Para‐Modern Family Therapy: Deconstructing Post‐Modernism

As in the arts and humanities and other social sciences, post‐modernism is quickly gaining orthodoxy in family therapy. This paper presents a social‐realist and deconstructive critique of recent post‐modern thought in family therapy. From the perspective of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, it suggests that family therapy is neither modern nor post‐modern, but both/and these alternatives, that is, para‐modern. In deconstructive thought, philosophical dualities like realism/social constructionism, cybernetic/post‐cybernetic, systemic/narrative co‐exist in an absurd double logic. Like writers of literature, the para‐modern family therapy ‘puts forward’ a theory or method not as an ideology of truth, but as a play of irony. She/he works simultaneously inside and outside family therapy discourse, open to a wide range of images and metaphors.