What does the name of this section refer to? Is it not obvious that ideas are made to be thought? Here is a good occasion to start thinking: what are ideas? what is thinking? which ideas do we propose to think? And further: what are the limits between ideas? what marks off disciplines, fields of knowledge, from one another?

Information as “difference”

G. Bateson, who had a particular gift for circumscribing certain notions in a way that was at once accurate and beautiful, defined information as “a difference that makes a difference”¹.

a) What does this mean? When we say “window”, it is not the window in itself that is distinguished: it is distinguished by a boundary at which it ceases to be window and turns into “wall”. It is the window-wall relation, or the window-wall difference, that constitutes the information. Information is therefore a difference, because it is always a distinction, an edge, a contour that an observer can trace.

b) This difference, which can be traced by an observer, makes a difference in whoever receives the information: something in the receiver’s practice changes by the very fact of receiving it. The minimal unit of information is an “idea”². And every idea would engender, in whoever receives it, another idea. Seen from here, orthodoxies are called into question. They rest on a view of ideas as elements that ought to be transmitted in a pure and “uncontaminated” form. This entails, at the same time, understanding communication as “something” that passes from one organism to another, and information as the “substance” that is being transmitted — which takes us back to the mechanical action of a line of bricklayers handing bricks to one another.

This is not the view of information that emerges from systemic-cybernetic thinking. Ideas are made to be thought, to produce other ideas in a continuous evolutionary process. Perhaps conceiving of ideas in this way makes it easier for our practices to evolve and protects us from orthodoxies, which we might understand as a pathology in the evolution of a discipline.

Living thought versus dogma

Orthodoxies do arise, however, and systemic-cybernetic thinking — like any discipline — is not immune to falling into them. It is worth asking, then, how disciplines are born… and how orthodoxies are born.

Disciplines appear as a set of practices devoted to thinking certain ideas. They do not arise by an act of will, as though one were founding a town one fine day by marking out a piece of land and putting urban plans into effect. In time, these practices acquire a certain regularity and a certain coherence: they engender a space that a name can identify, they draw its profile and set it apart from other spaces. There comes a moment when the practices themselves and their limits begin to be thought; when identity is explored in depth and the discipline is marked off. This is also the moment that favours orthodoxies: certain basic ideas are put “in the freezer” and become the banner of the new discipline.

We shall try to contribute to the construction of the case of our discipline — as an ecological system of ideas and practices — by giving it an identity while keeping it elastic enough to prevent orthodoxies from making its evolution sclerotic. To that end, we shall work on ideas coming from many disciplines, ideas likely to make a difference within the systemic field, and in particular in the field of psychotherapy. This means guarding both against the excessive rejection of a source of potential differences from which new elements might be selected, and against the automatic application of concepts born in other fields of practice.

Implicating the observer

We shall contradict the classical principle of scientific objectivity, according to which the observer must not take part in his observations. We shall include in the weave of the account the observer, his history, his feelings: his so-called “subjectivity”.

And this with the aim of overcoming a twofold hiatus: the one that separates disciplines like watertight compartments — while always attending to the difference introduced by the application of concepts belonging to other practices — and the one that separates the observer from his observation³.

As psychotherapists, we live daily with the challenge of making the world of scientific notions and the world of emotion commensurable; in this sense, this way of thinking ideas bears on that daily experience.

In keeping with what has just been set out, we shall frequently present conversations, dialogues, in which scientific notions take on very firm flesh, in an interlacing of personal history and thought.