Book Reviews [Conversation, Language, and Possibilities: A Postmodern Approach to Therapy, by Harlene Anderson. New York: Basic Books, 1997, 308 pp.]

Within the last several years in the field of family therapy, I have seen, or imagined, creeping signs of a gentle revolution I would have predicted. Perhaps the shift is a part of family therapy's coming of age, and/or a mournful tribute to those "founding fathers" (Goolishian, Whitaker, and Weakland, among others) whom we have lost in the same time span. Five years ago, writing to me about pitfalls to avoid in training therapists, John Weakland mentioned with mingled amusement and annoyance the inquiries he had been getting from prospective trainees, asking him if he had ever taken any classes from "those people who just did a big workshop near here-you know, the ones who invented family therapy." I think that would be less likely to happen now, not because there are fewer naive trainees out there, but because as a field we seem to be moving away from claims of radical innovation, and towards an honoring of our own history.