A book and its advance extract

Celia Elzufán directed the Centro Privado de Terapias Breves in Buenos Aires. A pioneer of systemic therapy in Argentina, she chaired the Systemic Association of Buenos Aires (ASIBA), of which she is also one of the founders. The volume she signs was compiled with Claudio Des Champs and presented by John Weakland, one of the founders of the Mental Research Institute: the lineage claimed is that of Palo Alto and of brief therapy.

What Red Sistémica publishes is not a review but an advance extract: pages taken from the introduction, from the first chapter devoted to constructivism and from the acknowledgements in the preamble. Only their main lines are given here; those pages belong to the book, and their Spanish version remains available on the journal’s website.

The image states a requirement of suppleness, not of complaisance. Therapists constantly meet different people, carrying different ideas about themselves, about life as a couple, about the family. As long as these visions do not make a problem for those who consult, Elzufán writes, it is not up to therapy to make one of them. The formula she uses to describe what she seeks to obtain from her own listening is more radical still: to repress her ideas and her prejudices to the point of being able to slip under the skin of those who consult her.

Constructivism, put to work

The first chapter sets up the epistemological base. Every assertion about “reality” is an assertion of the one who observes: Elzufán draws on Heinz von Foerster to recall that the context, as we perceive it, is a matter of choice, ethical as much as aesthetic, and that it therefore falls to us to assume the world in which we live. What we recognise with difficulty, she notes, is that we have built it with our experiences and our knowledge.

The same logic holds for families. Each has its rhetoric, its memories, its indelible anecdotes, its values, and out of that shared history are born rules of interaction that observation then describes as repetitive sequences. Elzufán draws on the work of David Reiss on family paradigms: some families are sensitive and permeable to context, open to experience; others need to coordinate the beliefs of their members, even at the cost of perceiving outside circumstances more poorly. These paradigms often pass from one generation to the next and weigh above all at moments of crisis: an accident, an illness, a transition of life.

From this follows a working instruction. The therapist is concerned above all to perceive the image of the world of the family or of one of its members, pays particular attention to their language, literal or metaphorical, and uses it in turn: Elzufán speaks of officiating as a chameleon. This “search for premises” then serves change, in the manner of Socrates starting from the presuppositions most likely to be granted. When a crisis shakes the family paradigm, the therapist can help to find an alternative reality — provided that it fits into the map of the world of that particular family.

The acknowledgements give the keynote of the book. Elzufán expresses there her gratitude to the people who consulted her and who changed far beyond what she could foresee — changing her, in turn, still more. One of them, seeing a cigarette in the ashtray, said to her: “What a pity, Celia, that you who can do so much for others can do nothing for yourself.” That, she writes, is how she stopped smoking. Those who consulted her have been and remain her most expert teachers.