Family Therapy … What's in a Name?*

The 2nd Australian and New Zealand Family Therapy Conference, held in Melbourne in July 1992, invited those making presentations to address the Conference theme Family Therapy … what's in a name? In a closing address to a plenary session of the Conference, I used the metaphor of first names (family) and surnames (therapy) to suggest that names are central to issues of identity. Our first name of “family” differentiates us within the larger group who share the surname “therapy”; but what does it mean to belong to the larger group sharing the name “therapy”? Historically, much of family therapy's energy has gone into issues concerned with establishing difference — difference within family therapy in terms of models and approaches, and difference from other approaches to therapy. Yet now perhaps family therapy would benefit from exploring what it shares in common with others who hold the same surname of “therapy”, with the possibility such dialogue could lead to mutual enrichment.     

Is Sex Work Sex or Work? Forming Collective Identity in Bangalore

While sex worker activism grows increasingly vibrant around the world, the forms and practices of sex work vary widely, and are often secret. How do sex workers come to see themselves as sex worker activists? What tensions emerge in the formation of collective identity within sex worker activist organizations, especially when the term “sex work” has often traveled linked to transnational organizations and funding? To answer these questions, this article analyzes in-depth interviews and participant observation on sex worker activism in Bangalore, India. Focusing on an organization I call the Union, I argue that it was first within the “shop floor” of transnationally funded HIV prevention organizations, and then within the activist work of the Union, that sex workers came to identify collectively as activists at a large scale. However, distinct configurations of practice among gendered groups of sex workers in Bangalore meant each group related differently to the formation of a sex worker activist collective identity. Two aspects of sex workers’ practice emerged as particularly central: varying experiences of sex work as “sex” or as “work,” and varying levels of anonymity and visibility in public spaces. Organizing through transnationally funded HIV prevention programs helped solidify these categories of differentiation even as it provided opportunities to develop shared self-hood.     

Stereotypes and National Identity: Experiencing the “Emotional Brazilian”

In this article, I examine how stereotypes are deployed in the process of experiencing national identities. Specifically, I analyse how a group of Brazilian academics who have studied in Europe and the United States have dealt with stereotypical notions of Brazilians as “warm people” who establish friendship “easily.” Ideas about a “greater emotionality,” which were often seen as negative from a European colonial perspective, are embraced and re-signified by them as a positive feature of Brazilian national identity, particularly when compared to the supposed “closed nature” of some Europeans. I argue therefore that the presence of such stereotypes contributes to reinforce a subjective sense of Brazilianess and also reveals the negotiations of power relations in the process of elaborating Brazilian national identity.     

Privacy,Publicity, and Accountability of Self‐Presentation in an On‐Line Discussion Group*

Although the anonymous condition of on‐line interaction seems to provide space for the experiment of decentered, fluid, and multiple forms of identity, the disembodied on‐line identity often entails the fallout of accountability of self‐presentation. This article explores the nature of self‐presentation in cyberspace by conducting a case study of an on‐line discussion group. Specifically, it deals with the issue of disembodiment and accountability of on‐line identity in a close connection to the feature of the obliteration of the public/private boundary in the group. This study inquires into the following questions: “What techniques, if any, do members of the group employ to conceal their identity information?”; “Under what circumstances do members voluntarily disclose their identity information?”; “How do participants probe others’ identity cues and thus construct pattern knowledge about them?”; and “How should differences/similarities between on‐line self‐presentation and face‐to‐face identity styles be addressed?” In doing so, this article, on the one hand, tries to integrate the dynamics of participants’ active “identity probing” as an important interaction dimension to the study of on‐line self‐presentation that has so far heavily worked on the processes of identity concealment and self‐disclosure. On the other, referring to literatures on identity styles in off‐line settings, it addresses similarities of and differences between patterns of on‐line/off‐line self‐presentation.     

