A century embodied, questioned, contested

Edgar Morin did not merely pass through the 20^th century. He embodied it, questioned it, contested it. Born Edgar Nahoum in Paris in 1921, into a Sephardic Jewish family from Salonika, he was a teenager in the years of crisis, a member of the Resistance under the Occupation, a communist militant and then a critic of Stalinism, a sociologist of mass culture, a thinker of complexity, a tireless advocate of a planetary humanism. His life was never external to his thought. Le Monde aptly sums up this rare unity: Morin will have “thought his life and lived his thought”.

His immense body of work could discourage any hasty tribute. It includes books of sociology, anthropology, philosophy, politics, education, ecology, cinema, popular culture. But his central gesture can be stated simply: Edgar Morin spent his life fighting the mutilations of intelligence. He fought the intelligence that separates without connecting, that classifies without understanding, that reduces the living to a single cause, the human to a single identity, truth to a motionless certainty.

Morin was also one of the rare intellectuals of his time to take seriously what the university often looked down upon: cinema, film stars, rumours, news stories, mass culture, ordinary conversations. With Jean Rouch, in 1961 he made Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer), a pioneering film of cinéma-vérité, which asks Parisians about their ways of living, loving, working, suffering and being happy. Here again, the gesture is Morinian: going towards living reality, accepting that the human cannot be locked into scholarly categories, turning the inquiry into an encounter.

La Méthode: connecting without conflating

But it is with La Méthode, a monumental work in six volumes published from 1977 to 2006, that Edgar Morin gave its fullest form to what he would call complex thought. This fresco brings together La Nature de la Nature, La Vie de la Vie, La Connaissance de la Connaissance, Les Idées, L’Humanité de l’Humanité and Éthique. The aim was to develop a way of knowing capable of “translating the complexity of the real”, of connecting the domains of knowledge and of reforming thought.

Three principles for thinking the living

Morin formulated several principles that have become essential.

No object, however minute, can be known outside its context.

An epistemology of the living for clinical practice

This is where his work becomes crucial for systemic practitioners, family therapists, couple therapists, clinicians of the bond.

Edgar Morin did not found a school of psychotherapy. He did not propose an interviewing technique, a protocol or a directly operational clinical model. His contribution is deeper: he gives therapists an epistemology of the living. He reminds them that the symptom is never an island. A symptom is always caught up in a history, a family, a body, a culture, a temporality, a relational economy, sometimes an institution, often several contradictory loyalties.

The individual, society, the species

For systemic practitioners, Morin is a major ally because he sublimates the systemic intuition: the human being cannot be understood through the individual alone, nor through the group alone, nor through biology alone, nor through language alone, nor through history alone. The individual, society and the species must be held together. The CNRS points out that as early as 1973, in Le Paradigme perdu, Morin developed this trinitarian conception of the human: individual, society and species are inseparable; the individual is within society, but society, with its culture and its language, is also within the individual.

This idea has considerable clinical reach. In family therapy, an adolescent does not only carry “their” problem. They sometimes carry an unsymbolised marital conflict, a transgenerational debt, an impossible place, a social expectation, a tension between autonomy and belonging. In couple therapy, the conflict is not merely the opposition of two individual psychologies; it is often a recursive organisation in which each partner becomes, in spite of themselves, the context of the other’s reaction. Circular causality, a central notion in systemic therapy, breaks precisely with the idea of a single cause in order to think reciprocal interactions.

Causality that loops back on itself

Morin gives this circularity an anthropological and ethical depth. It is not simply a matter of saying: “A influences B and B influences A.” It is a matter of understanding that relationships produce realities which, in turn, produce the people who sustain them. A family produces implicit rules; these rules produce behaviours; these behaviours confirm the rules. A couple produces a relational dance; this dance ends up producing each partner’s conjugal identity. An institution produces norms; these norms produce subjectivities; these subjectivities reproduce the institution.

Holding antagonistic truths together

For therapists, dialogic thinking is perhaps one of Morin’s most precious legacies. The clinician constantly encounters antagonistic truths that must be held together.

• A parent can love their child and smother them.
• A symptom can cause suffering and protect.
• A family loyalty can sustain and imprison.
• A couple can destroy itself through the very mechanisms that once bound it together.
• A family can want to change while deeply fearing change.

Simplifying thought cuts through: guilty or victim, attachment or separation, problem or solution. Complex thought holds the tension: both can be true, but not at the same level, not in the same context, not with the same effects.

The whole in the part

Hologrammatic thinking, too, is directly fruitful for systemic clinical work. In each member of a family there is something of the entire family system: its myths, its secrets, its exclusions, its permissions, its prohibitions, its definitions of love, of success, of danger, of loyalty. And in each session there is often something of the world: gender norms, social precarity, migratory heritages, historical violence, the educational ideals of an era. Morin prevents us from reducing therapy to a private scene cut off from the world. The family is intimate, but it is also political, cultural, historical.

Including the observer in the observation

But Morin also offers us another particular dimension: an ethics of knowledge. He insists on the need to include the observer in the observation. The researcher, the clinician, the therapist are not gazes from nowhere. They take part in what they observe. They have their hypotheses, their affects, their theoretical allegiances, their blind spots. For us, this touches a decisive point: neutrality cannot be an absence of involvement. It must become a vigilance towards one’s own involvement. The systemic therapist does not merely observe the system; through their questions, their reformulations, their silences, their setting, they enter the system. They become an element of the therapeutic context. To think with Morin is therefore to accept a more humble, more reflexive clinical practice, one less fascinated by mastery.