In this presentation I return – with several modifications -to issues I already treated and also recently. This new version has been prepared for the Conference “The Anatomy of (un)reason” held in Krakòw, Poland, October 10 – 12° 2014. The presentation has to be followed by Massimo Giuliani’s presentation “Beyond Medicine – Beyond Psychology – Beyond Post- Modernism: The Milan Approach to Systemic Psychotherapy”: http://prezi.com/2lgk1ozulcx7/the-milan-approach-to-systemic-psychotherapy/

1. Massimo Schinco, Italy Co-director at
Milan Center of Family Therapy’s
School and Clinical Center
The Systemic
Psychotherapy
between
Science and
Intuition

2. in this presentation I return – with several modifications -to
issues I already treated and aslo recently
this new version has been prepared for the Conference
“The Anatomy of (un)reason” held in Krakòw, Poland,
October 10 – 12° 2014.
the presentation has to be followed by Massimo Giuliani’s
presentation “Beyond Medicine – Beyond Psychology –
Beyond Post-Modernism: The Milan Approach to Systemic
Psychotherapy”
http://prezi.com/2lgk1ozulcx7/the-milan-approach-to-systemic-psychotherapy/
Massimo Schinco, Italy Co-director at
Milan Center of Family Therapy’s
School and Clinical Center

3. the aim of this presentation is to contribute to answer to a
question that psychotherapists conforming to different
schools of thought know very well
Massimo Schinco, Italy Co-director at
Milan Center of Family Therapy’s
School and Clinical Center

4. “what am I REALLY doing
when I lead a therapy session?”
despite therapists may try to remain faithful to their
refernce theories and to the narratives by which they
describe their approach to psychotherapy, there is
always a gap between what they actually do and waht
they tell that they do – included the theoretical
explanations and modelizations of what they do
my claim is that this is an unavoidable and even positive
phenomenon
Massimo Schinco, Italy Co-director at
Milan Center of Family Therapy’s
School and Clinical Center

5. in trying to answer to the question I’ll draw from my own
experience as a Systemic Psychotherapist and a Teacher
of the so called “Milan Approach” to Systemic
Psychotherapy
in other words, I will not proceed from a generic or
“neutral” point of view
in the meantime I assume that the conclusions I will reach
can be shared, in many cases, with professionals
conforming to different theoretical frames
Massimo Schinco, Italy Co-director at
Milan Center of Family Therapy’s
School and Clinical Center

6. the main features and basic assumptions of the “Milan
Approach” to Systemic Psychotherapy founded by Luigi
Boscolo and Gianfranco Cecchin at the end of the
seventies will be outlined in the next presentation led by my
colleague and friend Massimo Giuliani
the reason why we decided that I should present the first
will be clear at the end of my talk
Massimo Schinco, Italy Co-director at
Milan Center of Family Therapy’s
School and Clinical Center

7. anyway it will be useful to remark that in the “roaring years” of the
Systemic Psychotherapy (approx. 1970 – 1990)
practicioners were stunned by the elegance
both of conceptual models
and of related practices
it all looked so easy and simply beautiful
on a regular basis the students fell in love with it, beginning to imitate
what the Masters used to do
small surprise if the results were many often clumsy, not beautiful at all
Massimo Schinco, Italy Co-director at
Milan Center of Family Therapy’s
School and Clinical Center

8. with time, we learned that what we usually were doing in
therapy
not rarely was different from what we were taught
and also from what we in turn were teaching to younger
professionals
Massimo Schinco, Italy Co-director at
Milan Center of Family Therapy’s
School and Clinical Center

9. in the field of systemic psychotherapy many
scholars introduced new ideas trying to
explain why systemic therapies seemed to
be so extraordinary
radical constructivism, conversationalism,
social constructionism, narrativism … and so
on
this accelerated a flux of continuous
changes in practice
the mind-boggling thing was that practice
kept being different from all models that
tried to explain it
Massimo Schinco, Italy Co-director at
Milan Center of Family Therapy’s
School and Clinical Center

10. in 1989 Gianfranco Cecchin gave a talk at the English Association of
Family Therapy whose title was
“OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES”
Massimo Schinco, Italy Co-director at
Milan Center of Family Therapy’s
School and Clinical Center

11. “We are forced to repeat things very well known
already, but it is still necessary that we keep
talking about therapy and explain what we do
… If old concepts are still good – if wine is still
good – so why not to change the bottle, in other
words why not to change the way in which
concepts are described? Actually we have no
other choice … as you can see, the story of
family therapy, or the story of family theory is in
turn a narrative structure. Just like the
therapeutic process: once you arrive to a
certain point, contradictions and unavoidable
dissonances force you to look for a different
explanation, a new story about what you are
doing”
Massimo Schinco, Italy Co-director at
Milan Center of Family Therapy’s
School and Clinical Center

12. I’m persuaded that Cecchin was serious and deeply rooted
in his own therapeutic identity when he claimed that
“actually we have no other choice”
my claim, in turn, is that effective therapists are always in
advance in respect of their reference model
Massimo Schinco, Italy Co-director at
Milan Center of Family Therapy’s
School and Clinical Center

