Shortly before he left us, Gianfranco had suggested that I organise something for the centenary of Gregory Bateson’s birth. He would say: “We must commemorate him, we are the only school of therapy that has stayed faithful to him.” Gianfranco used the word fidelity a great deal, he who was an incurably unfaithful man. He loved paradoxes.

He and Luigi Boscolo had founded the Milan school. Before that, with Mara Selvini Palazzoli and Giuliana Prata, people spoke of the Milan Approach; but the School, that is to say the possibility of learning the “Milan Approach”, was built by Luigi and Gianfranco. Even though what they taught was not what they had done before. Gianfranco liked to explain second-order cybernetics, and in particular the theory of the observer, in a very clear and very pragmatic way. He would recount that in the old days, when they worked with Selvini and Prata, what was discussed behind the one-way mirror was the organisation of the family; then, when they opened the school, the students behind the mirror no longer wanted to talk about the family. What did the students want to talk about? Were they not there to learn family therapy?

“When we came out of the session — Cecchin would recount — to go behind the mirror, the students wanted to know why we had asked that kind of question at just that moment, or else how a particular intervention had been possible, and so on.

In short, the students were not interested in the family: they were interested in the therapist, or rather in the game the therapist was building with the family in the course of the conversation.”

Therapy as a critical social practice

The Milan school, with Boscolo and Cecchin, created a method for doing therapy and, at the same time, for analysing the social construction of therapy. Before them, the outside researcher analysed the social construction of therapy and the therapist did the therapy. The two parties — researcher and therapist — spoke different languages. The researcher developed a critical observation of therapy, restricting it to being no more than a mental health practice; the therapist did the therapy, prisoner of a realist clinical discourse.

Research tended to describe therapy as an authoritarian, asymmetrical, oppressive practice. Therapy tended to present itself as a scientific practice enabling the “mentally ill” to be cured. Even antipsychiatry could not get out of this dilemma. With the Milan school, therapy becomes what Marcelo Pakman has called a “critical social practice”. I like to describe it by recalling a sentence from Italo Calvino’s Palomar, where Calvino writes that the self is a window onto the world that looks at itself. Therapy is a window onto society; society looks at itself through therapy…