Among them there were Nicoletta Businaro from Italy and Arlene Vetere from England (both of them are teaching at the VID Specialized University that organized the visit).

We had a 3 hour seminar on Violence in therapy, starting from the analysis of the case of Anders Breivik (a Norwegian serial killer), an article written by Luigi Boscolo several years ago concerning the Novi Ligure case of children that murdered the parents in Italy and watching a session of therapy concerning violence conducted by Pietro Barbetta.

The meeting was fabulous, very exciting and fantastic. We enjoyed it and learned from our “northern colleagues” as well and wish to thank them for having been here: in the hope to seeing them again.

See example intensive-group-course “The Milan Approach in Milan. New Practices in Contemporary Times.”  

L'articolo proviene da CMTF.

A seminal volume on this topic, the book looks at issues such as the duration of therapy; the relevance of past, present, and future in therapy; and the balance of memory and oblivion. It also includes a discussion of how time is framed in other disciplines, including sociology, history, and psychopathology, whilst exploring the concept in practical terms through case vignettes and complete case histories, including the transcripts of actual sessions. The reader is thus given a set of guidelines for dealing with time issues in therapy from a systemic perspective.

Originally published in 1993, the book has been updated to create a dialogue with contemporary theoretical debates, as well as social and technological changes. It will fascinate all psychotherapists, particularly those interested in a systemic practice.

To buy: CRC Press

L'articolo The Times of Time: <br> A Perspective on Time in Systemic Therapy and Consultation – <br> L. Boscolo – P. Bertrando proviene da CMTF.

Centro Milanese di Terapia della Famiglia (CMTF) organizes regularly at its premises in Milan intensive courses in English for professionals coming from all over the world and willing to know more about the Milan Approach© and its practices applied in contemporary psychotherapy.

We will provide information for Hotels in Milan, nearby the CMTF.

The enrollment at the intensive course includes some essays to be read in order to introduce the main topics of the intensive course. Those essays will be sent to the applicant immediately after his/her enrollment.

Antonella Boscolo: Email:segreteria@cmtf.it – Tel:+39 02 4815350 (call at Italian time 9:30 am-12:30 pm – 2:00pm – 5:00 pm).

Cultural delusions, in the form of conspiracy theories and new radicalisms, are a social phenomenon of modern times which clinicians increasingly have to confront in their clinical practice, both as cause of stress and pathology when victimisation takes place, as well core psychopathological features eluding strict nosological definitions and refractory to conventional treatments.

The study day will consist of two parts:

Part 1: Racism and mental health: psychopathology, relational manifestations and clinical toxicity of the racist gaze on the other.

With the resurgence of nationalisms and populisms in Europe in the last few years, open and overt manifestations of racism and xenophobia can become a frequent occurrence as topics of discourse between therapist and patient in the consulting room. The teaching will be delivered through formal presentations, an experiential workshop and case discussions. Participants will also have the chance, if they so wish, to present cases from their own practice in the context of a group supervision session.

Part 2: Radicalism and conspiracy theories.

The session will deal more specifically with food radicalism, framed in the context of modern antiscientific conspiracy theories intersecting in the cognitive worlds of the radical “foodists”. The teaching will include a formal presentation, an interactive session based on tole play and participants can also present cases drawn from their own clinical practice.

Today it is very important to face emergency contest with psychological and psychotherapeutic attention to reduce psychopathological and traumatic evolution, to preserve individual and relation balances and to promote the systemic growth toward a new equilibrium in the future, based on present but in continuity with the past.

The Milan Systemic Approach it is an important chance to work in these contests, because is not focused only on traumatic experience and it allows a complex vision to work on multiple levels: the attention is focused on interaction between system involved as a victim and the Aid System, in accordance with the teachings of the second cybernetics. The lesson aims to deepen the application of Milan Ststemic Approach to natural disaster management, understood as systemic crisis. As example, we’ll present the methodology named “Basic Therapeutic Action”, to promote mental health in international contexts perturbed by collective trauma.

The richness of Systemic Thinking, as it was described by the founders Dr. Luigi Boscolo and Dr. Gianfranco Cecchin, can have, in its clinical and teaching application, a fruitful and stimulating development when it is embodied and embedded with the model of the Psychology of Selves (Voice Dialogue).

