, once embodied in the controversy between Bateson and Haley, between power and circularity. Power engenders control, doomed to failure if it is not inscribed in a relational reality of higher complexity. One might even maintain that authentic control does not exist, and that power is therefore a dormitive concept. But pure circularity dissolves into a chimera of egalitarianism. Responsibility is the third link in the sequence that begins with the exercise of will and passes through the acceptance of the fulfilment of duties.

And speaking of the individual will lead to a reflection on the emotions, another historical gap in the systemic model that will have to be filled. Weighing on them is the prohibition of Bateson (1973), who despised them as a dormitive concept; they went through the postmodern heyday of family therapy without leaving their peripheral, almost clandestine position. It is true that social constructionism concerned itself with the emotions, but more from the field of social psychology (Harré, 1986) than from psychotherapy. The risk of a sociologising discourse on the emotions is that a new dormitive nuance may arise (for example, the cheerfulness of Latins or the irascibility of Arabs) which would be added to the biological dormitive vision, which makes of them a sort of blind force of cerebral biochemistry.

As psycho-relational phenomena, on the other hand, the emotions occupy a central space in all psychotherapeutic activity.

It seems reasonable to regard love as occupying the central core of the human relational universe. Other orientations in the human sciences have attributed this position to aggressiveness, but anthropology provides data that allow love to be considered the defining element of the human condition. Some six million years ago, our hominid ancestors are thought to have discovered the pleasure of group play, at the same time as female sexuality extended beyond the narrow limits of oestrus. Thus love would have been born and, with it, an immense capacity to engender new states of mind and to foster new reflexive attitudes on the basis of experience. Language would be the natural consequence of changes that Langaney et al. (1998) link to “the most beautiful story of humanity”: the development, during the Palaeolithic, of a human species capable of loving and of speaking.

Love, which defines us as human beings, occupies the central core of the emotional universe. And not only that. Let the defenders of language as the ultimate creator of realities not forget that love, seated on play and on sex (and on sex as play), is the relational base on which language is sustained. A complex love, of course, which, from its emotional core, incorporates important cognitive and pragmatic elements and which, consequently, beyond feeling, makes it possible to perceive, to think and to behave lovingly. Phenomena such as recognition and valuing, the expression of tenderness and affection, the socialisation of children or sexuality in couple relationships are part of the loving spectrum.

If mistreatment, in any of its psychological and physical modalities, is equivalent to lovelessness, both constitute the foundation of psychopathology: interference with love in all its complexity.

And while we are witnessing a progressive recognition of the importance of the emotions at the individual and family levels, it is foreseeable that family therapists will confirm the tendency to recover their own from the corner of “benevolent neutrality” to which Freud had relegated them. Much ground has been covered, for systemic therapists were using “emotional intelligence” before Goleman (1995) popularised the term. Perhaps the main effort could go into theorising it, in addition to using it, so that the discourse gains in solidity to the benefit of therapeutic strategies and techniques.

Relational psychopathology

It is also foreseeable that the future holds a renewed interest in the causes of psychopathological phenomena.

Not that this interest ever ceased to exist, but the emphasis placed on the circularity of the relational has often relegated it to clandestinity. And this although linear and circular causalities are not competing but complementary, relational geometry allowing the most varied combinations of the two. The “mechanical question” will be uttered again by systemic therapists, without the new meaning granted to the “whys” obscuring the meaning that the “what fors” will surely continue to have.

The consequence of all this may well be that concern with diagnosis increases among family therapists. It is not only that presenting oneself before DSM-IV with the vague notions of presenting problem, dysfunctionality and symptom makes things very difficult on the level of dialogue between models. It is also that the diagnostic categories with which the vast majority of mental health professionals organise their thinking deserve something other than offhandedness and contempt. They deserve the immense challenge of being actively called into question from a perspective of complexity. They deserve to be reduced to the category of guiding metaphors (or, perhaps better, raised to that condition) and stripped of anachronistic rigidities. And above all they deserve a radical reinterpretation in a relational key. Anything rather than continuing to lapse into a double epistemology which, on the one hand, delegitimises diagnosis and, on the other, almost shamefacedly acknowledges that it is inevitable.

The old nosological entities of classical psychiatry have traditionally been used as classificatory labels. That is to say, to continue with Bateson’s terminology, as dormitive concepts: the patient is anxious because he is neurotic, or he becomes agitated because he is psychotic. That is a way of thinking – nosological thinking – rightly and definitively discredited. But psychopathological systems gather another tradition, that of therapeutic wisdom which, navigating amid ideologies of every stripe, has accumulated over centuries of interaction with human suffering.

