From family failure to therapeutic vocation

Asked about the reasons that led him to this profession, François Balta immediately evokes an original failure.

Many vocations, he suggests, are born of an inability to save one’s own relatives from their difficulties, which then gives the impetus to help others. This sincere reflection places humility at the very heart of his approach.

As an adolescent, he found answers to his own intimate questions in discovering Sigmund Freud. The texts of the father of psychoanalysis helped him make sense of the upheavals of adolescence and sexuality, and appeared to him as a “word of truth” in the face of adult taboos. At the same time, reading Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and in particular Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night), struck him with its raw description of the modern world. He was seized by the similarity of tone between the two: “they described the world as I felt it, and not as adults painted it while prettifying things”.

A discouraging remark nevertheless briefly diverted this path. In his philosophy class, his teacher put him sharply in his place: “psychoanalysis is for the rich, not for you!” Medicine would, however, bring decisive new encounters. During a placement in child psychiatry at the Enfants-Malades hospital, he met a psychoanalyst who reopened the door his teacher had closed years earlier. She encouraged him to begin his own analysis and to reconnect with his first passion. “Some people close doors on you, and others open them: it is a matter of encounters”, he sums up. Armed with this recovered permission, he threw himself into Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Questioning, and the turn towards systemic thinking

Having become a Lacanian in his early years, François Balta gradually tempered his approach. He recalls a sentence of Lacan’s — “there is no chance, everything makes sense” — which he had then taken far too literally. As a young therapist, he looked for the hidden meaning of every mishap in the unconscious, “as one rummages through a bin” to find something with which to justify everything. Life took it upon itself to shake those certainties: he went through a personal tragedy, and attributing such an event to a manifestation of the unconscious — his own or his partner’s — then struck him as unbearable and absurd. That event led him to question the idea that everything can be explained after the fact.

There began a long search for an open, welcoming analytic listening that would not fall back into the same traps. He trained in various approaches over the years: Gestalt therapy first, whose tools he experimented with, such as the famous two-chair technique. He then turned to emotion-focused approaches — faced with patients whose emotions were violent, Lacanian wordplay was no longer enough. He also explored transactional analysis, appreciating the concreteness of a model that offers a vocabulary shared with patients; but his free spirit sat poorly with the overly normative side of that approach.

The encounter with systemic thinking finally gave him the synthesis he was looking for. First drawn to the writings of Mara Selvini, whose style suited him only halfway, he truly found his direction by joining the first cohort of systemic family therapy training run by Mony Elkaïm in Paris. It was a revelation: “a real discovery, thinking the system”. This relational approach allowed him to recover openness of mind and humility in listening, while taking into account the social and family context of suffering.

Including oneself in the system

He nevertheless observes that many family therapists stop halfway: they apply strategies at the level of the system — family, couple — without involving themselves. Yet in order to think systemically for real, he holds that one must include oneself in the system. The therapist is not a neutral external observer: they are an integral part of the equation. This realisation led him to change his professional stance radically.

• How can I use the difficulties I myself experience with my patients in order to help them with their own difficulties?
• What is my real power as a therapist?
• What are my areas of responsibility, and what are the patient’s, which I must respect in order to give them back their own power?

In other words: rather than trying to change his patients, he tries to solve his problem as a therapist — how to better bear or understand a given situation — without the patient needing to change. Paradoxically, it is by giving up the wish to correct the other that he best manages to accompany them.

For nearly thirty years he has pursued this work of articulating the individual and the collective in understanding human problems. He quotes Edgar Morin: “think the and, not the or”. The individual exists only in a relational and social context, and that context exists only through the individuals who compose it, in permanent circularity. The cooperative systemic stance consists in finding a balance between these tensions: being both inside and outside, neither omnipotent nor powerless, but a co-actor of change.

Ignorance and curiosity, the therapist’s best allies

Asked for his essential advice to young therapists, François Balta surprises: he insists on the importance of ignorance. Of course one must train and accumulate knowledge — that can be reassuring — but “you have to know that our main resource in relation to the people we are going to receive is our ignorance”.

Every person or family who comes for help is like an unknown world: “we are like ethnologists parachuted into a distant tribe”, knowing neither its language, nor its rites, nor its founding myths. Faced with the unknown of the other, the therapist must above all show curiosity and openness, setting their certainties aside.

