Gender and Family Therapy

Charlotte Burck is a Consultant Systemic Psychotherapist, Trainer and Researcher in the Child and Family Department of the Tavistock Clinic, London. Her books include 'Gender and Family Therapy' (with Gwyn Daniel), 'Gender, Power and Relationships' (with Bebe Speed)), 'Mirrors and Reflections: Processes of Systemic Supervision' (edited with Gwyn Daniel) and 'Multilingual Living: Explorations of Language and Subjectivity'. Her interests include supervision and consultation, systemic research, and developing clinical work with families who have experienced domestic violence and enduring parental conflict. Gwyn Daniel is a systemic psychotherapist and trainer at the Tavistock Clinic who has experience of working in both children's services and in adult mental health. She has run workshops on this topic in London, Oxford, Belfast and Sydney. She is co-author of 'Gender and Family Therapy' (with Charlotte Burck), 'Growing Up in Stepfamilies' (with Gill Gorell Barnes, P. Thompson and N. Burckhardt) and co-editor of 'Mirrors and Reflections: Processes in Systemic Supervision' (with Charlotte Burck) as well as many other professional articles and book chapters. She has taught widely in the UK and internationally on many topics, including children and post divorce conflicts, systemic approaches to families where there is parental mental illness and on systemic couple's therapy. She continues to find ideas about gender and power central to her understanding of family relationships and organisational dilemmas.

• Editors' Foreword , Foreword , Introduction , Gender: a systemic understanding , Feminisms and other isms , Gender and subjectivity , Gender, power, and systemic thinking , Abuses of power: working with physical and sexual violence , Stories lived and told: language and discourse , Case studies , Training and supervision: addressing the context of gender , Training exercises , Conclusions and future directions

'Charlotte Burck and Gwyn Daniel's book shows us how richly productive good conversations can be. They have taken our current crop of favored ideas and stances - second-order cybernetics, post modernism, social constructionism, feminism, narrative and discourse theory - added what's best about systems theory (in their words, an interact ional understanding and a sensitivity to context, framing and level) - and then orchestrated a contrapuntal dialogue where each discourse comments on the other, producing newsworthy fresh ideas.'In their dense and nuance discussion of how gender's language and discourse possess us, Burck and Daniel give us new analytic tools and creative clinical strategies with which to mobilize women to embark on this research for themselves (and to help men see through the illusion that, unlike women, they are coherent, sovereign subjects).'In the process, the authors show us how therapy can foster a stance of critical inquiry towards the truths of one's time and place, especially about what it means to be a man or woman now.'- From the Foreword by Virginia Goldner