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The Systemic Psychotherapy between
Science and Intuition
Слайд 2in this presentation I return – with several modifications -to issues
I already treated and aslo recently
this new version has been prepared for the Conference “The Anatomy of (un)reason” held in Krakòw, Poland, October 10 – 12° 2014.
the presentation has to be followed by Massimo Giuliani’s presentation “Beyond Medicine – Beyond Psychology – Beyond Post-Modernism: The Milan Approach to Systemic Psychotherapy”
http://prezi.com/2lgk1ozulcx7/the-milan-approach-to-systemic-psychotherapy/
Слайд 3the aim of this presentation is to contribute to answer to
a question that psychotherapists conforming to different schools of thought know very well
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“what am I REALLY doing
when I lead a therapy session?”
despite
therapists may try to remain faithful to their refernce theories and to the narratives by which they describe their approach to psychotherapy, there is always a gap between what they actually do and waht they tell that they do – included the theoretical explanations and modelizations of what they do
my claim is that this is an unavoidable and even positive phenomenon
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in trying to answer to the question I’ll draw from my
own experience as a Systemic Psychotherapist and a Teacher of the so called “Milan Approach” to Systemic Psychotherapy
in other words, I will not proceed from a generic or “neutral” point of view
in the meantime I assume that the conclusions I will reach can be shared, in many cases, with professionals conforming to different theoretical frames
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the main features and basic assumptions of the “Milan Approach” to
Systemic Psychotherapy founded by Luigi Boscolo and Gianfranco Cecchin at the end of the seventies will be outlined in the next presentation led by my colleague and friend Massimo Giuliani
the reason why we decided that I should present the first will be clear at the end of my talk
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anyway it will be useful to remark that in the “roaring
years” of the Systemic Psychotherapy (approx. 1970 – 1990)
practicioners were stunned by the elegance
both of conceptual models
and of related practices
it all looked so easy and simply beautiful
on a regular basis the students fell in love with it, beginning to imitate what the Masters used to do
small surprise if the results were many often clumsy, not beautiful at all
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with time, we learned that what we usually were doing in
therapy
not rarely was different from what we were taught
and also from what we in turn were teaching to younger professionals
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in the field of systemic psychotherapy many scholars introduced new ideas
trying to explain why systemic therapies seemed to be so extraordinary
radical constructivism, conversationalism, social constructionism, narrativism … and so on
this accelerated a flux of continuous changes in practice
the mind-boggling thing was that practice kept being different from all models that tried to explain it
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in 1989 Gianfranco Cecchin gave a talk at the English Association
of Family Therapy whose title was
“OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES”
Слайд 11“We are forced to repeat things very well known already, but
it is still necessary that we keep talking about therapy and explain what we do … If old concepts are still good – if wine is still good – so why not to change the bottle, in other words why not to change the way in which concepts are described? Actually we have no other choice … as you can see, the story of family therapy, or the story of family theory is in turn a narrative structure. Just like the therapeutic process: once you arrive to a certain point, contradictions and unavoidable dissonances force you to look for a different explanation, a new story about what you are doing”
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I’m persuaded that Cecchin was serious and deeply rooted in his
own therapeutic identity when he claimed that
“actually we have no other choice”
my claim, in turn, is that effective therapists are always in advance in respect of their reference model
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I also claim that this occurrence can be explained and it
has strictly to do with the nature of a therapeutic process itself
during the session the therapist is connected with “something in advance” in respect of the words he uses
scholars probing the realm of consciousness can help us to understand why
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Henri Bergson, mathematician, philosopher, Nobel Prize
David Bohm, physicist and science philosopher
Montague
Ullmann, psychiatrist, researcher and psychoanalyst
Efstratios Manousakis, quantum physicist at Florida University
they seem to have some basic ideas in common about consciousness, though the language they use and some philosophical implications can be different
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consciousness is not “produced” by the brain
consciousness is the basic ontological
reality
individual “substreams of consciousness” are part of a “global stream of consciousness” which comprehends all that exists and existed
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important parts of consciousness, both individual and global, are in a
“potential state” that can be actualized by the operations of the mind
intuition works without the help of memory
both the production of theories and the perception of “matter” are operations implying memory and comparison
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intuition and action are in a close relationship
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once a therapist becomes aware of what a patient “remembers/knows” about
being in a certain state, the therapist can make an idea of what is allowed and forbidden to do with that patient
this implies what the practice of Milan Approach shows since decades
theories and related techniques much more than the sole “empathy” are not only useful, they are necessary to join a system and let the therapeutic relationship take place
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but once the therapist joined the system, change will occur only
by
forgetting theories, de-reifying narratives, relational patterns, roles and so on
in other words
the use of techniques paves the road to intuition
which, in turn, has
affective qualities that can be represented through metaphors
which eventually, in Ullman’s words are
“the stuff of reality”
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though different for what concerns the setting, in its ultimate roots
the process is not quite different from that of creation in narrative
Слайд 22Ernest Hemingway used to say
about narrative process:
“… I always try
to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show.
If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.”
Слайд 23about 40 years ago in Italy many of us fell in
love with a song composed by a weird couple of guys, the songwriter Giorgio Gaber and the painter Sandro Luporini
the song was called
“Reality is a Bird ”
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“a strange bird fascinates me
it has no past nor remains
the same
I must anticipate it I must go after it
otherwise I’ll die for normality”
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it’s up to you to wonder
where it’s going to …“
“reality
is a no-memory bird
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in the most crucial moments of a session, a psychotherapist is
abducted by a peaceful feeling of nothingness whence gush those
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intuitions
metaphors
actions
that decide the destiny of a psychotherapy
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now Massimo Giuliani will introduce you to what we pretend the
“Milan Approach” should look like
it will be evident that the great value of its epistemological, theoretical and technical framework resides mainly in what the approach allows and forbids to do during therapy sessions
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to the unpredictable
to the new
to
what will never be liable to a complete description