Palo Alto

The Mental Research Institute (MRI) in Palo Alto, also known as the Palo Alto School, is one of the institutions that pioneered brief and systemic-family therapy. Founded by Don D. Jackson and colleagues in 1958, the MRI has been a major source of ideas in the fields of interactive/systemic studies, psychotherapy, and family therapy.

Carlos Sluzki: after my first night in Palo Alto (January 1965), a Sunday morning, I decided to walk around to see the MRI building at least from outside. First surprise: I was expecting the Taj Mahal and what I found was a small house un-differentiable from any other medium dwelling in that neighborhood. Regardless of its size, the overall institutional environment was extraordinarily stimulant, and I submerged into it with joy.

There was a lot going on at MRI: weekly meetings of several research projects led by Jackson, Watzlawick, Beavin, Haley, Weakland, Tony Ferreira, Jules Riskin or others, several levels of family therapy training led by Virginia Satir, with Don Jackson, Watzlawick and some of Virginia’s disciples such as Joan Herrick and Frederik Ford; bi-weekly conferences by staff or by visitors eager to present and discuss the explosion of new ideas being generated during those times –cybernetic, semantics, inter-species and aliens communication, neuro-dynamics, non-verbal interactions, group processes, hypnosis, family research and therapy, and so on.  Lyman Wynne, Margaret Singer, Sal Minuchin, Ruth and Ted Lidz, Milton Erickson, Carol Wilder, Henry Lennard, Don Bloch, Nate Ackerman, John Lilly, Karl Pribram, Al Schefflen, and many others visited and contributed to those extraordinary meetings.

However, the MRI founders, while participating  jointly in meetings, tended to maintain some distance between each other and didn’t seem enjoy collectively generativity, nor very good at discussing each other’s ideas (I may be just comparing a more Anglo-Saxon American semi-distant social proxemics with the rather enmeshed Latino relational style, typical for our team in Buenos Aires.)  It was as if the ghost of Gregory Bateson (with whom Haley, Jackson and Weakland had published –and made well known—by the by then famous seminal paper on the Double Bind), who had labeled any clinical application of cybernetic ideas as premature and was therefore critical of the MRI’s clinical and training component, and interfered as a caveat, no matter how much reverence and reference to him was performed by his former team. Weakland and Haley had each their own research grant, John on analysis of patterns of family interaction in Chinese movies (his wife was a gifted Chinese painter, and he was fluent in that language) and Jay on interactional games. They were renting neighboring houses for their office and projects. I would visit and interact with them both at their offices and at home dinners (Haley, with his mid-western drawl, was quite clear for me to understand, while Weakland, always with a pipe between his teeth and a low voice, was more of a challenge).

Let’s jump a couple of years. At the dawn of 1968, the MRI, already in a new, more spacious building, was confronting a crisis: sources of research funds, the basis of the MRI’s subsistence as an research and training institution, were beginning to move away from « soft » qualitative research into « hard » quantitative and basic research, and were much more challenging to obtain.  Virginia Satir announced that she was being lured to projects elsewhere, Jay Haley was being courted by Minuchin to move to Philadelphia, Don Jackson, the MRI founder and director, was divorcing and wanted to abandon the managing of the already famous but challenging collection of cats at MRI to be able to focus on writing a series of books for the general public. But nobody imagined the shaking event that would follow: Jackson, the founder and director of the MRI, merely 49 years old, had been found dead at his apartment (three competing rumors, none of the confirmed: I. He died of an accidental overdose of a heavy opioid that he may have remained hooked after having been seriously wounded during WWII; II. He was using anesthetics on himself or as part of a small marginal team exploring near-death experiences, a theme he was interested in, and himself or one of his associates may have miscalculated the dosage; III. He had died of a heart attack, strained by the many overlapping tensions during that juncture in his life.)

Still living in Argentina, but spending again a trimester at the MRI, I remember arriving at the MRI building on that Monday morning to see many members walking stunned in the corridors and finding a distraught Janet (Beavin) and Paul (Watzlawick), my main buddies during those three yearly trimesters at MRI, at the building esplanade, sharing with me the shocking news. One of our first move was to seek Riskin, the MRI associate-director-turned-that-day-director and a rather pusillanimous or at least shy guy, to explore his plans for a needed acknowledgment-homage-mourning ceremony for Jackson’s passing both that day and as a short-term project at MRI. However, he informed us that he was going to obeyed Jackson’s recently separated and still bitter widow’s wishes, who opposed any kind of ceremony or homage -in fact, he told us that Jackson, who had died less than three days ago, had been already buried! Hence, Jackson literally disappeared from the MRI… and in good measure from the field. Ironically, that very morning Janet, Paul, and I, in desperate needing to get involved in some mourning ceremony of our own, ended up going to a present corpus mass taking place in a church a couple of blocks away for an MRI secretary’s husband who had died a few days earlier–a strange as-if experience of a proper ritual with a wrong corps! And, in the meanwhile, Don’s death became a disappearance, as if vanishing, with more rumors and hypotheses about why and how he died than a proper acknowledgment of the passing of such a seminal figure in the field.