Revisiting neutrality with curiosity once more: how is therapy political?

In the renowned follow up to the perturbing proposal of three guidelines for conducting a systemic session: Hypothesising, Circularity, Neutrality (Selvini, 1980), Cecchin (1987) proposed curiosity as a revisitation of the concept of neutrality to define a therapist’s positioning that is reflexively coherent with a systemic stance. 

Neutrality designated, rather than detachment, a position from which to connect with every system member equally. Nonetheless, such position was soon to be found untenably de-humanising of the therapist, as observer of the system as a whole., rather than from a particular perspective. Cecchin proposed curiosity to enable therapists to be irreverent towards their own certainties about the process of therapy, while remaining engaged in that very process ,acknowledging what pre-judices are informing therapists’ observations, and wondering how these resonate with “clients’” own pre-judices. 

More recently, 3rd order thinking (McDowell, Knudson-Martin, & Bermudez, 2019) has been proposed to insist on critically (re)framing therapy in its wider social contexts, recognising the impact that socio-economic and geopolitical processes, have on mental health, and incorporating such acknowledgment in the processes entailed in therapy. 

• What means to join a system in a process of change which you become a part of? 

• How do systemic therapists question the way their professional organisations fit with systemic assumptions? How do we get to work as though “some animals are more equal than others” (Orwell & Gröls-Verlag, 2023)? 

• How do group/whole and individual/partial needs enter in contradiction? Is a group that marginalises the needs of some of its members acting coherently with a systemic approach? 

• What is the relation between perturbing and marginalising positions? How are these different? 

• How do we act in accordance with social justice, specifically on the ongoing genocide in Palestine as well as other de-humanising and counter-ecological interventions?