This assumed not-knowing is a fruitful stance: “our knowledge reassures us but it encumbers and limits us, whereas ignorance is a door that opens”. It means letting oneself be permeated and touched by what patients live through, possibly being shocked or disturbed, but without judgement: welcoming these surprises as opportunities to understand. This benevolent curiosity allows one to ask questions in a tone of genuine astonishment rather than from the height of professorial knowledge: “oh, you do it that way… that’s interesting, I thought that…”

Including the context and those who are absent

From this perspective, therapy cannot be limited to the sole individual present in the consulting room. François Balta states that he has “never done individual therapy”: even face to face, he considers that each person comes with their whole world. The entourage is always involved, whether family, friends, “enemies”, or any important figure. The therapist must therefore think beyond those who are physically present, and respect the absent as much as the person in front of them.

He warns against “getting cosy with the present party at the expense of the absent ones”: it would be tempting to validate the story of the person present by making the absent the culprits, but that would miss each person’s own logic. On the contrary, he sets out to understand the logic of every actor in the system. Everyone has their automatisms and their reasons: generally, everyone is doing their best, defending values that matter to them. He likes to repeat that “what we hold to holds us”: our values structure us as much as we carry them. Problematic behaviour is often the clumsy expression of a legitimate value or need — it is simply that “nobody took the time to tune the instruments”.

From there, the therapist tries to gain a little height in order to loosen the situation: slowing the game down, helping to prioritise differently, introducing a new way of acting or of seeing things.

To do so, François Balta does not hesitate to step into the fray himself. “I let myself be caught in it, let myself be knocked about”, he says, because the more he feels the difficulty, the more it informs him about what these people are living: “the more I am knocked about, the more information I have about how they knock each other about”. Rather than taking refuge in the image of the “neutral, benevolent, peaceful therapist, a kind of sage come down from his hermitage”, he accepts being destabilised alongside his clients. He welcomes the disturbing emotions that arise in the session, even at the cost of his own comfort — but he does not wallow in them: his art consists in putting those emotions back into circulation within the system, in a useful way. He returns to people, with a certain shift, what is happening, so that all can recognise it and draw something new from it. He always seeks to be “with them” in the difficulty, neither above nor outside, while bringing an opening towards other perspectives: “and if we tried this, what would it change? Who would it disturb?”

Resonance rather than mere countertransference

By choosing to let himself be affected by what happens, François Balta makes subtle use of his sensitivity. He distinguishes what he calls resonance from traditional countertransference. Countertransference refers to what the therapist feels as an echo of their personal history — their own wounds, fears or expectations — in the face of the patient’s situation. Resonance consists in using that feeling not to speak about oneself, but to illuminate the other’s experience. The therapist asks: “what I feel, what does it tell me about my clients?” Even an apparently very subjective reaction can carry shared information: if I catch myself becoming defensive, it may be a sign that fear is present for everyone in this system, myself included.

It is therefore a matter of putting one’s sensitivity at the service of the people one accompanies. The therapist in a sense “lends” his emotions, his empathy, his capacity for reflection and imagination to those who have come to him, to help them better understand the situation and try out other ways of doing things. The approach is demanding: it obliges the professional to widen their own tolerance for sometimes painful emotions or disturbing thoughts. But it is precisely by agreeing to explore these zones of discomfort that one can “better understand the complexity of the other’s world”.

This work is, at bottom, mutually enriching: the therapist also grows through contact with his patients. “We do not develop all alone in our corner… it is through an encounter that we discover other aspects of the world that we would not have found on our own”, he says, referring to the contribution of literature as much as of human encounters. Every therapy is thus a unique adventure that changes everyone involved, the therapist included.

“Existing is not easy”

Running through it all, François Balta reminds us that existence itself is a permanent challenge. “Existing is not easy”, he says, stressing that life is a series of losses and continuous changes — we build ourselves out of our mournings. From there, the essence of therapy would be “to look, with people, for how to cope with the difficulties of existing”. Rather than promising miracle solutions, it is a matter of supporting each person through the inevitable transitions of life, facing impermanence and building meaning despite uncertainty.

This conversation was exceptionally rich. His path, marked by ordeals and self-questioning, and his practice, founded on humility, curiosity and respect for the bond, offer a precious source of inspiration for any therapist. Many other gems are tucked away in his words, and this text could only touch on a few of them: the full interview, in which his voice and presence embody with warmth the ideas reported here, can be watched below — in French.