held by diff erent family members (and professionals) – alongside the pragmatics of clinical experience, to consider the ways men who have experienced insecure attachments as children may struggle to regulate their own emotional experiences, and so unconsciously place inappropriate expectations on others to regulate them. Viewed positively, these negative prior experiences may result in parents seeking help to “disentangle the pain he or she is feeling and the damage he or she might be doing”. As Gorell Barnes suggests, such restricting earlier experiences, “may not result in a failure to love, but can lead to loving in ways that are inappropriate for children”. The book is rich with practical suggestions


for helping fathers to refl ect upon their own childhood experiences and the resultant internal working models, and to understand the consequences of these experiences for the ways in which they approach the parenting of their own children. There are invaluable sections on working with acrimonious and alienating processes in highly polarised families, and working with men who hold negative beliefs about women and have a fi xated sense of entitlement. The author provides extensive practice-examples of how to assertively challenge and modify such positions, “without amplifying the underlying, latent anger”. There are also invaluable chapters about working therapeutically in the context of court proceedings, and with families where there is parental mental illness. Drawing upon her experience as a therapist


in multi-cultural contexts, Gorell Barnes usefully warns that, “the plurality of intersections of ethnicity, class, and cultural heritage through diff erent generations and mutually constructing one another, mean we should never subserve any disciplines of the practices of child rearing under a single culturally assigned heading”. The book discusses the range of fatherhoods within contemporary family-life, including ‘non-live- in’ fathering, step-fathering, father-led single- parent families, previously absent fathers who wish to connect with their children, fathering in gay and lesbian families, and those who have donated sperm and subsequently wish to make contact. Although Gorell Barnes states the book is


not a manual or detailed guide to practice, this potentially underplays how invaluable the text is as a resource for health and social-care practitioners in their day-to-day work with families. Quite simply, this is a compassionate, challenging and beautiful book, written in a clear, accessible style, and which is both authoritative and refl ective in outlook.


50


Obituary: Lynn Hoff man, Judy Davies


Lynn Hoffman, one of the pioneers in


the field of family therapy and the most lyric chronicler of its evolution, died peacefully of pneumonia on December 21, 2017, at the age of 93, in the arms of her beloved partner (the 92 year old “love of her life”), Edward McAvoy, a former New York Times distribution manager. Born Grace Lynn Baker in Paris, 1924,


she was the first of three daughters of Donald Baker and Ruth Reeves, a groundbreaking textile artist and co- creator of the American Index of Design. She was raised in New City, NY among a community of artists, attended the Dalton School in NYC on scholarship, and went on to graduate Radcliffe College, Magna Cum Laude, in 1946, first in her class. Many years later, she earned a master’s degree in social work at Adelphi University, then practiced and taught at institutions and programs too numerous to mention. Lynn had been married to the late


Theodore Hoffman, founder of the NYU Theatre department with whom she had three daughters, who survive her: Martha, Joanna, and Livia Hoffman. Lynn was pre-deceased by her two sisters, Duny Katzman and Virginia Lehran.


She was a brilliant and uniquely


knowledgeable commentator on our field, having worked with many of the early pioneers, beginning with acting as editor of Virginia Satir’s seminal classic, Conjoint Family Therapy (1967), and then co-authoring Techniques of Family Therapy, with Jay Haley (1968). Over the years, Lynn authored and


co-authored many books. Foundations of Family Therapy (1981), covering the early years of our field, remains a classic and should be mandatory reading in all training-courses. Her final and more personal book was Family Therapy: An Intimate History (2001). She was also the author of scores of inf luential journal articles most notable for their singular voice and the clarity with which she explained the complex postmodern ideas reshaping the field, and, indeed, the intellectual horizon. The American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy presented her its ‘lifetime achievement award’. She is the subject of the film, All Manner of Poetic Disobedience, produced by one of her league of friends and admirers, which includes interviews with many of her colleagues around the world. It can be seen on YouTube.


Context 155, February 2018


Obituary: Lynn Hoff man, 1924 – 2017


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