A BRIEF HISTORY OF FAMILY THERAPY IN ARGENTINA

María Rosa Glasserman

I am an Argentine therapist. As you probably know, my country, Argentina, famous for its beef and tangos and infamous for its military coups, is located at the southern extreme of South America. As you may not know, out of a total population of around 32.5 million people, 11 million of whom, myself included, live in the nation's capital, Buenos Aires, where there is an exaggerated number of psychotherapists.

The field of psychotherapy has been greatly influenced by psychoanalysis. Many psychotherapists went to London during the 1940s to be trained and analyzed by English psychoanalysts. Enrique Pichon Riviere was a key figure in this regard. Working with institutionalized patients, he was a pioneer in trying to understand the relationship between mentally disturbed people and the families they come from and developed an important body of theoretical concepts for orienting treatment in this direction.

In 1956 Mauricio Goldemberg, a dynamic psychiatrist, took the first step toward breaking down the isolation surrounding the treatment of mental illness at that time when he set up a psychopathological treatment center in the Policlínico Araoz Alfaro. This was the first facility for treating mental patients in a general hospital in Argentina and, as such, was an important center for training mental health professionals for many years.

A case in point is Carlos Sluzki. He trained there and then went on to lead one of the most important theoretical and clinical innovations of that time: to give priority to the actual action and interaction in the present, the communicational sequence, instead of working within a theoretical framework that views the unconscious and the past as the prime factors in determining human behavior.

Dr. Sluzki set the wheels in motion to organize the First Argentine Congress for the Psychopathology of the Family Group, along with Ignacio Maldonado and other representatives of both traditional psychoanalysis and early systemic thought. This event represented a real change. 1500 professionals participated; invited guests included Jay Haley and Harry Goollishian, as well as Isidoro Berenstein, who represented the traditional psychoanalytical point of view. The debate was lively, and the discussion groups participated in, the lectures given and the papers read at the Congress motivated several groups of mental health professionals to begin working in public institutions once it was over.

The 1970s can be divided into two stages: before and after the military coup in 1976. During the first, we left the hospitals and went out into the community, working in the schools, in community organizations and with families at home using Goollishian's multiple impact technique.

This experience was violently interrupted in March, 1976. After that, family therapy as inter-relational thought which stimulates freedom and autonomy in relationships could no longer be practiced in the public sphere. Development from that time until the return of democracy in 1983 took place in private groups.

Dr. Adolfo Loketek and I began working together in 1971 in the Mental Health Center, a public institution whose director was Pedro Herscovici, a social psychiatrist and family therapist. After the military coup in 1976, Dr. Loketek and I were kicked out of the Mental Health Center, along with 100 other mental health professionals, and from that time until 1979 Dr. Loketek worked in his small private group and I in mine. In 1977, Estrella Joselevich formed a third private group and worked with us until 1981. It was in these circumstances that the three of us founded the first private Center for Family Therapy (CEFYP).

In 1978 the Argentine Society of Family Therapy was created, thanks to the efforts of Alfredo Canevaro, a member of Dr. García Badaracco's group, among others, and the Revista de Terapia Familiar published its first issue.

Therapists such as Hugo Hirsch and Celia Elzufán oriented toward brief therapy, directive techniques and attention to symptoms, and therapists from other orientations created another professional organization, the Asociación Sistémica de Buenos Aires (ASIBA) in 1984. This organization joined together all persons defining themselves as systemic, including professionals from other areas such as the court system and the business and educational communities. This group also began to publish a journal called Sistemas Familiares, whose first director was Cecile Rausch Herscovici. Many professionals were greatly influenced by American models in the 1980s; others were influenced primarily by European schools that take into account the historical context, a three-generational view, the knowledge inherent in family games, the place occupied by the individual and the therapist in the system. This inevitably led to the search for alternative stories representing the possibility of change.

We (in CEFYP) invited Mara Selvini Palazzoli and Maurizio Andolfi to Argentina. Other psychotherapists invited Cechin, Mony Elkaim, Tom Andersen and thinkers from other disciplines who provided us with useful tools which we incorporated into our praxis. But this experience also gave rise to a risky tendency toward isomorphism in the cases of Edgar Morin, Ilya Prigogine and Humberto Maturana.

In 1991 Dora Fried Scnitman organized a conference entitled New Paradigms, Culture and Subjectivity that was attended by many of the above-mentioned thinkers, among others.

The introduction of constructivism and social constructionism was a very important change because it meant that, within systemic therapy, different orientations coexisted organized around family violence (Cristina Ravazzola); gender and family (E Rappela and Cristina Ravazzola); DDA and Family (Estrella Joselevich); dialogue, freedom and power in the family (Dr Loketek); different types of divorce (María Rosa Glasserman), and working with the courts (María Rosa Glasserman, Lia Bikel, Silvia Crescini.) Silvia Crescini and Juana Droeven have worked with families of the disappeared. Names have been overlooked that should have been included, as is always the case in a list of this kind. But I do want to mention the journal Perspectivas Sistémicas directed by Claudio Deschamps to spread Systemic Thought. There are many systemic institutes today, as well as undergraduate and graduate courses in Systemic Thought offered in the university. Systemic Thought has also been incorporated into other areas such as the courts, schools and institutions.

There has also been an important systemic movement in several Argentine provinces. The work of Dr. Lino Guevara en Neuquén, Dr. Jorge Fernández Moya in Mendoza, Ruth Casabianca in Santa Fe and Dr. Fidel Lebensohn in Rosario should be mentioned in this regard.

I believe that a great deal has been accomplished, but it is also true that both a tendency to submit to foreign influences and the difficulties inherent in living in Latin America and being Latin American, have hindered production. I hope that this will be the beginning of a fruitful interchange.

María Rosa Glasserman is a clinical psychologist, family therapist and co-director of the Center for Families and Couples (CEFYP), which is dedicated to post-graduate training, research and family and couple therapy. She also leads graduate seminars and workshops in family and couple systemic therapy at the University of Buenos Aires.