Sad news: Mony Elkaïm passed away

Dear friends and EFTA members,

It is with deep sadness that I have to announce the untimely death of Mony Elkaïm, who passed away this Friday, November 20, in Brussels, after a long battle with illness.

To all those who knew him, Mony leaves the memory of a man with exceptional charisma, of a brilliant theorist, of an extraordinary therapist with unique intelligence and intuitions. He was a pioneer of family therapy, which he helped introduce in Europe.

After training in neuropsychiatry at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB, Brussels) and a stay in the United States, upon returning to Belgium he created in 1979 in Brussels the Institute of Family and Human Systems Studies with which he organized the first major international family therapy congresses in Europe in 1981, 1983, 1986 and 1989, to which were invited the American and European pioneers of family therapy as well as representatives of antipsychiatry (whose network he had coordinated in the 1970s). These congresses served as models for those subsequently organized by EFTA. After coordinating (with Maurizio Andolfi) the European network of family therapists, he was at the origin of the foundation of EFTA which he chaired for many years until. After the subdivision of EFTA in 3 chambers, he became chair of the chamber of Training Institutes (EFTA-Tic). Mony was always concerned with defending the status of European family therapists.

In 1979, he also created the first French-speaking family therapy journal – the “Cahiers critiques de thérapie familiale et de pratique de réseaux” – which published both translations of the American texts of the pioneers in our field and articles testifying to the development of these practices in European countries.

Mony Elkaïm was an outstanding, internationally recognized trainer in systemic family therapy, stimulating the deployment of the sensitivity and skills of the many therapists he trained and supervised around the world.

Edith Goldbeter
Head of training, Institut d’Etudes de la famille et des Systèmes Humains, Brussels.

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