Edgar Morin has left us

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.