The aesthetic preference: overcoming the pragmatic error.

Family therapists share the belief that people simultaneously are parts of multiplicity of contexts, one of which is the family. The family contexts connect people in patterns as part of the unity of all contexts. Family systems, like all other living systems in nature are structured entities governed by such aesthetic principles as symbolic representation, order, patterning, balance, and unity. Our therapeutic techniques have been created to help transform the various patterns of connections within families, our goal being to help increase the degree of personal and interpersonal flexibility and differentiation for each part of the family system. The family therapist is like the artist searching for a beauty and unity of structure. It is through that aesthetic process that flexibility and differentiation are best furthered. Discovering the nature of the meaningful aesthetic arrangements within family systems is the difference that makes a difference in defining ourselves as family therapists. That difference involves us as part of a paradigmatic movement (4, 20) espousing an ecological systems epistemology of mental life.