The Art of Reflection: Turning the Strange into the Familiar

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/famp.12158
• Published date: 01 June 2016
• Author: Kaethe Weingarten
• Date: 01 June 2016

The Art of Reflection: Turning the Strange into the

Familiar

KAETHE WEINGARTEN*

,†

To read this article in Spanish and Chinese, please see the article’s Supporting Information on Wiley

Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/famp).

There are a great many useful articles on the dynamics and pragmatics of reflecting

teams but few articles address what constitutes a good or inept reflection and why. I pro-

vide a conceptual model for thinking about what a good reflection does, distinguishing it

from a nice reflection. With some further refinements in place, I then illustrate how reflec-

tions can be part of any relationship, not just clinical ones. We have opportunities to make

them and to recognize when others make them to us. By using examples from my personal

life—as a grandmother, daughter, radio listener, cancer survivor, and client—I attempt to

ease the personal/professional binary, a project of mine for the last 35 years. In the second

part of the article, I address how writing can serve reflection. Although best offered at the

moment one is called for, it is never too late for a reflection. Writing allows people to offer

reflections after the fact to those who have shared their stories. Sometimes, it is to ourselves

we offer those reflections, when the reflector has long since dropped the thread of obligation

or interest. I provide an example of working with iconic imagery to unpack meaning so that

reflection can eventually take place, allowing integration to proceed, facilitating the

strange becoming the familiar.

Keywords: Reflection; Ico nic Imagery; Trauma; Holocaust; Writing

Fam Proc 55:195–210, 2016

My grandson, Dashiell, graduated from Kindergarten late May. Right before I left our

home for 3 months, he had his last overnight with us. At breakfast, I was trying to

embed a lesson about the skills children need to learn and I said something like this: “You

know, Dashiell, kids have lots of skills they have to learn growing up. They have to learn

to toilet themselves, fall asleep on their own, eat healthfully and of course, learn as much

as they can about the world.” Then I paused, and I remember tilting my head as if I were

searching inward for what I wanted to express, and said, “Grownups have to constantly

learn also, including how to think about other people not just themselves. But children

mostly just have to learn about the world.” This little speech was not my finest moment, to

put it mildly, and, in my own defense, not typical.

About 10 minutes later, Dashiell and I were driving to one of ou r favorite haunts and

he said from his car seat, “You know, Grandma, I’m not very busy this summer, I’m not in

school, I think I have time to think about other people.”

This anecdote is about reflection, about a child reflecting back to an adult something

incredibly precious to that adult that had never been articulated between them. Dashiell

*The Witnessing Project, Berkeley, CA.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Kaethe Weingarten, 2587 Hilgard Ave-

nue, Berkeley, CA 94709. E-mail: kaethew@gmail.com

†

Kaethe Weingarten, Ph.D., is the Founder and Director of The Witnessing Project, www.witnessingpro-

ject.org. This article is based on a talk given at the “Narrative Practices: Healing and Hope at the Intersec-

tion of Lives” Conference in 2014 in Bryn Mawr, PA.

195

Family Process, Vol. 55, No. 2, 2016 ©2015 Family Process Institute

doi: 10.1111/famp.12158

abstracted from my odd didactic remarks the essence of who I think I am and what is

important to me: thinking about other people. And, what’s more, he made it clear that he

wants to be like me, that he is like me.

This exchange goes to the core of reflection. While reflections happen in clinical situa-

tions, some of which may be heartbreaking, they are also an everyday possibility. We each

have the opportunity in all parts of our lives to bring forward, underscore, articulate,

make visible the meaning and importance of other people’s utterances, gestures, and

actions. We can be witnesses, not just in situations in which it is expected of us, but also

informally, for example, in a checkout lane, where it is not expected: “Wow , that was really

kind of you to let that person cut in front of you without making a fuss. I bet you made that

person’s day.”

We also have an opportunity to notice when others reflect us to ourselves, as Dashiell

did. It might not always be joyful, as that moment was for me, but it will invariably pro-

vide information about how others see us and how our actions or inaction affect others.

This is how we learn. Reflection—both the provision and the receiving of it—provides sig-

nificant opportunities for knowledge, learning, and growth about ourselves, others, and

relationships.

REFLECTION IN THE HISTORY OF FAMILY THERAPY

In my understanding of the history of family therapy, the term reflection first entered

the field in the mid-1980s via Tom Andersen, a Norwegian psychiatrist, who began to

work in what he called reflecting teams with his colleagues (Andersen, 1987). Thei rs

was not the first group to work in teams: A group in Milan was doing so as was a group

at the Ackerman Institute. All three teams based their work on Gregory Bateson and

Umberto Maturana, but the Norwegian Team eschewed hypotheses and interpretations.

They saw themselves as creating a process for respectful collaboration that would intro-

duce just the right amount of difference so that families could absorb what was offered

and change. They wanted to create a multiverse, to create a dialogic community to coun-

ter the monologic stuck dynamic of the family. Harry Goolishian and Harlene Anderson

suggested to Tom Andersen that he call his work a “reflective process,” because he

keenly observed that the Norwegians were introducing a way of “being” in their work,

not merely a technique.

Tom Andersen’s first published paper on reflecting teams in 1987 offers no insight into

what he means by reflection per se. There are now hundreds of papers and chapters on the

reflecting team and they too focus more on the pragmatics of team process. Only a few

address the underlying epistemology of their preference (usually constructivism, social

constructionism, and narrative) and fewer still delve into the phenomenology of reflection

itself (Shotter & Katz, 2007).

Shotter and Katz (2007, p. 19) studied Tom Andersen closely and found that by lis-

tening not just for the meanings of what people said, but to their “bodily voicing of

words in the course of their speaking them” he created a “responsive reflective talk,” an

“intimate style of talk”. The effect of his quiet absorption in the client was what Hoff-

man (2007) calls “withness.” Hoffman has written eloquently about Tom Andersen’s

work and connected it both to theory and to the most intimate detail of client experi-

ence.

Over the years, as so many people took up the practice of “reflecting” in the con-

text of reflecting teams, Andersen would return to descriptions of the practice and

refine his intention. He made one intention very clear: Team members wer e to talk

about “what they heard and NOT about what they thought about what they heard”

(Roberts, 2009, p. 63). This is a crucial distinction that requires a therapist to grasp

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