Revisiting Causality in Systemic Family Therapy: The Critical Realist Embrace

ABSTRACT The philosophical dominance of social constructionism over the past 35 years, in many parts of the world, created space for important developments in narrative and other dialogical, language‐based forms of therapy. However, the downside was an ultimately limiting linguistic reductionism in which talking about the world was replaced with talking about talk about the world . Discursive epistemology flourished, whereas ontology—what the world beyond our ideas is like—was often left unsayable. Roy Bhaskar's (2016) critical realism retains the valuable insights of moderate versions of social constructionism but places them alongside a non‐naïve realist ontology. It offers a structured, stratified, multicausal, open‐system view of reality that exists relatively autonomously from our socially constructed knowledge, enabling us to evaluate competing knowledge claims through ‘judgemental rationality’. It is argued that we can, do and should make choices about which ideas to support and that keeping such decisions out of awareness disguises the exercise of our power. Critical realism is able to embrace the whole field of systemic psychotherapy and has the potential to end many of the dualisms that have dominated its development. By providing a metatheoretical scaffold for a wide plurality of theories, it enlarges the pool of conceptual resources that therapists can bring to co‐constructed therapeutic encounters. Positivist accounts of science are shown to work only in closed systems. Critical realism, by contrast, explains how underlying but variable causal tendencies operate in open systems, making science—including social science—fit for the real conditions of practice. Despite the strong focus on theory and causality in this paper, theoretical concerns are ultimately positioned as servants to the relational processes of psychotherapy, embedded in caregiving love in the pursuit of human flourishing.