The Connected Human. Selected Papers

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.

Dr Imelda McCarthy, The Fifth Province Centre, Ireland:

Written by a soulful thinker, traveller and practitioner who never strays far from his roots as a Gregory Bateson scholar while drawing on the mysticism and beauty of William Blake's words. He moves gently through epistemology, specific practice vignettes and finishes with another expanded frame around critical environmental and ecological issues with the possible collapse of our known world.

Tracey A. Laszloffy, PhD, LMFT, The Center for Healing Connections:

Hugh Palmer's The Connected Human offers a rich and rigorous contribution to contemporary systemic thought through his skillful integration of cybernetic epistemology, clinical practice, and ecological concerns. Drawing on the legacies of Gregory Bateson and William Blake, Palmer presents a "fourfold vision" that is unified and dynamic framework for engaging human experience in relational, complex, and interconnected ways that shift from a cybernetics of control toward a cybernetics of healing. The fourfold vision is rooted in a "sacred uncertainty," which is an ethical stance that emphasizes openness, humility, and responsiveness in the face of irreducible complexity. The Connected Human makes a significant contribution to scholars and practitioners seeking an integrative, reflexive, and ecologically attuned approach to systemic practice in an increasingly unstable and complex world.

Roger Duncan, Systemic psychotherapist, supervisor and author:

In this groundbreaking book is essential reading for psychotherapists looking to explore Batesonian work more deeply as we face the collapse of old idea about narrative control and begin to step into the emerging complexity of a post humanist perspective.

Dr Leah Salter, Centre for Systemic Studies, Wales and South Wales Health Board:

The pattern that connects this collection of writings is the obvious humanity of the author. Maybe this should be more-than-human-ity. Hugh's reflections on practice illuminate the space between- between people, practices, theories, words, worlds, realms and take us to some unfamiliar and daring places. The depth of compassion and the depth of knowing that we are always connected is matched with the depth of engagement with Bateson's work; and represents a commitment to theory in practice as an ethical position. This is a treasure of a read.

Chiara Santin, Rainbow Therapy, Brighton:

The book is a testimony that the author is living what he is writing; he is believing what he's thinking. He is writing from within himself, his vast cultural knowledge and clinical experience with the greatest humility, not hiding behind word, fully immersed and entangled with the ecological context. This book elevates systemic thinking to a different level, rather dimension. The courage to explore power whether we consider it as a myth or a socially constructed discourse or domain at this time of confusion and political turmoil is brave and terribly topical and useful! His fourfold vision is the synthesis of his thinking beyond binaries, beyond first and second order or even post-humanistic thinking.