13. I also claim that this occurrence can be explained and it
has strictly to do with the nature of a therapeutic process
itself
during the session the therapist is connected with
“something in advance” in respect of the words he uses
scholars probing the realm of consciousness can help us to
understand why
Massimo Schinco, Italy Co-director at
Milan Center of Family Therapy’s
School and Clinical Center

14. Henri Bergson, mathematician, philosopher, Nobel Prize
David Bohm, physicist and science philosopher
Montague Ullmann, psychiatrist, researcher and
psychoanalyst
Efstratios Manousakis, quantum physicist at Florida
University
they seem to have some basic ideas in common about
consciousness, though the language they use and some
philosophical implications can be different
Massimo Schinco, Italy Co-director at
Milan Center of Family Therapy’s
School and Clinical Center

15. 7 concepts they share
Massimo Schinco, Italy Co-director at
Milan Center of Family Therapy’s
School and Clinical Center

16. consciousness is not “produced” by the brain
consciousness is the basic ontological reality
individual “substreams of consciousness” are part
of a “global stream of consciousness” which
comprehends all that exists and existed
Massimo Schinco, Italy Co-director at
Milan Center of Family Therapy’s
School and Clinical Center
1
2
3

17. important parts of consciousness, both individual
and global, are in a “potential state” that can be
actualized by the operations of the mind
intuition works without the help of memory
both the production of theories and the
perception of “matter” are operations implying
memory and comparison
Massimo Schinco, Italy Co-director at
Milan Center of Family Therapy’s
School and Clinical Center
4
5
6

18. intuition and action are in a close relationship
Massimo Schinco, Italy Co-director at
Milan Center of Family Therapy’s
School and Clinical Center
7

19. once a therapist becomes aware of what a patient
“remembers/knows” about being in a certain state, the
therapist can make an idea of what is allowed and
forbidden to do with that patient
this implies what the practice of Milan Approach shows
since decades
theories and related techniques much more than the sole
“empathy” are not only useful, they are necessary to join a
system and let the therapeutic relationship take place
Massimo Schinco, Italy Co-director at
Milan Center of Family Therapy’s
School and Clinical Center

20. but once the therapist joined the system, change will occur only by
forgetting theories, de-reifying narratives, relational patterns, roles and so
on
in other words
the use of techniques paves the road to intuition
which, in turn, has
affective qualities that can be represented through metaphors
which eventually, in Ullman’s words are
“the stuff of reality”
Massimo Schinco, Italy Co-director at
Milan Center of Family Therapy’s
School and Clinical Center

21. though different for what concerns the
setting, in its ultimate roots the process is
not quite different from that of creation in
narrative
Massimo Schinco, Italy Co-director at
Milan Center of Family Therapy’s
School and Clinical Center

22. Ernest Hemingway used to say
about narrative process:
“… I always try to write on the
principle of the iceberg. There is
seven-eighths of it underwater for
every part that shows. Anything you
know you can eliminate and it only
strengthens your iceberg. It is the part
that doesn’t show.
If a writer omits something because he does not know it
then there is a hole in the story.”
Massimo Schinco, Italy Co-director at
Milan Center of Family Therapy’s
School and Clinical Center

23. about 40 years ago in Italy
many of us fell in love with a
song composed by a weird
couple of guys, the songwriter
Giorgio Gaber and the painter
Sandro Luporini
the song was called
“Reality is a Bird ”
Massimo Schinco, Italy Co-director at
Milan Center of Family Therapy’s
School and Clinical Center

24. “a strange bird fascinates me
it has no past nor remains the same
I must anticipate it I must go after it
otherwise I’ll die for normality”
Massimo Schinco, Italy Co-director at
Milan Center of Family Therapy’s
School and Clinical Center

25. Massimo Schinco, Italy Co-director at
Milan Center of Family Therapy’s
School and Clinical Center
it’s up to you to wonder
where it’s going to …“
“reality
is a no-memory bird

26. in the most crucial moments of a session, a
psychotherapist is abducted by a peaceful feeling of
nothingness whence gush those
Massimo Schinco, Italy Co-director at
Milan Center of Family Therapy’s
School and Clinical Center

27. intuitions
metaphors
actions
that decide the destiny of a psychotherapy
Massimo Schinco, Italy Co-director at
Milan Center of Family Therapy’s
School and Clinical Center

28. now Massimo Giuliani will introduce you to what we
pretend the “Milan Approach” should look like
it will be evident that the great value of its
epistemological, theoretical and technical framework
resides mainly in what the approach allows and forbids to
do during therapy sessions
Massimo Schinco, Italy Co-director at
Milan Center of Family Therapy’s
School and Clinical Center

29. that is, opening the gates
to the unpredictable
to the new
to what will never be liable to a complete
description
Massimo Schinco, Italy Co-director at
Milan Center of Family Therapy’s
School and Clinical Center

30. Thank You!
Massimo Schinco, Italy Co-director at
Milan Center of Family Therapy’s
School and Clinical Center