The systemic movement in Santa Fe

Coqui Casabianca, how do you see the systemic movement in Santa Fe?

Ruth Casabianca: Well, clearly more developed than a few years ago. And since we have Carli Sluzki among us, I take the opportunity to say that in fact he has always been, from the shadows, a stimulating figure for the development of systemic therapy in Argentina, with a local impact in Santa Fe as well: in a certain way, those of us who took our first steps in systemic therapy were his students.

Hugo Hirsch, your view.

Hugo Hirsch: I would like to say something about what Coqui has just said. In fact, she as much as I, like so many others, began in all this in good part thanks to the support and the generosity of Carli who, instead of growing weary of the number of stray Argentinians who came to land in California, and then in Massachusetts, took us in, taught us, gave us the chance to learn: that is the first point.

The second is that Carli has, among other things, a quality I greatly appreciate and try to imitate: his concern to put certain forms of knowledge into circulation, as a way of contributing to the solving of problems in very diverse fields. In other words: I believe that operations guided by systemic thinking contribute to the development of health in a wide variety of fields; and one of the very interesting contributions being made here, in Santa Fe, for the rest of the country, has precisely to do with learning to think fruitfully in a great many places that had only conceptual instruments utterly unsuited to a whole series of social realities.

I believe that he, from the hospital in San Francisco and from his current work in the Berkshires, shows that same concern: the concern, I would say, to make systemic thinking productive. And that is something Coqui, here, has taken up a great deal and developed a great deal — with, at certain moments, my own contribution.

From Lanús to the Berkshires: saying what you do, doing what you say

Carli Sluzki?

Carlos Sluzki: My own trajectory, as you know, has as its starting point the Lanús experience, which was a seedbed of ideas, of people and of attitudes towards the field of mental health, thanks to the backing of Mauricio Goldenberg. Goldenberg was the teacher and the sponsor of a great many people, among them Vicente Galli, Valentín Baremblit, Hernán Kesselman and, directly or indirectly, hundreds of others. Lanús was a place where what mattered was precisely what Hugo was raising, that is, praxis: where what we said was what we did, where we tried to do what we said and, in the same movement, to evolve constantly in the search for and the refining of conceptual instruments within practice. That is a mark I have been able to keep, and it is what makes my present work as head of the psychiatry department at the Berkshire Medical Center so interesting to me: it is the place where I put ideas into practice and from which I can rethink them.

On that subject, the other day I presented some of our department’s practices at the 3^rd Inter-institutional Congress of Psychopathology and Mental Health, in Buenos Aires, and two or three colleagues pointed out to me that what I had set out was not terribly original, since they had already heard a variation on the same theme presented earlier by Mara Selvini — all differences allowed for, the very ones I had signalled in my own presentation. I answered them in turn with a question: “Yes, all that is very well, but who is actually doing it? Is the process of systemic intake and admission in mental health service institutions really being carried out today?” It may be that an intake procedure of systemic orientation is conducted in two or three private institutions; but, generally speaking, the distance between what is said and what is done is enormous. There is a double standard¹ that makes people lose the possibility of critically examining what they preach, since they do not preach it by example. And it is not that I am against falling in love with ideas. Quite the contrary. But with ideas you must not only fly: you must also plough.

The test of practice

From that point of view, our conceptual tools — as sophisticated and as complex as systemic tools in fact are — must be able to withstand the test of practice. Put the other way round: if they are kept at a distance from practice, then we are doing theology, something which, personally, does not interest me.

As for the other remark, Coqui’s as much as Hugo’s, it gives me enormous joy: to see that my effort over these last ten years to develop an annual programme intended not only to train, but to foster a dialogue with and among therapists from the countries of Latin America, has borne succulent fruit.

Professionals of the stature of Hugo, of Coqui and of so many others, in Argentina and in other Spanish-speaking countries, have come through our programme, then developed their own ideas, kept their own identity and established a common language, as people who generate ideas, who think and who act.