IJSP Number 7, 2025

International Journal of Supervision in Psychotherapy, Number 7, 2025 Page | 52 inescapable paradigm. It seems to be always about us , I , my , our own or mine , which are confronted and provoked by something strange and unusual, which is threatening our homeostasis. And that is what psychotherapy encounters: the limited capacity to face the new, the unusual, and the provocative. Even in supervision we have to deal with the difficulties created by the same provocations. If we look at Bowen’s theory, we will find at least some indications to better ourselves in order to deal with the limits of our understanding and integration. Why Bowen’s theory? Bowen saw the immense potentialities that his theory contains in nuce , and, as M. Kerr emphasizes it, he did not forcefully build on an already existing ground (Systemic Therapy, Psychoanalyses, etc.) but: “In contrast, Bowen saw the potential for a completely new theory of human behaviour emerging from family research. Many of the other family pioneers were more preoccupied with developing a new therapeutic approach to human problems, namely, family therapy, than developing a new theory.” [6] Although Murray Bowen was a genius of incontestable value and profundity, as a medical doctor and psychotherapist, he was confined to his proper domain of knowledge and practice. Moreover, the practice of psychotherapy is very challenging and needs the outmost implication and devotion of everyone who wants to have serious and durable results and achievements. Psychology and psychotherapy are vast realms of the human knowledge and, as it is very well understood, even a lifetime would not be enough to know, investigate, or to explore them all. However, exactly this vastness of the domain is what arrests and confines psychologists and psychotherapists. Psychology is, as every other science branch or domain, an enclosure; eventually every domain will realize a closure by closing itself on the occupants and making them prisoners of its own territory. After all, psychology, as well as every other science, has a precisely defined domain surrounded by a frontier, which protects from possible intrusions coming from the exterior and tries, at the same time, to conserve and preserve its own corpus of knowledge and practices. Unfortunately, such systemic protective mechanisms of homeostasis apply as well to psychologists, psychotherapists, or psychiatrists. As everybody else, they are not without professional sensibilities and vulnerabilities, put in place in order to preserve and conserve what they already have acknowledged or integrated and, as such, consider their very own domain. If we like it or not, there are many questions to be raised once we stand on the margins of psychology and psychotherapy. One example would be the question of how we could objectively examine something about psychology if we are psychologists (meaning that we are inside the domain and not outside of it and its inevitable limitations). Alternatively, how could we see and understand where we stand as psychologists, and what kind of knowledge we inhabit and believe in, if we are always within the boundaries of one single domain? Are we doing this just because it is the only domain of knowledge we know and we can access? As such, we agree with Feyerabend’s opinion that: “The answer is clear: we cannot discover it from the inside .” (…) “The first step in our criticism of familiar concepts and procedures, the first step in our criticism of ‘facts’, must therefore be an attempt to break the circle.” [7]