Carlos Sluzki - An Appreciation

Don Bloch

The American Family Therapy Academy "Lifetime Achievement Award," awarded to Carlos Sluzki, recognizes a long and fruitful career, a recognition that honors both the recipient and the association that confers it. Sluzki has a restless and powerful intellect, informed by humor, a humane heart and a realistic sense of what is practical, making him the best kind of innovative thinker and practitioner. I review his career with pleasure.

Carlos was born and raised in Argentina, a country that has given us so many family therapy leaders. He completed medical school at the University of Buenos Aires (1960). While he was a medical student, during a period of political repression (1953-55), he organized and directed the Comisión Universitaria de Solidaridad, a human rights organization aimed at helping students that were held as political prisoners by the government. He also developed and led (1956-57) a "Lamaze-type" program (a psycho-educational preparation for pregnant women and their husbands toward labor without fear), the first such program ever to have been offered in a public hospital in that country. In 1957, still in medical school, he joined a pioneering group under the direction of an innovative psychiatrist, Mauricio Goldenberg, MD. He remained in that program during its development, and became part of a team that organized, in the early 1960s, an innovative full Department of Psychiatry in a general hospital. Sluzki was for several years the Associate Chair of that Department as well as the director of its research programs. During that decade, he also completed his psychoanalytic training and became involved in a number of psycho-social research projects.

A three-month Fellowship from the Pan-American Union was spent at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, at the invitation of its then director, Don D. Jackson. In that period Carlos established enduring professional and friendship relationships with one of the pioneering groups that was developing the field of family therapy - a group that included, in addition to Jackson, Jay Haley, Virginia Satir, Paul Watzlawick, John Weakland, and, on occasion, Gregory Bateson, Albert Scheflen, and many others. The perspective of that group - with its origins in communication theory, strategic in its style, systemic in its overall orientation - was one to which Sluzki would also later contribute, and which I see as the guiding paradigm of his work.

During his visits, and because of his ongoing participation and contributions, he was named Research Associate at the MRI. For several years he alternated between Argentina and the United States, years during which the deteriorating political situation in Argentina became increasingly dangerous. In 1971, he received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, and an advanced research fellowship from the Foundations' Fund for Research in Psychiatry, and moved with his family to the United States, where he has been ever since. To give a taste of the character of his extraordinary career let me highlight a few of his activities: Carlos developed the first Family Practice Residency Program at the University of California San Francisco at San Francisco General Hospital, along with a multi-cultural clinic site for that program, becoming Professor of Psychiatry, and of Family and Community Medicine at UCSF. In 1978 he became Director of Training at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto and two years later was appointed Director of the MRI, a position he held until 1983. In 1984 Sluzki was invited to come East to direct the Department of Psychiatry at the Berkshire Medical Center, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he also was Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts. At that location he developed a major treatment and training center-with inpatient, partial hospitalization, outpatient, outreach, emergency psychiatry and consultation liaison services, and multiple training programs. Ten years later, with that model program in place, he returned to California to assume his current position as Director of the Center for Psychiatry and Behavioral Healthcare at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital, as well as becoming Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California Los Angeles Medical School.

Over the years Carlos has connected, and contributed to, several interrelated fields:

Psychiatry - where he has maintained a strong bio-psycho-social view and has been involved in his many positions in developing services sensitive to the needs of the community (he is currently the Editor of the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry);

Family therapy - he has been vice-president of AFTA and Editor of Family Process and a prolific writer and active trainer with a vast audience in Europe and the Americas, both North and South. He is considered one of the "founding fathers" of family therapy in Latin America, where he is honorary member of countless national family therapy organizations. Since 1979 he has conducted 17 consecutive intensive summer programs on family therapy in Spanish for professionals from Latin America and Spain, in which some 800 professionals have participated.

Social Networks - this is one of Carlos' current areas of interest to which he has contributed many articles and a book;

Human Rights - he has been involved in many human right endeavors and written extensively on the subject. Among other things he has been the Chair of the Committee on Human Rights of the American Psychiatric Association and the organizer and first Chair of the Human Rights Committee at AFTA.

His publications have added much to our store of useable knowledge - he has written, co-authored, or edited at least 132 papers and nine books. A small selected bibliography is attached from which the reader may glimpse something of the wide range and high quality of his work. The writing is always economical and felicitous, the thinking stretches the mind, and examples are apposite and chosen from a rich store of carefully observed experiences both personal and professional. The theorizing is state of the art, deep, subtle, and flexible.

Carlos is married to Sara Cobb, Ph.D., a recognized expert in mediation and conflict resolution. Sara is currently the Executive Director of the Program on Negotiations at the Harvard Law School. And, though their career paths separate them geographically, the couple have proven themselves to be outstanding (though, perhaps, unwilling) students of the fashionable problem of conducting a bi-coastal marriage. They have a total of seven children, who, in their totality, mirror the warmth, creativity, inventiveness, joie de vivre, (and the tendency toward over-work) of their parents, as they spread into different universities and locations on the West Coast and beyond. Carlos and Sara have added immeasurably to my life ? it is hard to think what it would have been without them.

Selected Bibliography

• Sluzki, C.E., & Ransom, D. (Eds.)(1976). Double-Bind: The Foundation of the Communication Approach to the Family, New York: Grune & Stratton.
• Sluzki, C.E. (1979) Migration and family conflict. Family Process, 18(4), 379-390.
• Sluzki, C.E. (1983) Process, structure and world views: Toward an integrated view of systemic models in family therapy. Family Process, 22, 469-476.
• Sluzki, C.E. (1985). Family consultation in family medicine: A case example. In L.C. Wynne, T.T. Weber, & S.H. MacDaniel (Eds.) The Family therapist as systems consultant. New York: Guilford. Also in Family Systems Medicine 3(2), 1985.
• Sluzki, C.E. (1992). Network disruption and network reconstruction in the process of migration/relocation. Family Systems Medicine, 10(4), 359-364.
• Sluzki, C.E. (1990). Disappeared: Semantic and somatic effects of political repression in a family seeking therapy. Family Process, 29(2), 131-143.
• Sluzki, C.E. (1992).Transformations: A blueprint for narrative changes in therapy. Family Process, 31(3), 217-230.
• Sluzki, C.E. (1993). Toward a general model of family and political victimization. Psychiatry, 56, 178-187.
• Sluzki, C.E. (1998). Strange attractors and the transformation of narratives in family therapy. In M.F. Hoyt (Ed.), The handbook of constructive therapies. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.
• Sluzki, C.E. (1997). Recovering the experience of freedom: From the personal to the collective...and back. Human Systems, 8(3-4), 225-238.

Don Bloch may be thought of as an icon of cultural evolution over the last half-century, embodying all of the confusions, inconsistencies, and changes in course such a description would suggest. He has lived in three families: the first, into which he was born, was a highly traditional non-observant second generation Russian Jewish family; his first marriage was modern transitional/traditional; his second marriage is blended dual career post modern. As an oldest son, he has been a persistent optimist in the face of the often overwhelming evidence to the contrary that history has provided. The three children of his first marriage and the one child of his second marriage have, together with his two wives, struggled valiantly to educate him in human development and the ways of the world, and would probably consider their efforts to be partially successful. Other education was as a physician, psychoanalyst, family therapist, editor, home owner, and small plane pilot.