Additional information
by Hugh Palmer (Author)
The Connected Human brings together thirteen papers written across more than a decade of practice, teaching, and reflection. They range from early clinical work in grief, bereavement, and adoption, through to more recent writing on ecological collapse, sacred uncertainty, and the politics of systemic thinking. What binds them together is a set of recurring questions about power and connection, about what it means to think systemically, and about whether the ideas that were used to inform systemic practice contain sufficient wisdom adequate for the times we are living in.
The collection is organised into three parts. The first, Fourfold Vision: Systemic Thinking and Power, gathers papers that develop and revisit the author's long engagement with Gregory Bateson's epistemology and with the question of power in systemic therapy. These papers explore what it might mean to move from a cybernetics of control toward what the author calls a cybernetics of healing - a way of working and thinking that is ecological, humble, and responsive to the living web of relations in which therapists and clients are always already embedded.
The second part, Therapy and Practice, collects papers that emerge from clinical encounters; working with bereaved families, with adoptive families, and with young people in inpatient settings. These are papers written from inside the difficulty of practice, where ideas are tested against the reality of lives in pain.
The third part, Ecology, Collapse and Edges, gathers the author's more recent writing, where the frame has widened to include climate, posthumanism, political fracture, and the question of what systemic practice is for when the world itself is in crisis.
Ideas repeat and return, and the same figures, Bateson, Blake, the pattern that connects, come back in different forms. The repetition is intentional, as these papers are offered not as a finished system but as a record of one practitioner's effort to remain faithful to a way of thinking that emerges from a belief that everything is connected.
