0 valutazioniIl 0% ha trovato utile questo documento (0 voti)
77 visualizzazioni4 pagine
Salvador Minuchin describes his background and approach to family therapy supervision. He comes from a large, close-knit family where mutual responsibility and commitment were strongly valued. These childhood lessons influence his approach as a caring yet challenging supervisor. He strives to expand students' therapeutic styles while respecting their individual strengths and difficulties less than in early career. The chapter examines his evolving philosophy and technique in family therapy training.
Descrizione originale:
Carrera Minuchin como terapeuta y supervisor
parte1
Salvador Minuchin describes his background and approach to family therapy supervision. He comes from a large, close-knit family where mutual responsibility and commitment were strongly valued. These childhood lessons influence his approach as a caring yet challenging supervisor. He strives to expand students' therapeutic styles while respecting their individual strengths and difficulties less than in early career. The chapter examines his evolving philosophy and technique in family therapy training.
Salvador Minuchin describes his background and approach to family therapy supervision. He comes from a large, close-knit family where mutual responsibility and commitment were strongly valued. These childhood lessons influence his approach as a caring yet challenging supervisor. He strives to expand students' therapeutic styles while respecting their individual strengths and difficulties less than in early career. The chapter examines his evolving philosophy and technique in family therapy training.
SALVADOR MINUCHIN Supervision of the Therapeutic Encounter In the chapters to follow, eight therapists relate their experiences in my supervisory group. In addition to the stories of the supervision itself, I asked each author to begin with a personal biographical statement that would illuminate for the reader the values, biases, and constraints that he or she brought to the therapeutic encounter and how they affected both the supervisees preferred therapeutic style and my work to expand that style. Also, since 10 years have now elapsed since they wrote their original stories, I have asked each author to write for this second edition a postscript to her or his story, detailing if and how their supervisory experience with me has impacted them and their clinical work during the intervening years. (The chapters of Andy Schauer, who died prior to the publication of the first edition, and of Hannah Levin, who died subsequently, do not contain this postscript.) Because my voice is heard throughout their stories in my comments and interactions, it seems appropriate for me to offer a brief personal statement as background to my role in the development of these therapists. Journey of a Supervisor Who am I, as a supervisor? I come from a large family. My paternal grandfather, who married three times, had nine children. My mother was one of seven. Both my parents had been taught a strong sense of family responsibility, and I learned it from them. My mother made a point of buying groceries at my Uncle Samuels store even though it was poorly stocked and some distance away. During the summer, my rich cousins from my fathers family in Buenos Aires came to spend vacations at our home in the sticks. My mother brought a distant relative from Russia, who lived with us for 5 or 6 years until she married. During the Depression, when we were very poor, my parents regularly
sent my mothers elderly father money that we needed for food.
We took it for granted that obligations were mutual. There was no high school in my hometown, with its population of 4,000, so when I finished elementary school I was sent to live with my Aunt Sofia. My father went bankrupt in 1930 and spent the next 2 years as a gaucho. My Uncle Elias helped him financially, and both of them regarded this assistance as a matter of course. When my parentsby then living in Israelbegan to age, I took it for granted that it was my job to take care of them, as they had taken care of me as a child. I cannot vouch for the details of my memories, but I know that what I learned about relationships in my childhood had to do with loyalty, responsibility, and commitment toward the family, the clan, and by extension the Jewish people. I have started this discussion of supervision by defining myself by my childhood learning because my relationship with my students has been colored by the sense of obligation and commitment I learned as a child. If you think about the values you hold most dear as a teacher, you will probably discover that these values are rooted in your childhood. I began supervising and teaching in 1952, when I was living in Israel. I was the medical director of five residential institutions for disturbed adolescents. Most of the children were survivors of Hitlers Europe, but there were also children from Morocco, Yemen, Iraq, and India. The staff of the institutions were psychoeducators who followed Adlerian principles modified by their substantial experience in group living, and they knew far more than I did about working with these youngsters. I was a young psychiatrist, and my training at a residential institution for delinquent adolescents, located near New York City, hardly prepared me for this population or this work. I was naive and ignorant, and I knew it. Yet what I remember best from this experience was my stubborn refusal to be crippled by what I didnt know. As a person, a therapist, and a teacher, this has always been one of my characteristics: I transform obstacles into a challenge to learn. My response to obstacles is in phases. First I get competitiveenergized by the problems.
Next I get impatient, then depressed, and finally thoughtful. Once I
am engaged, the challenge is primary, and obstacles feel like provocation. The underpinning is emotional, but there is also an intellectual response to the adventure of learning. The years that followed my Israeli experience were restless and productive. I trained as an analyst at the William Alanson White Institute in New York, but basically I was more interested in families. When I moved to the University of Pennsylvania, as professor of child psychiatry and director of the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic, I created an institution that worked only with families and with principles of family therapy. Here my persona as a challenger came to the fore. I was a jumper of fences, challenging the rigidities of the psychiatric establishment. Perhaps we created new rigidities in the process, but the challenge to individual treatment and traditional methods was surely appropriate to the times. It was in the 1960s at the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic that I first became a teacher and supervisor of family therapy. Looking back, I am impressed by the discrepancy between my style of therapy and my style of teaching at that time. My therapeutic style was an ensemble of support, confirmation, and challenge. I was careful to join with families, to assimilate their style, and to stay within their acceptable range when challenging. I did not feel that teaching required the same accommodation. I was confrontative and provocative, challenging students to learn. Perhaps I projected my own response to challengeand my own process for meeting itonto my students. My development as a family therapist provided both the building blocks for teaching others and some skills that got in the way. In my therapy, I developed a knack for reading nonverbal communications with great speed and could jump from minimal clues to hypotheses that guided the therapeutic process. I became comfortable with the knowledge that these hypotheses were just instruments for creating
experimental contexts, trial balloons that helped make contact with
families and that challenged family rigidities by introducing multiple perspectives. I moved by joining and then stroking and kicking, and during that period the pyrotechnics of such sessions became known as my style of doing therapy. I transferred that style to my supervision. I would watch videotapes, microanalyze segments, and jump to hypothesis building, excited by the intellectual nature of the enterprise, the way the pieces of the puzzle could be organized into a large framework, and the potential adventure of joining with the family in exploring newness and creating a different gestalt. I think my enthusiasm was catching, but I was impatient with the slowness of other routes through which my students could reach similar or different understandings, and I think this period was difficult for the people I supervised. I did not give them enough space or respect the idiosyncratic talent and difficulties that they brought to the supervisory process.