The Milan Team (when they were together till 1980)

The group was the first among family therapists to talk about marriages among family members, sacrifice of the identified patient, counter-paradoxes to be performed in front of the whole family at the dinner table and to open the black box to explore what individuals thought of one another through gossiping. They stayed together from the end of the ‘60es to the beginning of the ’80, when they separated into two groups: Mara and Giuliana attending mostly to research, Luigi and Gianfranco to training.

Umberta Telfener: In 1981 I went behind the one way mirror of the Milan Group. They were still together in via Leopardi in Milano on the verge of separating. I was with Lynn Hoffman and we stayed three intense days seeing them work. They seemed very intimate as a consequence of  the time they had spent together on a common project: they seemed otherwise formally distant by character. They still had the session divided in five different moments and just two entered the sessions. I still remember the crystalline laugh of Selvini who commented in a sharp manner, finding terms of endearment ; the witty cynical propositions of Cecchin; the warm embrace of the whole system – us included – by Boscolo; the pragmatic and punctual suggested moves by Prata, she acted as the shepherd dog that reunites and keeps the memory together. They seemed to have each a positioning in their group and were respecting their roles very obediently, with no need of meta-communication among them. The rituality they showed was precise and reassuring. Selvini was usually the most talkative. How did they arrive at the final intervention? They talked together, explored hypotheses, made comments, till one of the proposals seemed right – it fitted the atmosphere – and was chosen as the final intervention. If they could not find an agreement the responsible of the case, usually the psychotherapist, had the last word. As in a brainstorming at last an idea was popping up and was the imbrication of all that had been said before, sort of at a different level of understanding.