Mind For Therapy

Irreverent Portal

A Critique of the Family Therapy Field

In January of 2011 Bradford Keeney began his term as president of the Louisiana Association for Marriage and Family Therapists. Each new president must write a welcome from the president to be posted on the website.  The following is a draft of Brad's welcome message that was sent to me and not the final version that was posted. The final version only appear for two weeks or so, which was the extent of Brad's time as president. He resigned his position shortly after taking the post for various reasons (some politicial and some personal), but not before stirring up a bit of trouble.  I asked the current LAMFT president to archieve the message from Brad, but I don't think the organization is looking to make the kind of waves I would hope it would.  Anyway, here is a draft of the message. Enjoy.

WELCOME FROM THE PRESIDENT

Personal Welcome from Bradford Keeney, Ph.D.

Welcome to the LAMFT website. I want to say as the new president of our organization that it’s been both a delight and an irritation to have been intimately involved with the history of family therapy. The originating contributions of our profession – especially those articulated by Milton Erickson, Don Jackson, Gregory Bateson, Olga Silverstein, Virginia Satir, R. D. Laing, and Carl Whitaker, among others – were revolutionary and inspirational. The perspective they offered is as paradigmatically shocking today as it was in its first days.

Unfortunately, our field lost connection with these roots and today the majority of graduates from a marriage and family therapy program have never read an essay by Bateson nor watched a session conducted by Jackson. Some have never even heard of their names! To make matters worse, the more contemporary expressions of family therapy, voiced as “narrative,” “postmodern, and the re-involvement with neurobiological explanation and the myriad forms of psychobabble led Minuchin to lament that “there is no longer any family in family therapy.” I’d go further and say there is seldom any “family therapy” in “family therapy.” By this I mean we are no longer systemically/interactionally oriented – with few exceptions – and have sold out to the paradigms we once were differentiated from.

The context that fostered the degradation and death of our field was AAMFT. Its leaders and the graduate programs it spawned had little to no significant mentoring from the original founders of the field. Based largely in former home economic programs that took in family sociologists (the lowest status members of the sociology profession), it tried to define “family social science” as the ideal context for studying, teaching, and accrediting family therapy. This killed the profession, destroyed its promise for a mental health revolution, and poisoned any creative or deeply scholarly work. Its leading voices often came from graduates of the University of Minnesota, which, in my opinion, is an institution that should be given an award for its successful assassination of what was once inspirational and promising about our tradition. One family secret in our field: the schools that claim to be the top programs in family therapy are the worst!

Over the decades I experienced brilliant contributions to family therapy and they all took place outside the graduate programs that taught future generations of family therapists. At the same time I also watched utter gross social scientism and plain dumb power politics trivialize family therapy education. With perhaps one or two exceptions, I advise students not to go to any MFT graduate program. Why? Because there simply isn’t any “family therapy” there. There isn’t anything that resembles systemic thinking or practice. The majority of today’s family therapy graduates, faculty, and practitioners may know less about family therapy than those who practiced before AAMFT even existed.

I am not exaggerating. It’s actually worse than I am letting on.  Ask Wendel Ray or have a séance with the original founders. They’ll tell you the same.

Nonetheless, there are students, faculty, graduates, and everyday practitioners who still discover the great books and proceed to let go of the deadbeat nonsense that AAMFT and its schools propogandize. These rogue systemic warriors are the only reason it is worth writing this introduction.

I accepted this position as president of LAMFT for the sole purpose to ask for the end of AAMFT and the profession it represents. It no longer serves any good. After years of being away from the field I attended the last AAMFT national conference and found a social corpse already brain dead.

I am proud of the fact that I have never diagnosed a single client. I would be ashamed of those who did and called themselves family therapists. I, as President, refuse to support our legal right to diagnose. I would support our legal right to not diagnose. We are not counselors, psychologists, or psychiatrists. When we want their rights we sell our soul and have no reason to speak of having a separate identity.

I ask for the end of all mental health professions, including ours. They are all iatrogenic. I believe that many or perhaps most of our members don’t have a clue what is unique about family therapy, and that includes some of our past presidents.  We, as an offspring of AAMFT, are in a toxic mess and the only way to stop this nonsense is to put an end to it and clear the space for new ground.

Let us consider starting a diagnosis-free, non-medically oriented profession that reconnects us to the systemic roots of our profession. It is time to take a stand for well being rather than the rights to pathologize. It is time to recognize that the great practitioners of therapy are geniuses like Mozart and Louis Armstrong. They should inspire our performances not the social science con game of so-called evidence-based therapy. Do you want evidence based pastors and priests? Evidence based musicians and poets?  We are artists of transformation; not scientifically based dispensers of cures. The latter notion is not only insane; it is dangerous and wrong. It only serves making someone rich who is a “family social scientist.”

In conclusion, as your President of LAMFT, I am asking for your support in putting an end to AAMFT, saying no to the trivial rhetoric and politics of its leaders and representatives, and calling for a new context to hold the work of those who care more about helping people change than they do advancing professionalism.

I am aware that some of you will be irritated by these words. I hope so. Let’s fight with each other so others can know there are true differences worth fighting for. I’m calling you out and you know who you are! Others, especially students trying to sort out what it means to be a family therapist, please go read the original classics and make as much trouble as you can in your classroom and conference sessions whenever you don’t hear the presence of systemic thinking and practice.

Our only hope is to pull the plug on the comatose vegetating corpse that is only hindering what is wonderful about our profession. Let’s have a New Orleans Jazz Funeral and put this field to rest. Then let’s dance down the streets and start shouting that we are starting all over again. This is how life works: it’s a death and resurrection show energized and directed by the spirit of mystery. Let us be prophets and have the courage to say the truth. Let us be more alive than this profession has encouraged us to be and do so with a mighty roar and a fearless hurricane. Let the heavens proclaim the entry of the next divine dance!

Move over AAMFT. Down with this profession. Let’s wait no longer to walk away with whatever truths have survived and transplant them in new soil so healthy roots may deepen and enable a brighter future to blossom.

I hereby call for a separate political party within the LAMFT organization. Let’s call it the Mardis Gras Party. We shall laugh and sing and dance ourselves through this mutiny. Party on, members of the Mardis Gras Party! We shall be advocates of the heart and serve the mysteries of love and creative transformation. Where else could a new party of a higher order logical type provoke a revolution that is inspired by a mad hatter platter other than Louisiana? Send the word to other states that we are doing more than quibbling about internal politics and should be boss. We want to end this disaster and get on with a better way. Forget AAMFT. It not only lost its way; it died. Now the fumes of its rotting stench are encouraging anyone who wants the fresh breath of creativity to run for their lives.  Follow the teachings of the blues, gospel, and jazz.  Bring forth the swamp wisdom, alligator epistemology, and spicy therapy! Join me in this pirate takeover of what was always rightfully ours once upon a time . . .