Carlos Sluzki

Born in 1933, Medical doctor, specialized in Psychiatry, systemic thinker, he trained in systemic family therapy at the Mental Research Institute (MRI) in Palo Alto (California) in the early 1960s. Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. Professor Emeritus of Global and Community Health and of Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University

Mauro Mariotti: In 1979 I received a letter of introduction for Alma Menn, Palo Alto, at the Mental Research Institute, Middlefield road 555. She is the director of the Soteria house project, largely funded by the democrats then in government, for the treatment of youth psychosis without neuroleptic abuse. I introduced myself to her, speaking little English. She reassures me – ‘don’t worry‘ – they don’t speak English either, they speak schizophrenic geargon. And she adds: ‘We have here with us a very prepared person who speaks good Spanish and a little Italian, maybe you understand each other‘. It is Carlos Sluzki who, in the first lesson I attend, presents his scheme from roles to rules. It is the beginning of a journey that continues to this day. From 1979 until 2018 – the covid will stop me – I spend every year several months – in two or three separate trips – in the United States, mainly in Carlos Sluzki’s court. I have followed him from San Francisco to Pittsfield, from Pittsfield to Santa Barbara, from Santa Barbara to Washington, involving him in countless adventures and trips between the United States and Italy. I have written a metaphorical novel-book in Italian about my adventure with him, it is called The Seasons of the Ocean, the thread running through it is precisely the restlessness of the soul that with mental bridges unites places divided by oceans.

Carmine Saccu: I remember the first meeting with Carlos Slusky in Rome at the end of the 1970s when he proposed 20 formulas for Family Therapy; I remember meeting him again in the following years when Carlos was able, having adopted  the second-order cybernetics paradigm to find all his creative vein as a ‘special’ storyteller the way he has always been.

Once he was at the Institute with Maurizio and myself, we decided to see a family with a psychotic transaction. He entered with me. At the time we used to provoque the identified patient as a door to enter the system. I started working and he looked shocked as much as to leave and go behind the one way mirror. I followed him out and understood he would have not re-entered with me. I preferred him to conduct the session since the attenders wanted to see his work. His style was tender and delicate and he was the trainer the students wanted to see.

Yara Doumit-Naufal: In 2019, during the IFATC winter colloquium, I participated in a role-playing game as a family therapist. I was supposed to present a family I had been following for a one-shot session in front of three great masters of therapy – Carlos Sluzki, Reynaldo Perrone, and Gianmarco Manfrida. However, as the session progressed, a pattern emerged: the more we advanced, the more the family retreated into silence, and my tension increased. I tried some tactics to regain the family’s attention, but to no apparent effect. With a palpable sense of disappointment, I withdrew into myself.
That’s when Carlos Sluzki addressed me. Sitting, calm, while I was crouched down, he absentmindedly played with my ring while asking me, ‘Why this visceral need to protect the family at all costs?‘ Taken aback, I retorted: ‘Yet there were four of us in the operation, and still, nothing changed.‘ He looked at me kindly and offered a piece of advice: ‘Don’t be so hasty, some seeds take longer to germinate… Calm your inner turmoil.’

Juan Linares: In one of the circular meetings that we organized as Five Voices (see the anecdote told below by Edith Goldbeter), this time in Brussels, it was my turn to introduce Carlos. I told the story of how he saved my life. We are at the end of the 70s – I tell the public -, I was involved in social psychiatry, I considered myself anti-institutional, I felt outside the main stream. But I no longer had so much energy or so much curiosity, I was tired of a practice that was too much the same; the expectation that once the dog was dead the rabies was also dead – as we say in Spain – had failed. The search was worn out. So I started looking around. A Lacanian friend tried to convince me to begin an analysis with Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan’s grand vizier. I’m lucky because by chance I happened to hear a conference by Carlos at the Barcelona Medical Association. It was the end of the 70s. For me it was like the opening of a new world, in an hour I changed my identity. I told him, while introducing him years later in Brussels, that he had saved me from starting therapy with Miller. It was a real rescue. In those distant 70s Carlos showed me that there was an alternative model. I had read about it, I had read Bateson but I wasn’t that knowledgeable about the therapeutic model that had emerged from it. I committed to this new model and I’m still here.

Carlos Sluski (a gossip about himself, a genius!): I was asked several times how I connected with the MRI in Palo Alto, California during the early days of the development of our field. Well, here it goes, perhaps with more details than necessary for a gossip but what you see is what you get.
Around 1963, as a young psychiatrist in Argentina, I was part of a team developing a progressive psychosocially-oriented department of psychiatry in a public general hospital on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. As one of its research projects, I joined an investigation led by a close friend, the sociologist and semiologist Eliseo Verón, exploring possible links between micro and macro systems of social communication and psychopathology –a project that collapsed a couple of years later when a series of military coups paralyzed the University as well as most research centers and, in the long run, prompted many researchers to leave that country, Verón among them, and myself a few years later.

