EUROPEAN FAMILY THERAPY ASSOCIATION

CONNECTING FAMILY THERAPISTS AND TRAINERS

Gossips in front of the family

We – Umberta and Kyriaki – are very excited about this project. We know that what is interesting about the history of family therapy and of psychotherapy in general can be easily found in the small acts of its founders as in their theoretical interpretations. Following is a gathering together of small acts that tell much of both the narrator and the person encountered. We read them with passion and learned, not only about the person who was the focus of the story, but also we learned something about the teller. From each story we also gained something about life.
We have been motivated for many reasons: it helps remember very precious stories that otherwise would get lost; it is a way to honor our founders and our systemic past; it could become an important part of teaching students the history of the movement by offering them precious memories that can give the flavor of the ’70 and ’80 in our field and its ongoing development.
We are using this particular title for the project based on a quote of Mara Selvini Palazzoli: according to her, therapy is a sort of gossip in front of the family  and happen all the time. Also, Heinz von Foerster used to utilize a relevant phrase in his reference to “People who invented me”.

Gossips in philosophical terms aim not to denigrate the subject it speaks about but to reveal its moral identity. Giuseppe Mantovani, moral philosopher (The invisible elephant, discovering cultural differences, Giunti Firenze 2005) writes: “Gossip almost always tells the truth about things that happen, but things almost never happen as gossip tells them“.
Actually, the Greek word for gossips – “κουτσομπολιό” (koutsobolio) refers to the process of “grafting” whereby one part of a plant is transplanted to tissues of another plant, connecting them together in such a way that they go on to grow and develop a new different plant. This is what we hope for our process…
We decided to begin by calling for gossip related to the “masters’”, but we know that our professional society is now more horizontal and that the concept of masters could be seen as patriarchal. Since the participation in this adventure has become large we are also including people who are the second and third generation; as we have explained in the presentation letter we wished this project would take a life of its own, becoming a self referential system. We therefore admitted every gossip we received.

We choose to put the name of the storyteller at the beginning of the shared experience so as to underline that stories are personal experiences rather than objective reality. In this way, we hope that no one will get offended, because what is told is the personal recollection of the narrator and her/his respect and love are already evident by choosing that specific person instead of another one.

We think that this project gives life to the pioneers by telling a part of their life that is not evident in their writings.

Colleagues can continue sending in stories, we are not interrupting this project and would like it to be an ongoing flux. Here is what we are assembled till now:

Tom Andersen

Tom Andersen

(1936–2007) MD, Ph.D., Psychiatrist, Professor of Social Psychiatry at the Institute of Community Medicine, University of Tromso, Norway, recognized worldwide for the contribution of the Reflecting Team (RT). Former Board Member of the Taos Institute.

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Mia Anderson

Mia Anderson

Psychologist, family psychotherapist specialized in serious eating disorders

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Harry Aponte

Harry Aponte

Director of the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic in the clinic’s golden age in the late ‘70’s,  when Minuchin and Haley worked there and Hoffman, Madaness and Whitaker would pass by. Social worker very involved with social issues, he is teaching at the Drexel University.

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Gregory Bateson

Gregory Bateson

Born in 1904, he graduated in biology at Cambridge. He was an anthropologist, an ethnologist (Naven 1936), a sociologist and a systemic thinker (Steps to an Ecology of Mind 1972, Mind and Nature 1980), interested - among many curiosities - on the behavioral effects of communication.

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Luigi Boscolo

Luigi Boscolo

(1932-2015) He became a pediatrician at the Medical School of Padua, then a psychoanalyst in New York City (1960-1967)...

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Luigi Boscolo & Gianfranco Cecchin as a team

Luigi Boscolo & Gianfranco Cecchin as a team

They traveled together and separately for seminars, congresses and performances while the post-Milan teams all over the Western world were experimenting with their ideas and were meeting to play out new procedures…

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David Campbell

David Campbell

Psychologist and systemic psychotherapist. He worked at Tavistock Clinic for 37 years.

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Luigi Cancrini

Luigi Cancrini

Psychiatrist and psychotherapist with psychoanalytic and systemic training. In the 1970s he founded the Study Center for Family and Relational Therapy, one of the important schools of Psychotherapy in Italy. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Scientific Review Ecology of the Mind (Pensiero Scientifico Editore).

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Alfredo Canevaro

Alfredo Canevaro

Psychiatrist and psychotherapist. Founder of the “Review Terapia Familiar” in Argentina; Director from 1978 to 1993. First President of the Sociedad Argentina de Terapia Familiar (1978-1983). He then arrived in Italy. Since 1999, he is on the staff of the School of Psychotherapy “Mara Selvini” in Milano.

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Gianfranco Cecchin

Gianfranco Cecchin

(1932-2004) Psychiatrist, as Boscolo worked in the States and came back to Milano. Co-founder with Luigi Boscolo of the Milan Center of Family Therapy in via Leopardi 19, where they had started the first systemic training (1977) and where they “translated” their thoughts to adhere to the public contexts in which the students were working.

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Mauro Ceruti

Mauro Ceruti

Born in 1953, he is an epistemologist and systemic thinker, has taught in the University of Ginevra, Paris, Palermo and Bergamo of which he has been the Dean, and now is at the IULM University of Milano...

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Vittorio Cigoli

Vittorio Cigoli

(1942-2022) Professor Emeritus at the Faculty of Psychology of the Catholic University of Milan, he was a psychotherapist, a researcher and an author of many  writings relating to family interactions, couples,  separation and divorce.

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Rodolfo de Bernart

Rodolfo de Bernart

(1947-2019) Psychiatrist, pioneer of family therapy. Founding member and director for 30 years of the Florence Institute of Family Therapy (ITFF), Italy. President of EFTA until his untimely death.

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Steve de Shazer

Steve de Shazer

(1940–2005) Pioneer of solution-focused brief therapy, he proposed a model in which the role of the therapist is to focus attention on the present and the future, leaving the past behind.

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Mony Elkaïm

Mony Elkaïm

(1941-2020) Born in Marrakesh, neuropsychiatrist, director of the Institute of Family and Human Systems Studies in Brussels since 1979 and director of the journal Cahiers Critique de Thérapie Familiale e de Pratiques de Réseaux. He was the founder, president and soul of the EFTA which has been gathering professionals since 1990...

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Milton Erickson

Milton Erickson

(1906-1980) MD, one of the most authoritative hypnotists of our times, he worked in Phoenix and invented a less invasive trans. He was a great expert of communication also because he has been one of the rare people who had polio twice (in 1919 and 1952) and was in bed and immobilized for long...

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The Fifth Province Group

The Fifth Province Group

Nollaig Byrne, Imelda McCarthy, Phil Kearny also known as the Fifth Province group operated in Ireland looking for an alternative view to problems: “There was the experience of opening things up and seeing them more clearly and then shifting them along. There was a sense of the spiritual underlying the process.” they write.

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Heinz von Foerster

Heinz von Foerster

(1911- 2002) Born in Vienna, invited in the United States by Warren McCulloch – Harvard neurophysiologist who had admired his physics dissertation on a quantistic point of view of memory (which came out in 1948) – where he arrived in february 1949...

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Ernst von Glasersfeld

Ernst von Glasersfeld

(1917-2010), He was a German journalist, translator, philosopher and cybernetician, who lived in Ireland, Italy and the United States. He worked extensively with Silvio Ceccato on cybernetics...

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Jay Haley

Jay Haley

(1923-2007) Belonging to the original group of the Palo Alto School, he collaborated with Milton Erickson and Gregory Bateson and was part of the study group on the double bind...

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