Videos

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST delivered by Maria Borcsa & Valeria Pomini on the last EFTA Book « Handbook of Online Systemic Therapy, Supervision and Training« 

On 29 May 2026, Edgar Morin passed away in Paris at an advanced age, just short of his 105th birthday. He was born Edgar Nahoum on 8 July 1921 in Paris, the son of secular Jewish immigrants from Thessaloniki, and himself lived a complex biography: a fighter in the Résistance, a member of the Communist Party until 1951, then expelled from the party and a lifelong dissident vis-à-vis any orthodoxy. At the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), which he joined in 1950 and where he became research director, he worked at the intersection of sociology, philosophy, ethnography and biology. He received honorary doctorates from 38 universities worldwide.

Morin’s intellectual life’s work is concentrated in the six-volume La Méthode (1977–2004), whose first volume, La nature de la nature, sets out the programme: order, disorder and organisation are not to be conceived as opposites but as inseparably interwoven dimensions of reality. In critical engagement with Ludwig von Bertalan_y’s general systems theory, Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics and Claude Shannon’s information theory, Morin developed an independent position. He adopted the concept of the open system, but radicalised it: no system, he argued, is completely open, and none is completely closed. Every system requires openness towards its environment and closure for selfpreservation – a tension he does not resolve but understands as constitutive of all systems. The core concept is complexity – and Morin emphasised that complexus in Latin means “woven together”. Complexity is for him not a property of di_icult subject matters but an epistemic attitude: the attempt to deal with the interplay of part and whole, subject and object, order and perturbation, not through reduction but through a form of thinking capable of withstanding the tension between these poles.
One of the basic assumptions of systemic perspectives is well known: one cannot intervene in living complex systems in a directive-instructional manner; they can only change through self organisation. Living complex systems include families, couples, groups, but also, for example, the brain, the climate or the human being as a complex biopsychosocial system – Morin referred to these as hypercomplex machines. One of his particular achievements was to develop complexity-scientific and interdisciplinary
reflections on the structure and dynamics of such systems (above all in his major work La nature de la nature). For Morin, the “driving forces” of self-organised processes of change in living, complex systems are disorder, “noise” and error/mistake (Morin, 1974, pp. 137f.), whereby by disorder he means all internal and external “perturbations” of the system’s existing organisational schemata, and by error/mistake everything the system produces that does not correspond to a previously defined intention.
A further important element of these considerations is what he formulated as the “law of systemic antagonism” (Morin, 1981, p. 119), which posits polarities and ambivalences as central to the dynamics of living, complex systems. He marks as immanent to the system, and as stimulating change, both the antagonistic relations among the components and elements of a system and the system’s constant confrontation with contradictions from
the environment – that is, with alternatives that contain equally desirable or equally repellent possibilities (Morin, 1974, p. 138).
This “law” aptly explains why systemic practitioners are so fond of ambivalences: they require the tension associated with ambivalences, antagonisms and polarities as the
“fuel” for self-organised processes of change. This “law” also helps explain why antagonisms and oppositions appear constitutive for the maintenance of systems. Systemic thinking in Morin’s sense therefore means always “co-thinking” the counterpole to one’s own position as constitutive of the system and, in this sense, according it
recognition – and this applies to the micro-, meso- and macro-levels of living complex systems, such as cellular metabolism, families or society. It also protects against naïve
and undercomplex interventions at all of these levels and instead invites us not to adopta one-sided position, but always to include the antagonistic element in our perspective in order to arrive at a reflective understanding of dynamics and structures that meets the demands of systems and complexity theory.
With Edgar Morin, the intellectual world loses one of the last thinkers of the 20th century who sought to counteract the fragmentation of scientific knowledge into countless individual disciplines with a passionate plea for complexity and transdisciplinarity.
Tom Levold and Matthias Ochs
References:
Morin, E. (1974). Das Rätsel des Humanen. Grundfragen einer neuen Anthropologie.
München/Zürich: Piper.
Morin, E. (1981). Method. Towards a study of humankind. Vol. 1: The nature of nature. New
York: Peter Lang.

