The new pillars of the MRI

For systemic practitioners, both those devoted to clinical work and those working in research, the Mental Research Institute was and remains the Mecca of the main advances in the sciences of human communication. What are the new ideas that its new director is bringing to the MRI today?

The MRI has the tradition you mention, and it is truly incredible. The institute was founded on Don Jackson’s initiative in 1959, and it has kept alive, and still keeps alive, the projects of Bateson and his group: the birth of family therapy, the application of cybernetics to human behavior, interactional theory and constructivism, creating the first model of family therapy and then the brief therapy model. All of this research developed here. It is a very important place in the world of ideas.

In earlier conversations, outside this interview, you told me about a series of pillars that would support the future direction of the MRI; could you summarize them?

The MRI of the future will be devoted to revitalizing and deepening these seminal ideas on communication and on therapy, and to spreading them throughout the world. For the time being, this dissemination will rest on three fundamental pillars:

1) First, the “brief therapy” center, which is beginning to develop new projects. Among them, the “Latino Center” project, with which we will try to reach the entire Spanish-speaking population.

2) The second pillar is a strategic therapy center, which has become one of our main partners. Its director has more than twenty years of experience with Jay Haley’s strategic model. It is a very well-organized training school, with various activities, training programs and research projects.

3) The third pillar is the theoretical foundations project, of which I will be the director. The MRI houses a great deal of historical material: articles, publications and books, transcripts, audio and video tapes, and so on. For example, the audio tapes of the Bateson project exist only here; the same goes for the early work of Jackson and of Virginia Satir, and for the rest of the theoretical and epistemological work that Watzlawick and the rest of the team went on to deepen. We will try to make this material accessible to researchers, to professionals doing clinical work and to investigators interested in using it. It is like a gold mine that is well worth going to discover…

These will be the three central pillars, but there is a fourth pillar, on which I am really betting for the future of the MRI. I hope for a much closer collaboration with our representatives abroad. You, who represent us in Argentina, are an example of this: Marcelo and I have long been sharing research, publications and the design of training programs, which we hope to build on over the next five years so that this keeps growing stronger.

Myths and certainties of the MRI model

So much for the institutional profile… More specifically, regarding the brief therapy model, how do you think of the MRI model for the 21^st century? It seems to me that this question deserves some clarification: today there is a whole series of popularizations and mystifications of the brief therapy model. For example, that of the “coldness” of the model, or the idea that the model does not work with emotional aspects…

The idea that the model does not work with emotions is a myth, not a mystification. The question we should ask is how a “brief” therapist handles emotions in the session. Not whether he takes them into account, because they are inevitably part of the therapeutic work. I am answering your question before you have finished it… but I think it is valuable to clear up this point once and for all. For example, I do not consider myself an expert on the MRI model, but I know it well enough to know what it is not, and it is certainly not a cold model. Coldness is a myth, not a reality; it was probably created by someone who has an interest in the MRI brief therapy model being seen as something cold, something that does not explore the emotional level. Over time, the model has received criticism, and that is to be expected for any development. Many of these criticisms tend to disqualify this model.

These disqualifications always belong to the power games between models. Professionals compete by setting up the model they represent as the most effective one. In that sense, they teach respect for diversity in the consulting room, but do not advocate it outside… That said, I think we must distinguish between the model and the therapeutic style. If the model is the alphabet, the style is the cadence, the intonation, the modulation with which those letters are pronounced…

The difference between a model and personal style has to do with first- and second-order realities. The construction of my therapeutic model is based on brief therapy. I have great respect for it, and a large part of what I believe I know, I learned from Jackson, from Watzlawick, from Weakland, among others. My therapeutic practice is very much influenced by all these masters, but I have a different way, a way of my own: that is my style. I am very influenced by Bradford Keeney and by Gianfranco Cecchin. Both acknowledge and see themselves as direct extensions of the Bateson group or of the early MRI. That is one of the reasons why it is such a great honor for me to have been given the privilege of being director of the MRI.

From clinical work to research

Let us move from clinical practice to research. For many years you have been engaged in historical research on the MRI; you are in fact putting together the Don Jackson archives, those historic 8 mm film reels that hold the testimonies of the seeds of family therapy…

My personal research began in 1981. It all started when I was a student at university. A professor, in class, showed me a 1964 film of a family session with the Hillcrest family. It is a spectacular film, in which the same family is interviewed by the four most famous therapists of the time: Nathan Ackerman, Don Jackson, Murray Bowen and Carl Whitaker. A real family, made up of a father, a mother and four children. Both were divorced; he had two children from a first marriage, she had one child from her previous marriage, and they had a baby together. This family is seen by these four therapists, and my teacher, after watching the film, said that Jackson’s interview was the best session he had seen in his life. As I left the class, I told him: “I want to know more,” and he gave me two books. Books that changed my life, that changed my whole career.