“Involved in something (involucrado en algo)”: Denial and stigmatization in Mexico’s “war on drugs”

This article responds empirically to the question posed by Stan Cohen about “why, when faced by knowledge of others’ suffering and pain—particularly the suffering and pain resulting from what are called ‘human rights violations’—does ‘reaction’ so often take the form of denial, avoidance, passivity, indifference, rationalisation or collusion?”. Our context is Mexico's “war on drugs.” Since 2006 this “war” has claimed the lives of around 240,000 Mexican citizens and disappeared around 60,000 others. Perpetrators include organized criminal gangs and state security services. Violence is pervasive and widely reported. Most people are at risk. Our study is based on qualitative interviews and focus groups involving 68 “ordinary Mexicans” living in five different Mexican cities which have varying levels of violence. It investigates participant proximity to the victims and the psychological defense mechanisms they deploy to cope with proximity to the violence. We found that 62 of our participants knew, directly or indirectly, one or more people who had been affected. We also found one dominant rationalization (defense mechanism) for the violence: that the victims were “involved in something” (drugs or organized crime) and therefore “deserved their fate.” This echoes prevailing state discourses about the violence. We argue that the discourse of “involved” is a discourse of denial that plays three prominent roles in a highly violent society in which almost no-one is immune: it masks state violence, stigmatizes the victims, and sanctions bystander passivity. As such, we show how official and individual denial converge, live, and reproduce, and play a powerful role in the perpetuation of violence.     

Students Who Strip: The Benefits of Alternate Identities for Managing Stigma

We apply interactionist theories that highlight the contextual nature of stigma and the relational quality of stigmatization to the case of college students who work as topless dancers. We explore how the “toll of stripping” might be mediated by having an alternate, positive identity like “student.” Our analysis demonstrates that students who strip are distinctive from other strippers in important ways that stem from their salient, positive identity as students. Although they often feel as if they live a “double life” because they hide their occupation from family and friends, they benefit from sharing their student goals and ambitions with club customers. “Student” is a socially acceptable identity to share in routine social interactions and helps student strippers frame dancing as a transient occupation, offering them an opportunity to maintain a positive sense of self while buffering them from some of the negative effects of stripping.     

Home(land) Décor: China Adoptive Parents’ Consumption of Chinese Cultural Objects for Display in their Homes

American parents of children adopted from China frequently consume Chinese cultural objects for display in their homes. While parents defend this consumption for display as an effort to validate their children’s ethno-cultural origins, they also reveal how it signifies and solidifies their own identifications with Chinese culture. As part of a larger research project examining China adoptive parents’ evolving “Chinese” identities, this paper asks: Which parents “become ‘Chinese’” through the consumption and display of Chinese cultural objects, and why? To answer this question, I conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews with 91 Americans in the China adoption process and ethnographic fieldwork at two different field-sites: Families with Children from China (FCC) Chinese cultural celebrations and Chinese culture camps organized by/for China adoptive families. Focusing on the emergent and personal meanings that parents give to Chinese cultural objects, I demonstrate how these meanings both structure parents’ consumption and yield a display differential. In doing so, I reveal that white European-American parents and mothers are most likely to engage in this consumption and display, thereby amending the three types of ethno-cultural identity consumption represented in the literature. Specifically, I expose the central role of race in ethno-cultural identity consumption; demonstrate that the collective category of reference for ethno-cultural identity consumption is not always an ethnic category (in this case, such consumption refers to a gendered category); and illustrate the ways in which global ethno-cultural identity consumption both appeals to and satisfies distinctly local constructs.     

Engagement: Who's Engaging Whom?

A definition of ‘engagement’ in therapy is developed, based upon the proposition “the client engages the therapist”. Engagement is then distinguished from ‘joining’, and a consideration of the relational power between client and therapist, implied by this definition, shows it to be consistent with systemic theory for therapy.     

