Book review · Red Sistémica
The art of helping. Its light and its shadow
Claudia Casanovas and Felisa Chalcoff take helping itself as their subject: not only professional help, but the help that is given and received in everyday life, between friends, within a couple, at work. Their thesis is simple and unsettling: goodwill is not enough, and relieving, caring for or consoling someone can weaken the very person one believes one is supporting. A short treatise on the “traps” of the helping relationship and on the qualities that make it possible to move through them.
“Sometimes, true help is the help that gives up on helping.”
Presentation of El arte de ayudar
In this book, the authors develop the fascinating theme of helping: not only professional help, but also the help we offer and receive in daily life, with friends, with our partner, at work. In order to be able to help, they say, one has to know what to do — or what not to do — in the face of another person’s pain. Goodwill and good intentions are not enough. Relieving, caring for, consoling, if it is not the appropriate action or not the right moment, produces a weakening and counterproductive effect.
Readers will feel touched by the abundant examples of the bond between “the helper” and “the helped”, and of the interferences — called, not without some disquiet, “traps” — that distort the process of helping. They will also feel reassured to discover that they carry within themselves the seed and the possibility of unfolding the qualities required to go beyond those traps.
The conception of helping set out in this book draws on the great lines of philosophical and spiritual development, Western as well as Eastern. This short treatise can thus become a lucid perspective and a profound guide for anyone seeking to take the path of “the art of helping”.
What the book brings
A methodical attention to the shadow side of a gesture that the caring professions take to be self-evidently good. The book does not say how to help better: it examines what, in the helper’s motivation, in the moment chosen, in the position of the one who receives, turns help into a hindrance. This is a shift familiar to systemic therapists — looking at the helping relationship as an interaction between two positions, and not as a gift flowing from a full vessel into an empty one.
Contents of the book
The authors themselves give this thematic index:
- Prologue — why this work was undertaken and who its authors are.
- Introduction — a general overview of helping, and the questions that will be developed throughout the book.
- Chapter 1 — the philosophical conception that, in their view, underpins helping.
- Chapter 2 — suffering, its function in the development of consciousness and its relation to life as a teacher.
- Chapter 3 — the idea of change, and which change is meant here.
- Chapter 4 — success: the conventional idea of it is questioned, and what successful help is is described.
- Chapter 5 — the source, that is, the motivation from which the help we give proceeds: from what place within ourselves the desire and the impulse to help arise.
- Chapter 6 — the dynamics of giving and receiving as a single act, illustrated by an exercise on breathing that brings out the unity of body and psyche.
- Chapter 7 — the bond between the one who helps, “the helper”, and the one who receives the help, “the helped”.
- Chapter 8 — the place of the one who receives: their possible interferences and the conditions that make it possible to take in the help.
- Chapter 9 — the helper and their shadow, and helping actions contaminated by their interferences.
- Chapter 10 — the qualities the helper cultivates and develops along the way.
- Chapter 11 — the possible evolution of the consciousness of the person who asks for and receives help.
- Closing notes — the process of writing this book and its relation to helping.
What the prologue says
The review published by Red Sistémica reproduces the prologue of the book. We do not give a translation of it here: it is part of the book. Here is its substance.
The authors begin by recounting their friendship, born in 1979 in a movement class at Río Abierto, in Buenos Aires, when one of them was leaving art school and the other a degree in psychology. Four years of daily closeness, then the ocean: one went to live in Italy, the other stayed in Argentina, and the bond continued for twenty-six years through cassettes, letters, emails and occasional reunions. If they open the book with this story, it is because they see in it the foundation of their argument: one does not learn to help professionally without first having learned to help among peers, freely, out of affection — a learning that begins in childhood friendships and can last a lifetime.
The second source of the vocation to help is suffering. “Those who have not suffered cannot help others”, they write; but having suffered is not enough: one must also have known what to do with that suffering in order to know what to do, or not to do, with another’s. Hence a piece of work on what accepting means — recognising that something is so, without judging it in terms of good and evil, and carrying on — and on the difference between accepting and resigning oneself, a difference they hold to be decisive for anyone who wants to understand the art of helping.
The prologue ends with a note on how to read the book. It grew out of a workshop the authors had planned to run together and which never took place; it keeps that form. Each theme comes with practical guides for self-observation, so that the book can be used as a workshop — with a notebook beside you, alone, with a friend, or with the people you accompany — as much as read as an essay. The authors finally state that the personal examples they give come sometimes from their own lives, sometimes from their patients, their friends or their relatives, and that they make them equally their own. They also run theoretical, practical and experiential workshops on this same theme.
Who are the authors
Claudia Casanovas was born in Buenos Aires. A graduate of the Higher Academy of Fine Arts, she first discovered the path of inner exploration through art and artistic expression. That search led her to the doors of Río Abierto, a space of human development where she trained as an instructor in the method. Having emigrated to Italy, she founded Río Abierto Italia there, which she has directed since 1982. Trained in Gestalt therapy, she integrates into her work various currents of transpersonal psychology, including those of Antonio Blay and Claudio Naranjo, as well as the teachings she received from Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta. Mainly in Europe, she runs trainings and workshops for professionals in education, art and health, whose aim is to foster the capacity to collaborate with one another on the path of the awakening of consciousness.
Felisa Chalcoff was born in Buenos Aires. With a degree in psychology (University of Buenos Aires), she has taught at every level of the school system. She trained in group facilitation, psychodrama, Gestalt therapy, the systemic and transpersonal approach, Bach flower remedies, astrology and family constellations. She is part of the steering committee of the Neighbourhood Mental Health Programme of the Pirovano Hospital, whose principles follow from a conception of health as a matter of community ethics: mutual aid, inner freedom and responsible action. With Orlando Zaslavsky, she introduced the Sacred Circle Dances and the Dances of Universal Peace to Argentina — a path of spiritual exploration through art, movement and sound, which she has integrated into her work with groups. She devotes herself to clinical practice and to teaching, and brings together in her training and her activity the spiritual teachings of various sources and schools of knowledge.
This book review is an English translation of “EL ARTE DE AYUDAR. Su luz y su sombra”, published by Red Sistémica (first published in Red Sistémica). Translated and republished with the journal’s permission.
Read the original articleHow to cite this article
Casanovas, C., & Chalcoff, F. (2023). The art of helping. Its light and its shadow (Complexe Systémique, Trans.). Complexe Systémique. https://app.complexe-systemique.com/en_GB/articles/the-art-of-helping-its-light-and-its-shadow (Original work published in 2023 in Red Sistémica; republished in 2023 by Red Sistémica, https://redsistemica.ar/2023/02/10/el-arte-de-ayudar-su-luz-y-su-sombra/)
To go further
- Professional exhaustion (burnout), self-care and care of teams working on violenceAna María Arón: what helping costs, and how to care for those who care.
- Please help me with these familiesCarlos Sluzki: when the therapist becomes the one asking for help.
- The use of interrupted therapies: in search of craft-based trainingBraulio Montalvo: learning the craft from what fails rather than from what succeeds.
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