Published: March 2025

Keywords:
Disrespect-prejudice-assumption-circularity-neutrality-observation-bias-change-evolution-family therapy.

John Soderlund

He is a licensed counselling psychologist, registered with the HPCSA and working in Cape Town, South Africa. He provides an insight-oriented and solutions-oriented approach with clients around the world, both online and in-person.

Between 2000 and 2016, he cofounded and served as the editor of New Therapist magazine (http://www.newtherapist.com), an international magazine for psychotherapists, providing essential support to therapists around the world who are interested in ensuring that they provide a thoroughly informed, sustainable, ethical and effective service to their clients.

Since 2000, he has been providing psychotherapy to individuals and groups to deal with a wide range of difficulties. Special areas of interest include depression, anxiety difficulties, substance use disorders, couple relationships and the complexities of navigating an increasingly time-urgent, myopic and pressured world.

Abstract

This text is republished as is from the printed issue 5, a tribute to Gianfranco Cecchin.

In this interview, conducted by John Soderlund editor of the journal New Therapist (www newtherapist.com) Cianfranco Cecchin is reflecting on the notion of prejudices, one of the most predominant concepts in the contex of this systemic-family therapy approach. The interview was originally published inNew THERAPIST IN 1999 (Vol.1 May /June) and is currently reproduced in its electronic version ( www.newtherapist.com/30cecchin.html) with John Sonderlund’s kind permission

Metalogos' Ed. Comment: Metalogos thanks the journal New Therapist and John Sothrlund for sending the issue again (20 years later!) and allowing the original paper to be published.

The paper is published here as it is in New Therapist.

Gianfranco Cecchin

Gianfranco Cecchin, psychiatrist-psychoanalyst and educator, was one of the pioneers of family therapy in Italy and beyond. One of the symbols of Psychiatry and scientific research in Milan. After studying Medicine in Italy, he specialized in psychiatry and psychoanalysis in the USA, where he worked until the end of the 1960s. Returning from New York to Milan, he participated with Mara Selvini Palazzoli, Luigi Boscolo, and Giuliana Prata in the foundation of what would become known as the "Milan Family Therapy Group". This group developed an innovative approach to Family Therapy since 1971, initially based on the Palo Alto MRI model and then became progressively more independent, with an increasing emphasis on Cybernetics and epistemology based on the thought of Gregory Bateson. Among their most important publications are the book “Paradosso e Controparadosso” (Paradox and Counterparadox 1975) and the article “Potizzazione, circolarita, neutralita”, (“Hypothesis-Circularity-Neutrality”. 1980).

Gianfranco Cecchin and Dr. Luigi Boscolo taught entire generations of therapists, in a communication based “on the examination of the rules of the family system and not on the judgment of behaviors”. After the dissolution of the group in 1980, he founded and directed with Dr. Luigi Boscolo founded the Milanese Center for Family Therapy (Centro Milanese di terapia della Famigilia), which became one of the most important training centers for the approach that then came to be known as “Systemic Therapy”. Their work gained an increasing international influence and culminated in the publication of the book “Milan Systemic Family Therapy” (1987), which was translated into Italian in 2004 under the title “Clinica Sistemica”. The two Milanese collaborators became sought-after for seminars and other educational activities and managed to bring the new Milanese Model around the world (from 1981 until his death in early 2004 in a nighttime car accident near Brescia).

The Centro Milanese played a fundamental role in the shift of systemic therapy towards constructivist concepts, influenced by the ideas of Heinz von Foerster and Humberto Maturana, and the subsequent development towards postmodernism and social constructionism.

Cecchin's career between the 1990s and the early 2000s paralleled that of Luigi Boscolo. He wrote books and articles mainly with Italian and Anglo-Saxon collaborators.

In the United States, Lynn Hoffman and Peggy Penn published, with Cecchin and Boscolo, the volume Milan Systemic Family Therapy, a lively discussion with the two Milanese masters that was translated into various countries and became the vehicle for the new way of family therapy that came from Italy.

He traveled a lot, creating many post-Milan groups in the rest of Italy and the world, which he “co-created” with his ideas and which “co-created” him.

One of these groups was the group of therapists of the K.P.S.Y. D.T. Thessaloniki, which initially inspired it with his writings, then disturbed it, destabilized it, overturned it, excited it, with the result that these ideas and stimuli became the central “material” of its processing, adoption and organization. His three visits in 1989, 1991 and 1992 created a new horizon of vision not only for the K.P.S.Y. D.T. Thessaloniki but also for many other therapeutic spaces throughout Greece.

In Greece, his book "Systemic Family Therapy of Milan" was translated under the editorship of Violeta Kaftantzi and published and is in circulation by the publishing house University Studio Press (Book Series About Systems).

https://www.newtherapist.com