Opinion: Is there a new paradigm emerging inspired by fungi & a family therapist?

Freedom Park, Wall Street, NYC, on Oct. 8, 2011.

Freedom Park, Wall Street, NYC, on Oct. 8, 2011. Jean Stimmell photo

By JEAN STIMMELL

Published: 12-28-2024 8:00 AM

Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com.

In the early 1990s, while attending graduate school at Antioch in Keene, I fell in love with the work of the social worker Lynn Hoffman. She made it clear that she disliked abstract psychological theories, preferring to discuss human creativity and the art of participating in bonds with others.

She spurned conventional thinking that emphasizes hierarchies and rigid sociological systems. She was interested in promoting neighborly ways of being, something desperately needed in our nation, which is so polarized that some pundits warn of civil war.

She was ahead of her time, rejecting the conventional metaphor that family therapy was a top-down hierarchy like the structure of a tree. She also repudiated the notion that the family was a mechanistically determined system. Rather than based on a machine, she looked for a more interactive model, as such found in the patterns of nature.

She found what she was looking for in the work of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who had proposed “rhizome” as a new metaphor based on the complex branching stem of fungi we now call mycelium.

Because mycelia have no center, they are neither a rigid system derived from technology nor a tree that grows from top to bottom by predictable branching.

As described by Professor Katina Rogers: “The rhizome model is a contrast to the traditional model of thought, which is often structured like a tree… In the rhizome model, there is no single point of origin or fixed center, but instead, a multitude of entry and exit points. The rhizome is not a unified whole, but a network of interconnections and flows that can be constantly reconfigured.”

For Hoffman, the rhizome was more than an apt metaphor for family therapy: it was an exciting new paradigm for society. By “moving beyond hierarchical and mechanical models to a pulsing aliveness,” it represented the future, what Hoffman predicted would become known as the Rhizome Century.

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What Hoffman foresaw was the gradual breakdown of conventional politics in our country and around the world in a radical move away from the system metaphor, “with its emphasis on symmetry, order and a return to the same, to the rhizome with its more messy and horizontal plane of endless relations.”

Back at the beginning of social media in 2008, Hoffman called the World Wide Web a classic example of a rhizome.

“The internet was already sprouting movements, formats, patterns, that are questioning, evading, and uprooting many of the gatekeeping structures that support our Modernist society.”

The first stirrings were movements like the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, which were quickly squashed by the status quo. I think the recent rise of authoritarianism is, at least in part, a backlash against this surge of “people power.” Unfortunately, in our country, Trump has hijacked the aspirations of the people for his own corrupt ends.

But it will not last. The Rhizome Century that Hoffman predicted is now upon us. As Peggy Sax, a collaborator of Hoffman, has written.

“In the future, what counts as an ethical response will require an entirely different focus of attention. It will mean starting on the grassroots level to listen and learn from our neighbors, rather than dictating or deferring to what the experts say: to grow “our attentiveness to and curiosity about what it might mean within a locally and historically situated life - to live an interconnected life with a sense of purpose and meaning.”

Nation Magazine, in its January issue, has highlighted one such approach to combat the upcoming Trump agenda: Straight out of the Lynn Hoffman playbook, adrienne maree brown has begun what she calls “mycelial organizing.”

As she puts it: “Put your nose down in the dirt and understand that each of us can be a tiny filament in the vast, complex, dynamic web that will make up the resistance. Find your task and your team, and step into your place in the network, where your assignment is to connect, cooperate, and serve.

For most of us, it’s not our job to come up with the best strategies. Indeed, if we’re privileged, it must not be our job. Now is the time to take direction from people most affected by the new regime (they’ve had it with your bright ideas), to be curious about each other’s lived experiences — and willing to align ourselves with people even if we share only a belief in our common humanity.

“This is how we build the resistance and reconstitute our nation: by stitching together the social fabric one nuanced relationship at a time, our little threads waving at each other in the dark, blocking and building, sharing resources, warning each other of danger, and protecting those who need protecting.”