Introduction to “Four Useful Interventions in Brief Family Therapy

Guy Shennan

Abstract

Earlier this year I found myself gripped by reading a series of foundational SF papers, which - and I have the sense of a terrible confession here – I had not read before. In a fasci- nating recent account of reading practices, Gale Miller (2013, p4) suggests ‘it is useful to read texts from the standpoint of different interpretive communities’, and goes on to describe three such communities from which SF texts can be read, which he labels rumour, paradigm and instrumental. Whether or not we can place ourselves clearly in one of those particular communities, these ideas are helpful, I think, in encouraging us to consider the positions from which we read a text. And our positions are determined in part by our histories and by the particular time that we come across what it is we are reading about. I love the music of The Beatles, but I will never have the same relationship with it as someone who was 14 years old when they were waiting for I Want To Hold Your Hand to be released to knock She Loves You off the top of the charts (I was about two at the time).

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