The idea of the sub-personalities (Selves or Energies), which perceive, feel, have cognition, etc. in the model of the Psychology of Selves, can hold the systems of meanings which underly people’s relations with the world and the other human beings. Selves develop in an individual to adapt them to survive in the world and in their significant relationships from the earliest stages of the life. After a theoretical presentation of the framework of the link between the two models, the workshop will be focused on the lives of the therapists, on clinical examples, work with dreams, and exercises.

The seminar will deal with the difference between being and becoming in the mind of the therapist. The Western diagnostic process is mainly based on a structuralist approach, where diagnosis is considered a pathological stable way of being of the person or the family. During these last thirty years, we got a very viable insight by Luigi Boscolo and Gianfranco Cecchin: the idea that we should no longer use the word “human being” as a word that shapes the mentality of the therapist. Instead of “human being” the idea of “human becoming” creates a mind where the therapist can create with the family the perspective of change and de-pathologize the so called Identified Patient. Clinical examples will follow.

During the workshop, we will present some clinical cases concerning the idea of the “alone child” in Italy, a country where persists a strong family pattern that reduces the number of children in the family. The alone child could be also the never born child, due, for example to the increasing number of cases of infertility. We are facing of an increasing amount of biological infertility, particularly from the male partners, and an increasing amount of psychological infertility within the couples. This phenomenon from the relational point of view, involves both the cases of infertility (the desired child, with the increasing number of adoptions), cases of couple with one child and even couples of two children. Where from does it come this supposed “natural” (actually social and psychological) phenomenon? Where does it dwell their systemic unconscious, in the family with an only child?

Children symptoms are like birds picking at the window glass, they need attention, welcoming and tenderness.

In the Milan Approach, children are always considered important resource, both in the case where on of them is the identified patient, and where they are in the therapy session with another member of the family as identified patient, as for example where there is ion the family an anorexic sister in her adolescence or young adulthood. During the seminar I will analyze with the group some key moments of conversation in therapy with the aim of showing the “becoming child” of the therapist.

In a constructivistic perspective the clinician doesn’t know more and better than the customer: its theories, hypothesis, narratives are nor true nor false, they are plausible, exactly as the ones of the clients. What differentiates them is the fact that the hypothesis of the therapist must remain at a different logical order: not as content of knowledge but as process which organizes knowledge, a second order processes which implies knowing one’s knowledge. Interventions emerge from a shared reality within a collaborative, co-responsible and dialogical context. Our work is transversal to contexts and culture awareness has become more and more the fundamental ingredient. We will reflect therefore on the operations the clinician must perform and on her/his responsibilities.

The clinician is the person who understands events and narratives, s/he who enters into unexplored domains. S/he must also be aware of the possibility of unexpected outcomes that occur nearly inevitably during the process. We operate on undeterminable systems and undecidables questions – as Heinz von Foerster would state – considering the inevitable presence of blind spots. We risk to resonate, to collude, to become doctor Homeostat, to create cronicity. The work together has the aim at reflecting on the risk of iatrogenic risk (iatreia = cure, gignomai = to emerge) the risk coming from the cure, which hasn’t to do with the severity of the symptoms or of the situation nor with the personality of the people involved. It emerges from what has happened during the clinical dance. My seminar therefore has to do with the clinical

L'articolo The Milan Approach© in Milan. New Practices in Contemporary Times proviene da CMTF.

On 15 February 2020 the CMTF will host Prof. Xudong Zhao in Milan for a conference entitled: “The transformation of families due to the aging of population and the falling birthrate. The consideration between different countries in Asia and Europe concerning the family evolution”

To participate, registration by email must be sent to: segreteria@cmtf.it

Xudong Zhao is a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Tongji University and heads the Department of Psychosomatic Medicine at Shanghai East Hospital. He was the first psychiatrist with a foreign doctoral degree and founded the first institute of psychotherapy and family therapy in China.

L'articolo [15 February 2020] <br> The transformation of families due to the aging of population. <br>The consideration between Asia and Europe <br><strong>Xudong Zhao</strong> proviene da CMTF.