One evening, browsing the first issue of Behavioral Science, a new journal that I picked up at random at another friend’s library, I happened to read the abstract of one of its articles, Bateson, Jackson, Haley and Weakland’s 1956 “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia.” It blew my mind! It spelled out a cybernetic-oriented optic that connected interactional processes –within the family and even in larger systems – with a psychopathological response. I borrowed the journal from my friend, passed copies of the article to the other members of the research team, searched in the yearly publication Psychological Abstracts for indexed papers written by the authors of that article, and sent letters to them requesting reprints of their papers –a cumbersome standard procedure of connecting with authors in the pre-computer world! That provided us with a first glance to articles utilizing that systemic worldview as generated under the umbrella of the recently formed and already legendary Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, California. I then wrote to its director, Don D. Jackson, asking, in my primitive English, whether I would be accepted –at no cost to them– for a three-month fellowship that I was already procuring at the Pan-American Union. In a very friendly letter Jackson accepted sponsoring me, and in January 1965, I flew to San Francisco (a pre-jet era 20 to 30 hours of flight endeavor in a Pan-Am four-propeller Douglas DC-6B!)  At the San Francisco airport, sent by Jackson to pick him up – my name hand-written in a sign–, was waiting the only MRI staff proficient in Spanish, a fellow named Paul Watzlawick (whom I knew a bit just through having read recently a couple of his early papers). It was love at first sight!!

The MRI founders, while participating jointly in meetings, tended to maintain some distance between each other and didn’t seem enjoy collectively generativity. I didn’t feel touched by all that, only puzzled and lamenting that cloud, and enjoying the overall experience during those three glorious months in Palo Alto. And to crown that experience, at the end of that first trimester, Jackson anointed me as Research Associate of the MRI, a seal of belongingness.

Carlos Sluzki (a gossip about himself, a genius!): Umberta asked me how I became appointed as an early advisory editor of the pioneering journal Family Process, founded a few years before by Don Jackson and Nathan Ackerman. In 1968, several months after the major commotion generated by the untimely death and hush burial of the founder of the MRI, Don Jackson, at 49 (I have explored this anecdote elsewhere in these columns), I, once again in Buenos Aires, read in the Editor’s Notes page of the most recent issue of Family Process that Jay Haley, by then editor of that journal (some 15 years later I ended up becoming in turn the editor of that publication!), was organizing a First Don D. Jackson Memorial Conference. Elated by the news, I wrote to Jay a letter praising him for his wisdom at sponsoring what I thought was a much-needed acknowledgment of Jackson’s passing and homage to his many substantive contributions, and asked for details about the meeting so I could register and plan his trip to attend. Jay response was a terse letter (cowboy as he was) informing me that that meeting was structured as a close gathering for the Advisory Editors of the journal, rather than open to the public. I took that letter very personally. Argentinians’ inflated egos make us believe that we are sort First World darling exceptions, in contrast with the rest of the inhabitants of a still developing Latin America, if not of the rest of the world. Moi being rejected? I started ruminating potential explanations for what I assumed was Jay’s surprising personal animosity against me. I remembered that a few months before, while in Palo Alto, Jay and I had a heated –but I thought friendly– discussion during dinner at his house, where I criticized him for his  frequent unnecessary use of elementary psychoanalysis as a strawman to contrast the wisdom and accuracy of an interactional view, and in turn he accused me of having secretly sold my soul to Freud’s cosmovision. And/or perhaps Jay was miffed with me for not having kept for too long an old unpublished manuscript that he had loaned to me. In my self-defense, I argued with myself, I returned it back to him without his even having reclaimed it, and he told me that he didn’t have any plans to do something with it, but… who knows them Americans! (Paranoia seeks externalized explanations to cement its arguments! A propos, that long paper ended up being included years later as a chapter of my early book on the Double Bind.) So I poured all those musing into a two-page single-space furious letter (banged on my poor pre-computer era portable Olivetti!), a mixture of bitter complaint and righteous indignation that proceeded to mail to Jay (by airmail, of course, again, in that pre-email era!), more as a temper tantrum than with any other expectation. Alas, three weeks later, I received another terse one-line letter from Jay this time appointing me, deservingly or not, as Advisory Editor of Family Process, one of the most elegant slapped-with-a-silk-glove that I have ever received. And, a few months later, I was able to join in 1986, Asilomar, California, that First Don D. Jackson Memorial Conference as the youngest Advisory Editor of the journal, rubbing elbows with the most interesting and diverse group of researchers, teachers, and clinicians at the frontlines of the by-then still new field of family therapy.