This is a deeper challenge. The blind spot of systemic therapy lies close to my therapeutic home ground — the place where I trained my psychotherapy skills, and perhaps the hardest context in which to apply the Dada lens. Yet my fondness for Dada's peculiar charm would not have evolved so richly without first being "infected" by systemic thinking in psychotherapy.
I begin with an overview — a kind of hall of fame. For those who are not very familiar with the individual contributions of each expert, here is my admittedly "biased" résumé.
Who Are the Gladiators of Systemic Therapy?
The theorists who shaped systemic therapy each brought a distinct move into the arena. Here are the ones I keep returning to:
Gregory Bateson — The Cartographer of the Arena
Main move: Problems are patterns of relationships.
Dada twist: The patient is just the brightest pixel in the wallpaper of the system.
Steps to an Ecology of Mind — 1972
Milton Erickson — The Street Magician of Change
Main move: Small, precise disruptions shift the system unnoticed.
Dada twist: Systemic therapy learned its street tricks from Erickson — how to bend a spoon without the system noticing.
My Voice Will Go with You — 1982
Heinz von Foerster — The Conscience in the Loop
Main move: The observer is always inside the system; knowledge is constructed.
Dada twist: The system laughs, the therapist laughs, nobody is outside the feedback loop.
Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition — 2002
And those who refined the arena's rules:
Steve de Shazer & Insoo Kim Berg — Solution-Focused Therapy
Main move: Stop dissecting the problem; amplify what works.
Dada twist: Problems vanish, but nobody knows where the rabbit went.
Michael White & David Epston — Narrative Therapy
Main move: The problem lives in the story, not the person.
Dada twist: Sometimes the villain is punctuation, sometimes the hero is a semicolon.
Paul Watzlawick — Palo Alto / Communication Theory
Main move: You cannot not communicate; attempted solutions often backfire.
Dada twist: Words are boomerangs in disguise.
Milan Systemic Group — Selvini-Palazzoli, Boscolo, Cecchin, Prata
Main move: Families are governed by rules; symptoms stabilize the system.
Dada twist: Dysfunction is a family hobby nobody admits to.
Virginia Satir — Humanistic / Experiential Family Therapy
Main move: Blocked communication and low self-worth create distress.
Dada twist: Therapy is an emotional buffet; sometimes people starve while tasting everything.
Salvador Minuchin — Structural Family Therapy
Main move: Dysfunctional boundaries and hierarchies create symptoms.
Dada twist: Minuchin rearranges the furniture. Dada asks if furniture was ever the point.
The Blind Spot of Systemic Therapy
Systemic therapy excels at reframing, circularizing, and dissolving problems into patterns. But its very elegance becomes its limitation. When everything is context, nothing is. When meaning is always relational, individual suffering can become scenery.
The Dada lens notices: systemic therapy can be so committed to the system that it forgets the person sitting in front of you is not a node in a network — they are in pain. Real pain. Now. In the chair.
The risk: beautiful maps drawn over unbearable territories. The map gets applauded. The territory continues to hurt.
What My Dada Would Add
- Name the power: Systemic therapy's neutrality can become complicity. When systems include abuse, oppression, or structural violence, reframing the pattern is not enough.
- Expose power without moralizing: Exaggerate roles, swap chairs, perform family myths as theater. The hidden choreography becomes visible.
- Reintroduce the unsolvable: Silence, confusion, and contradiction hold the experiences that cannot yet be reframed.
- Restore play without trivializing pain: Play targets rigidity, not the client. Movement shifts the nervous system before insight arrives.
These suggestions aren't intended as a perfect concept — just something I endured, honestly.
A Gentle Wink at Therapeutic Speak
In the Dada spirit, therapy is a very serious word that wears a lab coat even when nobody is sick. Somewhere along the way, "therapy" began to sound like a repair shop:
"Bring your sadness. We will tighten the screws. Please wait in the lobby until your personality is aligned."
Therapy: a place where language tries to convince the nervous system that everything is under control. The nervous system rarely signs the contract.
"Cure" is even more ambitious. It suggests that human life is a technical malfunction with a warranty. Cure is a charming industrial fantasy — as if grief were a software bug and the therapist had admin rights. My Dada raises an eyebrow. What exactly is being cured? And who decided that this version of us was the broken one?
Most therapies promise change; My Dada hopes to notice what refuses to change. Sometimes, I see therapy as just a socially acceptable place to be confused together.
The Unauthorized Dada Dictionary of Therapy
If systemic therapy has taught us anything, it's that words are slippery, patterns are infinite, and the therapist is never truly outside the system. And yet — somewhere between reframing a symptom, bending a loop, and performing a paradoxical intervention — language starts to sound serious, even sacred.
TherapyA place where words try to convince the nervous system that it's safe to relax.
CureA charming industrial fantasy — grief as a software bug, emotions as faulty wiring.
InterventionHeroic-sounding attempts to move a system that might not want to move.
InsightFancy translation of "Notice what we all already knew but ignored."
ResistanceThe nervous system voting "no" while the mind politely argues.
ProgressA rumor spread by charts and timelines.
EvidenceRelief that agreed to stick around long enough to be measured.
NormalA statistical rumor invented to keep everyone in line.
DiagnosisA confident label worn like a hat, often too small or crooked.
ComplianceFollowing instructions while the nervous system smirks behind your back.
BoundariesInvisible fences that the mind insists exist, until someone bumps into them.
Defense Mech.The system's polite way of kicking you in the shins.
SymptomA subtle note from the body saying, "I exist, even when ignored."
MindfulnessWatching the chaos politely without flinching (sometimes).
TherapistA participant observer in someone else's circus.
This glossary refuses solemnity. It is a small rebellion, a wink from the Dada corner of the room. Enjoy 15 selected terms to smile at.
Kind of a Legacy
In my current workshops — "My Unburdened Virtual Being," "Tea with the Tyrant: The Ceremony of the Disobedient Steam," "Twist the Hype," "From Sparks to Change," or "Knead Dada to the Story" — I scatter my Dada charms like confetti: not to make you only think, not merely to argue, but to stumble, to wonder, to taste the pause between the words, the curl of a loop, the weight of a sigh.
I hope that the next generations of psychologists, emerging from independent training programs and universities into professional life, will uphold the idea of a sensual approach to the human psyche and keep our profession vigilant in adapting to the demands of the times. A little Dada spark in evolution would be wonderful.
See you there, in the swirling work of it all?
Poetic Conclusion
System wise?
We knew the floor of emotions was moving
and refused to call it ground.
We watched causes chase themselves
in circles,
saw symptoms migrate like birds,
saw the patient dissolve
into a grammar of glances.
We learned the trick early:
there is no outside.
The mirror is part of the face.
The observer leaves fingerprints
on the fact.
But when the room was filled with pain
that feels unbearable,
when bodies shook without metaphors,
when power entered
without asking permission,
we hesitated.
Systems do not bleed.
People do.
So, we borrowed ethics
from the next room,
smuggled values in our pockets,
pretending we had not chosen them.
Still —
we remain dangerous to dogma,
immune to false cures,
unwilling to worship certainty.
We just had to learn
that deconstruction is not enough,
that wisdom without weight
floats,
and that the therapist
is another improvisation
of dust and exercise.
We rearranged meanings,
polished paradoxes,
interviewed reality.
Reality declined the interview.
The emotional pain we all share
sits quietly in the corner
rearranging the furniture of meaning.
It hums through the floor
we once refused to call ground.
It asks for our full attention,
our loving smile,
then leaves
before we finish understanding.