The school project the book came out of

The text published by Red Sistémica is the presentation placed at the head of the book; its substance is given here, the full Spanish version remaining available on the journal’s website. Its authors begin by telling of a decision taken more than fifteen years earlier: to build a training institution in the systemic model that would bring together students from different social classes, professions and ideologies. They imagined a multi-space where students coming from everywhere would exchange their ideas, a place where one thinks, studies, sees patients and does research, but where passion and affection reign first of all.

The wager lay in a refusal: not to confuse seriousness with academicism. A psychotherapy course can be conducted responsibly and effectively, they hold, without one having to put on a grave air in order to teach. Humour, attachment to the students, putting things up for discussion were in their eyes unorthodox but effective means of training health professionals committed to the difficult task of producing health.

The same principle holds for professional practice. Against the idea that seriousness would be the obligatory synonym of competence, the authors claim humour as a strategic variable of the therapeutic relationship: it gives the suppleness needed to treat pressing and painful problems. They were called irreverent, they recall, when they asserted that it is important to love one’s patients and that a dose of affect makes interventions more effective — and more affective. The underlying conviction is that every patient possesses resources for getting through. What they teach is therefore an articulated synergy of knowledge, art, love, passion, creativity and positive motivation, elements that are expressed in the therapist’s speech, in their body, in their reflections and in their emotion.

The school itself is described as a large family: one learns there to work with the family, but also in couple, individual and group therapy, and one lets happen there what happens in any family — loves, quarrels, triangulations, alliances and coalitions, moments of cohesion and of dispersion.

The black box, and the plan of the book

The title takes up one of the first metaphors used by the Bateson group when it transposed cybernetic ideas and general systems theory to the human sciences: the black box of aeroplanes. The mind was regarded there as a box whose inputs and outputs one observes, everything that can be said of its interior being a matter of the observer’s inferences. The book sets out to work inside and outside that box.

All the chapters were written by the professionals of the school, each on their own speciality. The work opens with an introduction devoted to psychotherapy, then unfolds in three parts. The first reviews the possible treatment settings in the light of the systemic paradigm — individual, couple, family, group — with an explicit intention: to abolish the historical myth according to which systemic therapy would concern the family alone. The systemic model is an epistemological model; as such, it is applicable to a multiplicity of systems.

The second part shows the versatility of the model outside the consulting room: in situations of marginality, in education, in companies. The third applies it to a series of disorders — phobic and panic disorders, eating disorders, addictions, disorders of childhood, violence and aggressiveness, sexual dysfunctions, depressive disorders. A conclusion articulates the conceptualisations described across the articles and invites the reader to reflect on the pragmatic exercise of the model.