Abbiamo perso John Shotter, uno dei più lucidi pensatori nel campo sistemico-relazionale: filosofo, psicologo sociale, tra i suoi libri ricordiamo Cultural Politics od Everyday Life e Conversational Realities. Dopo avere aderito al movimento del costruzionismo sociale, Shotter si è allontanato da questo modello teorico spostando la sua attenzione dal linguistic turn – la svolta linguistica in filosofia – al corporeal turn, sviluppando un nuovo modo di pensare, con riferimento alle teorie letterarie e in particolare al concetto di “polifonia”, espresso dal pensatore russo Michail Bachtin. All’inizio degli anni Novanta fu chiamato a insegnare all’Università del New Hampshire, negli Stati Uniti, dove si sarebbe dovuto sviluppare un programma di dottorato intorno al suo pensiero, ci rimase per oltre dieci anni, poi si ritirò rientrando a Londra. Ho avuto modo di incontrarlo in differenti occasioni, la conversazione con lui era sempre intorno a teorie filosofiche e antropologiche, oltre a Bachitn, uno dei suoi punti di riferimento era Wittgenstein. Lo ricordo in un brillante colloquio a Philadelphia nel 1993, al Congresso dell’American Society for Cybernetics, insieme con John Lannaman, Humberto Maturana e il compianto Ernst von Gasersfeldt. Lo ricordo anche, diversi anni dopo, all’Università di Bergamo durante un Convegno organizzato da me, insieme a Marcelo Pakman. Infine mi piace ricordare alcune giornate in cui fui suo ospite, con mio figlio, presso casa sua, in un bosco del New Hampshire, presso un piccolo lago. John era un tipo schivo, ma molto loquace, arrivava subito al punto e diceva quel che pensava fino in fondo, come si addice a un eretico. Cosa rara, preziosa, che non sempre giova, ma che ha suscitato fin da subito la mia personale ammirazione. Pietro Barbetta

There are no words more meaningful about John Shotter’s being in this world as a scholar and a human being, about the ways in which he spoke and wrote with such passion, earnestness and a bit of wry humor about things that are mostly unsayable about communication than his own. This is a passage from one of my favorite pieces of his, on Wittgenstein and what is not hidden:

In setting them out, rather than attending to language considered in terms of previously existing patterns or systems, formed from ‘already spoken words’, I have focused upon the formative uses to which ‘words in their speaking’ can be put. My concern has been with the nature of the relationships and relational situations thus created between those in communicative contact with each other in their speakings. Such a focus attends precisely to the political influences at work in deciding the form of connections and contacts made, the possibilities and tendencies they open up, and those they close down. Within systems of already spoken words (in what one might call already-decided- forms-of-talk), those tense moments of uncertainty and instability, when the constructing of those possibilities is decided, is ignored. We study only what has been done, the implications in the system of possibilities already decided – and we can do that as isolated individuals. But we were excluded from the originary interplay of voices that decided the system; if we are not content to live out, or ‘work out’, its possibilities, we find ourselves powerless to do other than complain. Thus, if we want actively to enter into the constructing of our own forms of life, then we must both: i) locate those sites, those moments when, in the interplay of voices, our voice can count; and, ii) increase our grasp of what what-we-do does (with apologies to Foucault, 1982, p.187). And my concern here today, has been with the ways of talking, the practical means appropriate to a more dialogical way for us, still as professional academics, of conducting our affairs that is not so exclusive of all the others around us.

Throughout his life as an academic, John Shotter’s conversations about conversation transcended the violence (as he called it) of the monologues and theories of academia.  I will continue to hear his words when I think, write and teach. 

Mariaelena Bartesaghi, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Communication University of South Florida CIS 1040, 4202 E. Fowler Ave Tampa, FL 33620

L'articolo In memory of John Shotter [Marcelo Pakman and Pietro Barbetta] proviene da CMTF.

Umberta Telfner, among the keynote speakers

Read/open the AFT2015 conference site  

L'articolo ASSOCIATION FOR FAMILY THERAPY AND SYSTEMIC PRACTICE – ANNUAL UK CONFERENCE [10-12 SEPTEMBER 2015] proviene da CMTF.

L'articolo PIETRO BARBETTA AT UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE proviene da CMTF.