Published: December 2021

Keywords:
Italo Mussilo, Maturana, freedom, love, ethics, responsibility.

Italo Musillo

Italian-Swiss sociologist, collaborated with the Turin branch of the CMTF.

Abstract

Maturana discusses love and freedom of choice, as ways in order to recognize the other.

In memory of Humberto Maturana, recently deceased, we want to publish an interview that has already appeared on the pages of Connessioni (Connessioni 8, March 2001 ). He was interviewed in 1999 by Italo Musillo, an Italian-Swiss sociologist, who, at the time, collaborated with the Turin branch of the CMTF. Musillo, having been inspired by the Milan Approach, used it in consulting businesses and management companies. He talked about it in Family Crisis and Excellent Companies (Franco Angeli, 2008). The specific interview still seems to us full of fruitful ideas.

Maturana, in the 70s and 80s, was one of the authors who have given shape to the new "second-order" cybernetics, that is, based on the theory of the observer; (it is the observer who shapes and delimits the systems he observes), thereby giving a coup to the naive realism that still informed so much systemic theory. Maturana later developed his own path, which led him to observe human interactions with an eye different from the one that characterized the major part of the therapists. Over time, his vision starting from neurobiology has evolved by progressively moving towards ethics, conceived as "being ready to accept the legitimacy of the other to be different from me". If the style of Maturana often apodictic and sententious, makes him at times difficult to accept for the average therapist, his unconventional view certainly helps to better understand our role as observers, our patients and ourselves: how different is the therapist of today compared to that of yesterday, and how much this influences their attitude towards patients and families, different from those back then? And what can change in this network of relationships? What can that therapist do to help change things?

Musillo urges him on topics other than biology and living beings, so much so that the Chilean biologist and epistemologist does not propose here a theory on human organizations (including families), but a starting point to think about the role of the human in relation to others and to the role of the therapist in this larger framework. Maturana does not give us any answers, nor could he. But he leads us to ask ourselves -if nothing else- interesting questions.