The Father as an Idea: A Challenge to Kinship Boundaries by Single Mothers

In separating parenthood from partnership, women have created new family forms in which men may be involved but not as traditional fathers. Through in‐depth interviews with single middle‐class women, I compare families created with anonymous donors to those created with known donors. In the former cases, mothers craft imagined fathers as their children become “looking glasses” into the men they will probably never meet. These children must rely on the mothers’ imagination to create a sense of the fathers’ view of them. While known donors are not “dads” either, the mothers help these children imagine positive fathers, often through more concrete, personal knowledge, and these fathers often know the children from a distance. In an interesting manner, although children may be created without men as physically present “dads,” women contextualize the donors that allowed them to become mothers through acknowledging the social ways that blood kinship creates families. They ultimately reaffirm certain kinds of kinship rather than challenge them.     

Dominican‐American Etbnic/Racial Identities and United States Social Categories

The majority of Dominicans have sub‐Saharan African ancestry, ¹ 1 In the 1980 Dominican census, 16 percent of the population were classified as blanco (‘white’), 73 percent were classified as indio (‘indian‐colored’), a term used to refer to the phenotype of individuals who match stereotypes of combined African and European ancestry and 11 percent were classified as negro [‘black’] (Haggerty, 1991). These categories are social constructions, rather than objective reflections of phenotypes. The positive social connotations of “whiteness,” for example, lead many Caribbean Hispanics to identify themselves as white for the public record regardless of their precise phenotype (Dominguez, 1978:9). Judgments of color in the Dominican Republic also depend in part upon social attributes of an individual, as they do elsewhere in Latin America. Money, education and power, for example, “whiten” an individual, so that the color attributed to a higher class individual is often lighter than the color that would be attributed to an individual of the same phenotype of a lower class (Rout, 1976:287).
which would make them “black” by historical United States ‘one‐drop’ rules. Second generation Dominican high school students in Providence, Rhode Island do not identity their race in terms of black or white, but rather in terms of ethnolinguistic identity, as Dominican/Spanish/Hispanic. The distinctiveness of Dominican‐American understandings of race is highlighted by comparing them with those of non‐Hispanic, African descent second generation immigrants and with historical Dominican notions of social identity. Dominican second generation resistance to phenotype‐racialization as black or white makes visible ethnic/racial formation processes that are often veiled, particularly in the construction of the category African‐American. This resistance to black/white racialization suggests the transformative effects that post‐1965 immigrants and their descendants are having on United States ethnic/racial categories.     

Family Therapy: Inner,Outer and the Issue of Pathology

This paper sets out to examine the relationship between ‘the inner’, ‘the outer’, and ‘the issue of pathology’ in the family therapy field. It begins with the observations that ‘pathology’ has become a rarely mentioned issue in family therapy, and ‘what is wrong’ is increasingly located in ‘the outer’: the family ‘game’, ‘linguistic activity’ or ‘the cultural discourse’. At the same time, family therapy often hosts forums in which presenters are ‘attacked’ for not seeming to hold the ‘correct view’. The paper considers these phenomena in tandem, looks at the matter of ‘method’, and applies James Hillman's critique of psychoanalysis to family therapy. The suggestion is that family therapy has been blinded by its own metaphor of ‘seeing’, symbolised and literalised in the one way screen. Alternative metaphors privileging intuition, feeling and aesthetics are put forward, before discussion points are raised, and before this paper on therapy concludes poetically, or this paper concludes that therapy may be poetry.     

Considering Alternate Sources of Role Identity: Childless Parents and Their Animal “Kids”

Identity theory posits that role identity is negotiated between human social actors and is based in broader cultural expectations about how particular statuses should be performed. I argue that the formation of role identity in actors can also occur in relationship to nonhuman actors, if they are perceived as minded. Depending on context and human perception, identity can be formed as a result of interaction and developing “theory of mind” with nonhuman animals, directly implicating the animal. Using in‐depth interviews of childless and childfree companion animal owners, I demonstrate the existence of a parent identity in childless participants that would not otherwise be present were it not for interaction with the animal “child.” This identity is confirmed in participant narratives describing substantial behavioral output aligned with the U.S. cultural ideal of “parent.” Likewise, I find that significant others provide external support for the enactment of this role identity, allowing participants to verify self‐in‐situation. Overall, my analysis emphasizes the importance of considering nonhuman sources as occupying counterstatus positions in the formation of role identity while highlighting how these relationships affect interaction in the childfree and childless home, thus expanding scholarly understanding about both identity formation and emerging family types.     