Even though I can imagine them, which were those two books?…

Those books are the two volumes of Human Communication, Communication, Family, and Marriage and Therapy, Communication, and Change, compilations by Don Jackson bringing together many articles and texts from the early research of the Bateson group. From that moment on, I tracked down everything Jackson had developed: articles, papers, and so on. I began a doctoral program in family therapy in 1985, and in 1987 I finally went to Palo Alto, where I met all those who would later become my masters, and chiefly the figure of John Weakland. All these professionals had known Jackson and had been part of his research projects. I spent most of those two weeks in the basement; there were boxes containing nothing but Don Jackson’s things. I found, for example, “historic” recordings of sessions, and both Weakland and Riskin gave me permission to take those tapes to Louisiana, where I transferred them to CD. They also allowed me to take all the articles. One of the projects I am about to finish is the complete collection of Don Jackson’s articles. Jay Haley, who has always supported me in all these ideas, wrote the preface. Shortly before his death, John Weakland sent me three boxes with the rest of the recordings, the transcripts and all the documents of the Bateson research, and that became a research project. There are also films from the Bateson project that have been transferred to video; I have students helping me to move forward with the transcriptions so that they can be seen and heard on more modern audio media. Over the past twenty years, in parallel, I have built good relationships with Mary Catherine Bateson and with Lois Bateson, who was his last wife, and both have authorized me to do research in Bateson’s papers on his relationship with Jackson. These documents are part of the Jackson archives. I have also managed to create the Bateson archives, which are located at the University of Santa Cruz. For me, it is fantastic work, and I do not know anyone who is not influenced by this original work. That is my research.

Conclusions

For a few minutes, if you were Jackson himself, what would be the basic premises of your epistemological model?

There is an article called “The Study of the Family” (The Study of the Family), in which he tells us what he thinks, what he considers to be the most important points of his theory and practice. The basic premises are also presented in books such as Pragmatics of Human Communication and Change.

My opinion, forty years after the creation of the model, focuses on three main concepts: first, present causality, that is, what is happening in the present, in the interaction, here and now.

Second, present causality, as opposed to what was happening in past causality.

Third, and this is just as important, as a consequence of these first two premises, the idea that people do the best they can at a given moment of crisis; this was something Jackson was deeply imbued with. He wrote it, he talked about it with patients. It is one of the three things that make interactional therapies effective and different from other models. These are the three basic pillars found in all the interactional models that stem from Jackson’s work.

Suppose you had in front of you a beginning therapist, in training; what would be the main recommendations you would give him as a trainer?

I would recommend that he study the original works. I would encourage him to think a great deal about his own prejudices, about the beliefs that influence what he thinks of the other person. It is very important to think about what is happening to you, yourself, in your way of seeing the world.

Another point is the idea that nothing is normative or pathological: people really do their best all the time, and it is very difficult. You have to listen very carefully, not only with your ears but also with your eyes, watching everything that is going on.

And then, the passion you visibly put into things…

That is true, the passion has to be there, because if you do not put passion into it, therapy seems to lose its substance…

What do you think about change? How does change come about in psychotherapy?

On this point, I agree with Brad Keeney, and also with what is expressed in the book Change. Change is inevitable; it is an invariant, it is constant. As therapists, we help people change the way they change, that is, to modify the way in which they change, and to remain stable in the way they maintain their balance during change. It is important to keep this in mind during therapy: change and stability interact constantly, and so we help people change while maintaining the illusion of stability.

From your point of view, what is the therapy of this 21^st century?

This is where the MRI is so important. First, by not rejecting, and even less judging, people for what they have done, but by accepting that what they have done is the best they could do. I believe that this is the therapy of the 21^st century: it is almost a matter of “embracing” people for having done their best, and then telling them “no one could have done better”; and the process of change is very complicated, so let us not go too fast, because you know far better than I do how difficult it is; therefore, let us go slowly. It is far better to go slowly at the beginning than to push quickly toward some active intervention, and to do something before the problem, and the way it is being handled, have been clearly and explicitly explained.