A systemic psychotherapy of resilience

The term resilience was borrowed by the social sciences from the semantic field of civil engineering, where it describes the capacity of certain materials to recover their initial shape after being subjected to a deforming pressure. Applied to human beings, it designates the capacity we have to face adversity and to triumph over it — and, precisely for that reason, to come out of it strengthened.

Along with creativity, emotional intelligence, humour, happiness and interpersonal relationships, resilience belongs to positive psychology, an approach that gives priority to people’s strong and healthy aspects “in order to deal with deficit and illness, and to transform them”.

In this book, Selma Azar de Sporn sets out a systemic psychotherapy of resilience: she grounds it theoretically and illustrates it with numerous detailed clinical experiences, adding the strategies and the tools that make up the practice of this speciality. Written in an accessible style yet rich in theoretical notions, Terapia sistémica de la resiliencia presents itself as a reference work for anyone interested in family therapy.

What the book’s preface says

The Red Sistémica review reproduces the preface of the book. We give here its main lines, in condensed form: the preface itself belongs to the work.

It opens with two questions: when does a book cross time? When is it destined to last? Its writer, himself the co-author of a much-reprinted reference work on violence and sexual abuse within the family, answers from what readers have told him over the years: they valued the clarity of the concepts and the possibility of applying immediately in the consulting room the notions developed there. New ideas were taken up, he says, for their simplicity, their coherence and their clinical relevance.

The texts that left a mark, the preface goes on, are those that resonated within the reader’s cognitive structure without destabilising the “precious” system of beliefs on which their identity rested: those that added new material without distorting their own singularity. Selma Azar’s book is placed among these, and a long life is predicted for it.

Two qualities are credited to it, held to be exceptional when found together: modesty and rigour. The modesty of a contribution that lays no claim to transcendent revelations, and caution in advancing on the fundamental themes of the work: the construction of reality, interaction, self-esteem and identity, the life cycle, functional and pathological mourning. Rigour, because each concept — or set of concepts — is developed exhaustively, taking into account the semantic extensions and the complex connotations attached to each theme. In every chapter the author explains the plan of work about to unfold, her ideas, her practice and her experience, from a position that integrates different points of view; and when she takes up a clinical history, she systematically mentions what she learned in the encounter with her patients and what they did for themselves, before mentioning what she did for them in therapy.

One last remark: the reader will come across some fifteen authors in this book, for Selma Azar, besides citing them, repeatedly reproduces the reference text, the title of the work and the page number. This wish to shed the light of her own commentary on the writings of her reference authors is constant, and particularly noticeable in chapter 7, “Thematic assembly”, where she analyses — almost to the point of vertigo — a textbook case. Her theoretical and clinical elaborations and the detail of the therapeutic interventions addressed to each of the family subsystems are interwoven there, in a remarkable synthesis, with extracts from fundamental texts: S. Minuchin, Umbarger, J. Gottman, C. Fishman, V. Satir, S. Sinay, C. Madanes, J. Keim, D. Smelzer, P. Steinglass, C. Díaz Usandivaras, Rosman, Baker, L. Hoffman, P. Watzlawick, D. Goleman, M.-F. Hirigoyen or R. Gardner, among others.