It is with sorrow that I announce the death of Edgar Morin, the 29^th of May at 104 years. It is with responsibility that I wish to pay a tribute to him. A researcher, an irreverent thinker, the father of complexity. I’ve met him many times – in Roma, Milano, Naples and abroad –  and studied his books whenever I could. I became interested in him in the early 1980s, intrigued by the concept of complexity (1977), which we still consider the mandate of those who define themselves as systemic practitioners in mental health. Proposing a new way of thinking about humanity, the world, and knowledge, Morin considered the composite nature of reality—every theory is according to him local—pushing toward a multiplicity of positions and definitions: « Complexity presents itself as difficulty and uncertainty, not as clarity and an answer. »

Complexity in psychotherapy becomes the proposal for an interconnection between languages and between professional figures; it considers the complementarity of descriptions and the composition of knowledge as a possible method for « reading » the question brought to us. Multiverse, reflective polyphony, hypothesis, intricate hierarchies in constant flux, allow not only new rules of the game but also space for the discovery of questions and problems, redefined in a new way. Complexity has blurred disciplinary boundaries, making it clear that every discipline is contained within every other. The challenge Morin proposes is to seek new metaphors, new styles of thought, new strategies of knowledge: the uncertainty of hypothesizing replaces the certainty of explanations.

Morin fundamentally redefined the game of knowing and psychotherapy, as well as training. According to him social sciences had to change their assumptions and proposed practices. What does it mean to respect complexity in psychotherapy? It means primarily making complexity visible, not flattening oneself with reassuring simplifications, embodying it, riding it, allowing it to emerge; simultaneously it means respecting singularities, seeing the particulars and the whole at the same time; keeping ever more levels in mind, adopting a multiple stance to open up possibilities. It means questioning the very concept of truth, which becomes, as von Foerster argues, « the invention of a liar« . It implies choosing a complementary perspective and generating multiple descriptions. Knowing how to deconstruct preconceived ideas and, to do so, using abductive and divergent thinking; demonstrating irreverence and curiosity in order to allow oneself to be amazed. It means feeling connected, resonating with the capta (Laing 1967) we choose to abduct from the background, overcoming the subject/object dualism, to shift the analysis to the pattern that connects them. And much more.

All this he explained and at the same time lived every minute of his life: irreverence, curiosity, being out of the nine dots, looking at what happened with irony and amazement, with gratitude.

For clinical systemic practice to become the “best” practice, we must take care of the treatment process, that is, subject it to constant, second-order recursive evaluation. Every therapy, regardless of its model, should respect complexity: it should propose operations upon operations. In the recursive position, the practitioner—accessing information about difference and considering themselves an integral part of the ongoing process—observes their own participation in the process they are co-constructing, seeking isomorphisms that repeat identically across different dimensions, as in a fractal. As clinicians, we analyze each question brought to us, interrogating the system that shares the problem (which may include a pediatrician or an elderly aunt), and we consider the symptoms within the organization of the systems in which they appeared, as an attempt to raise the level of complexity of the system itself.

Together with Marco Bianciardi, I wrote a book on therapy as a second-level, recursive operation (2014). We wrote about the ability to use oneself to investigate oneself in relation to others. We wrote about the Morinian necessity of changing attitudes, tolerating doubt, accept the unsaid, and getting one’s hands dirty with action. Participation becomes a privileged postulate as Morin taught us, he, the king of entering any situation in front of him. Together with Pietro Barbetta (2021), I wrote another article for the international journal Family Process,  in which we insist on the need to overcome universalist abstraction, by placing epistemology alongside ontology: epistemology allows us to reflect on the lenses and maps through which we interpret the world; there is then a level at which we consider the contexts in which we act and the stories we are told, an ethnographic descriptive positioning that allows us to pay full attention to the essence of the other and their singularity within multiplicity. Taking this into account means allowing the subjects we work with to express who they are, neutralizing the danger that our premises lead us to ride our prejudices and our knowledge, seeing what we think is the Other. Morin was a curious man, he tried every minute to connect with your essence, to start from your story to get to the common interests.