Bad Therapy A Training Technique

This paper describes a new training technique. The therapist, with a role-playing family, is instructed to do “bad therapy” — to make the family worse. Usually the “patients” and observers regard the “bad therapy” as beneficial — in fact, better than before. Several examples are given and a short discussion follows. “When I am good I am very very good, But when I am bad I am better”.     

Ambiguities of global and transnational collective identities

As traditional categories of collective identity are in decline and brought into question, the process of defining shared perceptions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ by new markers and new mechanisms seems more important than ever. In the article, I summarize basic aspects of collective identity formation in the ongoing processes of globalization and transnationalization and discuss the basic challenges of collective identity in the twenty‐first century. I present different ideal types of border‐crossing collective identities in terms of the patterns of their spatial reach. Two of these types of collective identity –‘global humanism’ and ‘transnational collective identities’– are discussed in more detail, especially concerning their ambiguities of universal and/or particularistic character. I conclude that the global collective identity of ‘humanism’ is not as global as it appears at first glance, and that transnational collective identities usually refer to the authority of a stated global collective identity. Given these genuine interrelations between global humanism and transnational (and other spatial patterns of) collective identities, the future seems destined to be shaped by an intertwined ‘as‐well‐as’ relation rather than an ‘either–or’ relation between the different types of collective identities.     

“Those foreigners ruin everything here”: Interactional functions of ethnic labelling among pupils in the Netherlands

This paper contributes to a deeper understanding of ethnic labelling practices by examining their interactional functions among secondary school pupils in Venlo, the Netherlands. Pupils with migration backgrounds often labelled themselves and others “Turk,” “Moroccan,” or “foreigner,” and labelled others “Dutch.” The paper highlights that ethnic labelling can be understood not only as identity construction, but also as interactional work. I build on membership categorization analysis (MCA), complemented by conversation analysis (CA), to analyse how pupils’ use of ethnic labels evoked an expert role which altered interactants’ power positions; and how, often, pupils engaged in jocular mockery with ethnic labels and in that way mitigated the effects of exclusionary and stigmatizing discourses about people with migration backgrounds. Finally, I argue that pupils’ labelling practices had locally occasioned meanings and functions, but that they ultimately reflect wider‐spread systems of categorization and marginalization of people with migration backgrounds in the Netherlands.     

“Phil's Calling Grandma… ”: The Role of External Support in Human–Companion Animal Identity Pairings

This exploratory paper deals with human–animal role identity pairings such as parent–child or sibling–sibling and the necessity of support from other actors both for the formation of these idiosyncratic identities, as well as for their situational placement in social environments not limited to the nonhuman animal. Taken from a qualitative study examining identity formation counter to the nonhuman animal, I use in‐depth interviews of both people with and without human children to demonstrate how human‐to‐human relationships are formed by categorizing the companion animal as a “child” of sorts within the family structure. These relationships prove integral to the continued development and enactment of identities such as the animal “parent” or the animal “sibling” via three different groups: their own parents, partners, and, in one case, adult siblings. This creates positive affect and commitment to the identity across other social situations. Implications of these findings for identity theory and family research are discussed.     

Teamfähigkeit und Performance

Relationship between team competence and the group performance is analyzed in this paper. The underlying question is whether it is possible to create an ideal group, when focussing on personality characteristics of group members. For this purpose, the paper first describes that the performance of a group is influenced by its composition. The team competence concept is then described based upon team concept sub-components like communication and cooperation competencies. Integrating the concept of team competence into the “five factors personality model” shows that the personality characteristics of ‘agreeableness’ and ‘extraversion’ have the highest coverage towards the team competence concept. The studies cited in this paper do not show significant positive relations between these two team competence related personality characteristics and the performance of a team. Implications for the understanding of team competence are shown.