Introduction to Systemic and Family Therapy: A User's Guide. By John Hills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, £23.99, pb, 216 pp. ISBN: 9780230224445

This book, written by a humane, philosophical and highly experienced clinician, is in a ‘Basic Texts in Counselling and Psychotherapy’ series, billed as accessible, readable and introductory.

John Hills is ambitious in his range. He covers the vital basics of systemic family therapy: the genogram, how to engage families, the therapeutic stance of curiosity, pattern recognition, non-blaming, skills in asking questions that open up a family’s awareness of itself. He also sprinkles the text with clearly written, brief clinical examples and exercises the reader can try out. Each chapter is summarised at the end for easy recall. There is a helpful glossary and a ‘how to’ guide to genograms at the end.

Hills takes us through the main threads of developing systemic ideas, Bateson and cybernetics, structural family therapy and Minuchin, attachment theory with Bowlby and Skynner, the Milan school, social constructionism, scripts and the rest. Nevertheless, this book is much more than a beginner’s introduction to systemic family therapy. It is both far richer and also more distracting. John Hills refers us across theologies, philosophers and writers, from Jainism to Wittgenstein, from Eugene O’Neill to Santayana. He writes: ‘systemic ideas are a way of looking for meaning […] looking across the whole relational environment in which an individual difficulty is embedded’. So far, so good.

But Hills is interested in the big existential questions: ‘the fact of death, isolation, the search for meaning amidst absurdity and our freedom’. He discusses the political context in systemic terms, such as a rising Greek suicide rate in the current economic crisis. He sees systemic thinking as not only drawing on scientific empiricism, but also on the observation of ‘patterns that connect’ as art does, and on the awareness of massive discrepancies in power relationships, the traditional stamping ground of politics. And even more ambitiously, he discusses and emphasises the ethical and spiritual dimensions of human experience.

Personally, I applaud his breadth and inclusivity, but this book is not only what it says on the tin. The clear, accessible, didactic account of systemic family therapy is there; but there is much more to intrigue and stimulate the wider reader. Perhaps it would be fair to describe the book as in itself an enactment of systemic thinking, as Hills moves from the clinical and interpersonal world of the particular family, out into the political sphere and up into the reaches of existential thought. As E. M. Forster, one of the writers he does not quote, advised: ‘Only connect!’.