How can one fail to recognise that the great diagnostic categories present concordances with certain relational constellations? The psychoses, alongside their ever more explored biological bases, seem linked to communicational phenomena such as disconfirmation and mystification, conveyed by organisational situations such as triangulation, which involves parents denying their symmetrical confrontation, prestigious siblings and pseudo-parental members of the extended family. And that is only one example, for the list could be very long and, in fact, diagnosis increasingly occupies the attention of systemic authors. The field open to relational research on psychopathological disorders is immense.

Nor does it seem unreasonable that the systemic model should continue its expansion into non-clinical territories, foreign to the traditional implantation of mental health services. Psycho-educational and psycho-legal spaces, business and service organisations, family businesses… all can benefit from systemic analysis and intervention more than they currently do. But where it is most urgent that this should happen “before it is too late” is in social services and child protection services, as in those that intervene in domestic violence. It is to be hoped that the systemic presence in these spaces, already considerable, will increase and consolidate, bringing a complex therapeutic vision that neutralises simplifying approaches. There is no doubt that control and protection are necessary in the face of mistreatment; but if they are not inscribed in a therapeutic approach that integrates the multiple relational dimensions involved, the problem will not stop getting worse.

Ultramodern family therapy

After twenty years installed in full postmodernity, the epistemological enthusiasms and heroisms of the beginning have turned into a placid conformism. Everything therefore announces that a new turn is approaching, one that will shake up the systemic field by engendering new feats and arousing new allegiances. And I say turn, rather than “paradigm shift”, because that seems to me a more modest framing, one which not only does not renounce the history of human thought but willingly inscribes itself in it.

Of course, not everyone will subscribe to the change. As happens whenever a more or less profound transformation makes its way, some embrace its cause while others resist it. The systemic tradition, however, unlike what has occurred in other psychotherapeutic models, has it that these processes are settled in good harmony, without the different sensibilities turning into schisms.

An innovative state of opinion is taking shape and no one yet knows under what name it will develop, but many of its defining elements are already inspiring numerous family therapists around the world. Changes, indeed, do not occur abruptly in the field of human thought, and it would not be surprising if the one announcing itself today were to take a long transitional time.

From this perspective, one might even consider that the decline of postmodernism began with the passage from constructivism to social constructionism: feminism, which so rightly criticised a relativist constructivism as reactionary, felt much more at ease under the constructionist mantle. But there are many sensibilities within the latter, and some, the most radical, preserve an intense postmodern spirit: nothing has consistency in the individual, everything is pure social construction. Once again, then, the responsibility-dissolving evanescence.

A philosopher, Marina (2000), describes the postmodern disposition as a utopia of the spirit endowed with “(…) a seductive air of lightness, of play, of absence of commitment, of a taste for incoherence, which strikes us all as refreshing. There is a feeling of the provisional, of indeterminacy and of pleasant superficiality that facilitates the rapid play of encounters and disagreements” (Crónicas de la Ultramodernidad, p. 58).

In this offhand atmosphere, where language provides the general framework for understanding the world, the subject disappears.

Marina proposes the recovery of a strong subject, jealous of his psychological and social autonomy. A subject concerned with ends and with projects. He also proposes a theory of intelligence that is not limited to solving cognitive problems, but that confronts those which “… affect our life, involve hopes, fears, loves, hatreds, the whole vast flora of human feeling” (op. cit., p. 60). And he states:

And there is the word: ultramoderns. We do not know the philosopher’s reasons for proposing it, but we can imagine a certain provocative impulse that is not without interest.

Let us therefore put forward straight away the proposal of the name ultramodern family therapy for what we imagine as an integrative overcoming of postmodernism.

Ultramodern family therapy, as we envisage it from this article, could go on being creative without being so obsessed with creativity; it would not lapse into linguistic relativism while taking nothing away from the importance of language, and it would recognise more fully the reach of the emotional dimension of the human being. Emotional intelligence, in this perspective, would not merely be a resource for succeeding in life: it would be endowed with an ethical dimension. To organise a happy family would assuredly be a mark of intelligence far higher than the one required to solve differential equations.

The subject would occupy a larger space, both in theoretical reflection and in therapeutic intervention, and, consequently, so would diagnosis: by broadening its relational dimension, it would integrate the traditional psychopathological metaphors without difficulty.

Finally, going beyond historical inclinations, ultramodern family therapy would stop preaching the revolution of the “new way of thinking” and would modestly assume the need to increase understanding with the other therapeutic models.

Someone may say that nothing of what is claimed for ultramodernism is really new and, certainly, they will be right. It is only a matter of nuances, most of which are already present and operative in the systemic field, and which merely continue the infinite spiral that is the flow of human thought. That is perhaps, in the last instance, the raison d’être of the ultramodern turn: a modest claim for nuances.