Fam Proc 36:127-132, 1997 Mapping and/or Discovering Meaning in Family Therapy: An E-Mail Conversation C. CHRISTIAN BEELS, M.D. a STEVEN M. KOGAN, Ed.S. b JERRY E. GALE, Ph.D. b a Faculty, Ackerman Institute for Families, 149 East 78th Street, New York NY 10021; e-mail: 104205.66@compuserve.com. b Correspondence may be sent to either author: Steven Kogan, Doctoral Student, Jerry Gale, Director, Marriage and Family Therapy Program, Department of Child and Family Development, Dawson Hall, Uni versity of Georgia, Athens GA 30602-3622; e-mail addresses: skogan@fcs.uga.edu or jgale@fcs.uga.edu. Editor's Note: Because of the provocative and stimulating nature of the study reported on by Steven Kogan and Jerry Gale in their article "Decentering Therapy," I have invited one of our Advisory Editors, Chris Beels, to provide some comments about the study and its implications. However, rather than use the standard for mat of a formal "Commentary," followed by an "Authors' Response," Beels, Kogan, and Gale have instead carried out a series of e-mail exchanges, with reactions and responses going back and forth in the form of a dialogue. What follows is a slightly edited version of their conversation. As you will see, this exchange has afforded Beels, Kogan, and Gale the opportunity not only to critique each other's ideas, but also to raise questions and to puzzle together about the linkages that might be forged between the Kogan and Gale study and earlier therapy process research carried out by Beels using Scheflen's context analysis techniques. The use of a conversation format seemed more consonant with the research being discussed, research that urges a stance of openness and curiosity rather than formal hypothesis testing and closure. Hence my decision to endorse this experiment in "commentary as conversation," rather than "commentary as debate." What follows is the first three rounds of this "conversation," with the "roughess" of ordinary e-mail communications retained, but with some minor editing in order to facilitate clarity and narrative flow. Dear Steve and Jerry: I am delighted with your article for many reasons. Both the analysis of this example of narrative therapy and the ex plication of the research methodology are very satisfying, for reasons I will go into. The microscopic look at Michael White's work felt to me like a good flight-training program, very realistic, with the reader in the pilot's position, and in slow motion so that one could really understand the movements. It has the authenticity of a participatory theater exercise. I thought I learned a great deal about how this particular interview worked. I am interested in these questions partly because Conversation Analysis has some similarities to an old tradition of the "body language" research called Context Analysis, which was being done in the 1960s by Al Scheflen and Ray Birdwistell. That work, although it had its own quarrels with objective, experimental science, was nevertheless solidly in the camp of natural-history observation. It took the whole communicational scenegestures, whole-body postures, ensemble synchronies and symmetries, and sequential repetitionsas a guide to transactions between the participants, a sort of direct reading of the performance as dance. The implication of that work was that the dance of gestures reflected a kind of communication more emotionally meaningful than the talk, perhaps more influential, more connected to "intuition" about the purposes of the participants. Reading your analysis of a recorded interview by a famous therapist at a national conference gave me an eerie feeling of déjà-vû. Jane Ferber, John Schoonbeck, and I (1973) used Scheflen's context-analysis method to analyze Don Jackson's interview with the "Hillcrest" family, a family that was also interviewed at the same conference by Bowen, Whitaker, and Ackerman. Since we, like you, found what felt like a "discovery" (as you say, "we did not know what we would eventually say or believe about the text," p. 108), I felt an immediate identification with your enterprise. There are meaningful patterns that repeat, that seem to verify "what is going on." I am wondering what, if any, is the relationship between these research traditions? Yours, Chris. *** Dear Chris: First of all, we thank you for your support and your encouragement; it means a lot to us. In response to your question _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 1