Personally, I believe that it is precisely maintaining complexity in our work, this polyphony of levels of attention and action, that allows us to access the political dimension of our work; I believe that Morin has been and will continue to be the one to guide us in the ethics, aesthetics, and politics of our work as psychotherapists. Now he does it from his own space, in a dimension we do not reach, trough the books he wrote and the conferences he did, always with extreme generosity.

Umberta Telfener

Barbetta P., Telfener U., 2021, The Milan Approach, History and Evolution, Family Process, Vol 60, N°1, pp.4-16.
Bianciardi M., Telfener U., 20014,  Ricorsività in psicoterapia, riflessioni sulla pratica clinica, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino.
Laing R., 1961, The Self and Others, Tavistock, London.
Morin E., 1977, Il metodo. Ordine, disordine, organizzazione,  Feltrinelli, Milano 1980.

Chers membres et futurs membres de l’EFTA – chambres CIM, NFTO et TIC.
L’objectif de l’EFTA est d’obtenir la reconnaissance de la thérapie familiale et systémique en tant que forme distincte et scientifiquement fondée de pratique thérapeutique, et de garantir des normes rigoureuses en matière de formation et de pratique professionnelle dans toute l’Europe.
À cette fin, l’EFTA a achevé le processus de mise à jour périodique de ses normes de formation, conformément à l’évolution des différents cadres réglementaires et professionnels européens.
Les nouvelles normes de formation s’intitulent « Normes minimales de formation de l’EFTA 2025 ».
Vous trouverez ICI les normes de formation pour les thérapeutes familiaux et systémiques au niveau européen, ainsi que les niveaux de formation requis pour l’adhésion à la Chambre des instituts de formation de l’EFTA (TIC) et à la Chambre des membres individuels de l’EFTA (CIM).

Les nouvelles normes de formation de l’EFTA 2025 doivent être mises en œuvre dans tous les programmes de formation destinés aux étudiants qui entament leur formation de quatre ans à partir de 2027.
Les anciennes normes resteront en vigueur pour tous les autres étudiants ayant commencé leur formation avant 2027.
Les diplômés qui commenceront leur formation en 2027 devront choisir de s’inscrire soit dans le parcours 1, soit dans le parcours 2 d’ici 2031.

L’EFTA prévoit d’organiser des séances d’information et de discussion en 2026. Les chambres individuelles prendront également contact avec leurs membres pour leur fournir des informations sur les nouvelles normes.

It all began three years ago with an intuition, that of Reynaldo Perrone, who planted a seed of an idea in the minds of his friends in Latin America and Europe…
A meeting was arranged with two presidents, Umberta Telfener (EFTA) and Marcélo Cébério (RELATES).
With a touch of madness, we build monuments and make dreams come true.
The dream of bringing two continents together!

For a long time now, inventive and curious minds have been crossing oceans and bringing continents together, gathering men, women, and children, and connecting worlds.

The intuition gave rise to an idea. It was only the beginning, the first step toward unity: The EFTA RELATES 2025 Congress!
The idea took shape, combined with organized data, dealing with reality, eliminating, synthesizing… under the gaze of the curious, the fearful, the brave, the meticulous, the hardworking, the dreamers, the courageous…

And that’s where it all began; link by link, the idea gave way to a collaboration involving many minds, many bodies, and many spirits.

A multitude of experiences and convictions!

It was the end goal that brought men and women together for a common cause. What energy! What obstacles! What differences! So many certainties! So many uncertainties! So much determination! So much fatigue! Don’t think it was easy!
First:
– Convincing people that it was possible: bringing two federations together for a single event!
– Convincing people that they would come: volunteers, and lots of them!
– Convincing people that France was the right choice: host country…
– Convincing people that Lyon was the perfect host city: Lugdunum, Roman city.
A year-long journey to validate an initial decision.

Then, searching, visiting, negotiating, choosing a location, or rather locations. Supporters gave strength to the project: friends, training centers in France, and Lyon 2 University with the DIPHE Laboratory. What brought us together: the goal!

Different worlds, different visions, different languages, different ideas, different feelings, different habits, different experiences, different universes, and yet more than 30 people worked with determination, thought together, validated, negotiated, achieved… Exhausted but happy, so that 1,600 people of 66 nationalities could come together, connect, transmit, receive, share, vibrate, and engrave in their memories: “We were there!”