A meeting at the Guggenheim

The interview takes place in an unusual setting: inside the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, in a quiet corner. It is hot. Minuchin is casually dressed, wearing comfortable trainers and a visor. Pat, his wife, who has accompanied him on his travels for many years, has already gone off to see the exhibitions with Itziar and Juanjo. We have had a very good lunch at the museum itself, and drunk a little txakoli, not much, just enough to talk about local produce and relax a little. Minuchin does not want to give me much time: he wants to see the museum, visit our School, then go back to San Sebastián. And besides, he does not like interviews.

Do you like interviews, Salvador?

No, I don’t like them. But we are going to do one thing. We are going to do as when one receives someone who has been brought to therapy against their will. I usually tell them: “Look, I know you are here because you are being made to be. Exactly the same thing is happening to me, I have no choice but to do this. So, since we cannot avoid spending this time together, let us see what positive we can get out of it.”

Minuchin speaks with a pronounced Argentine accent, in a soft voice and at a measured pace. Some words are hard for him to translate, but they are few if one thinks of the number of years he has lived in the United States. He now lives in Florida, where a good many retirees go to retire and where, it seems, life is very good. Despite that, Sal and Pat never stop travelling.

A master on the road

I know you are not arriving directly from the United States. Where have you come from?

I gave a seminar in Sweden. Then we went to see a friend in Amsterdam, we spent six days in Paris, and we will stay here for two weeks. Then we go home. There were a lot of people at the seminar in Sweden; here too, I think it will be full. For some years now, it seems that in Europe there is more interest in my work than in the United States.

That is at least the impression we have here. I think your model, the structural model, is widely used around here, especially in southern Europe, whereas in the United States narrative therapy seems to have taken over almost the whole field. How have you yourself seen the development, the use of your model?

At a lecture I gave in London six months ago, I began by saying: I am not a structural therapist. For me, it is a label that was necessary at one time, because we were building a new theory and there was a need for differentiation. It was partly an economic matter: Jay Haley had his strategic school and Murray Bowen had I no longer remember which… Each one created his own label, had his students, and it was a competitive process in which castles surrounded by moats were built; and that was necessary, it was the beginning of a new theoretical, ideological position.

“I am not a structural therapist”

We were creating a new paradigm, with a set of global ways of thinking. Graduates were coming out of universities with an individual way of thinking, and that is why the schools had to be created: the structural school; the Milan people made the Milan school, which they later called the systemic school; and so I had a structural school, and they had a systemic school.

We needed to create divisions and dissensions. Then comes the narrativist school, which also creates a dichotomy. The truth is that all therapy is narrative. That constructionism seized the narrative label and made it its own, as the structural became mine, was a necessity of the process; but it is a mistake today.

Actually, speaking of constructivism…