Distinguished Contribution to Family Therapy Theory and Practice Award

By Jay Lebow

Bill Pinsof is the recipient this year of AFTA's award for Distinguished Contribution to Family Therapy Theory and Practice. What is most striking about Bill is the sheer number of ways he has contributed to our field. And these contributions are not shallow and fleeting. Bill makes strong commitments and has followed through on these commitments over his entire career.

Bill is, first of all, a wonderful clinician.  He is perhaps the best-known and most sought-after couple/family therapist in the Chicago area.  Despite numerous other commitments, Bill has always maintained a substantial clinical practice, keeping his work on theory always closely connected to real clinical experience.

Bill is a major theorist.  His approach to therapy, called Integrative Problem-Centered Therapy, was among the first integrative therapies in family therapy, constructed at a time when most were looking at family issues within a much more narrow frame. As is true with all of his work, Bill has continued to refine and shape Problem-Centered Therapy throughout his career, the outline thickening and deepening as it has evolved. In 1995, he finished a decade-long project of writing a book that described Integrative Problem Centered Therapy.  Since the publication of that volume, the model has continued to evolve.

Bill is also a figure in family therapy research. With Lyman Wynne, Bill co-edited the most important overview of the research assessing couple and family therapy, published both as a special issue of the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy and as a separate volume. Wearing the hat of chair of the research committee of the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy, Bill has had a major role in enabling research to occupy a more central role in that organization and in developing its annual research conference. 

Bill has exerted a major influence on a number of threads of research. His dissertation was a pioneering work assessing therapist processes in family therapy. Bill produced a coding system for family therapist behavior that could fully be used to describe therapy, and still stands as a very special method. Bill's second major research focus was on assessing the therapeutic alliance in family therapy.  Long before many had even turned their attention to the importance of this vital construct, Bill created a measure that differentiated the alliances within individual, couple and family therapy, and sorted the aspects of the alliance into tasks, bonds, and goals. The measure he developed with Don Catherall for assessing the therapeutic alliance has become among the most widely circulated measures of couple and family therapy process.  The latest thread of Bill's research, with which I am also involved, is the culmination of Bill's thirty year desire to study progress in couple and family therapy and the relation of process to outcome in these therapies.  Bill has devoted a great deal of his recent energy to create a set of instruments to assess progress in systemic therapies: the Systemic Therapy Inventory of Change (STIC).   These instruments provide self-report measures assessing individual, couple, and system levels that can track change over time. These well-constructed validated measures are being utilized to assess progress on multiple levels in individual, couple, and family therapy.

Bill is a superb trainer and supervisor.  I have seen Bill bring is combination of thoughtful ideas and engrossing case examples to endless audiences.  A superb speaker, Bill always gets his ideas across.  The first experience I had of hearing him speak was in a workshop in a small town in Wisconsin. He brought no less energy and enthusiasm to addressing that small group of five therapists than he has to plenaries at AAMFT.

Recently, he decided to offer a new class on sex and marriage to the undergraduates at Northwestern as part of the Family Institute's university offerings. As is typical of Bill, he devoted great care and planning to developing the course and his lectures. Bill didn't just examine recent theory and research about marriage, he read intensely about the entire history of marriage; he organized a research project tracking what university students felt they needed to know about relationships and marriage; and he organized a faculty seminar examining the views of marriage across many disciplines.  Quickly, the course became an undergraduate favorite.  Because of his enthusiasm and thoughtfulness, Bill has affected innumerable trainees and students in a profound way over the course of his career.

Have I mentioned yet that Bill is the President and CEO of the largest family institute in the United States?  Somehow, he has found the time to not only run the Family Institute at Northwestern, but to participate in a hands-on way in directing almost all of its activities.  Bill negotiated a complex joint venture with Northwestern University, which has helped the Family Institute thrive as an institution, and headed the monumental relocation of the Institute to the Northwestern campus.   Not the least of this achievement was the fund-raising effort, headed by Bill, which paid for the Family Institute's state-of-the-art building, which includes classrooms, offices, and many video and observation rooms.  At a time when many family institutes were becoming smaller or even closing, Bill created a unique and secure base for a growing institute.

Bill's commitment to underserved populations is evident from a perusal of the programs of the Institute.  Beyond the usual outpatient therapy offered on a sliding scale and the training of students, the Family Institute has developed unique partnerships with a number of urban sites, where services can be delivered to those unlikely to ever come to the Family Institute's facilities. This includes a program called WINGS aimed at intervening with children and their families in inner city Chicago schools, YMCAs, and family preservation programs; a partnership with the Evanston High School; programs in the Chicago Latino community; and a program in several Chicago Schools to reduce school violence.  Bill has not only fully supported these endeavors, he has been an extraordinary force in finding monies to support them.

Bill has also played a major role in all the important organizations in our field.  He has chaired the AAMFT research committee, was a Board member of AAMFT's Research and Education Foundation, and is presently Vice President for Research of The Division of Family Psychology of the American Psychological Association.  He also serves on the Board of Directors of Family Process and is an advisory board member of the Wynne Center for Family Research.  Bill is also an approved supervisor of AAMFT, a diplomate of the American Board of Family Psychology, a fellow of the American Psychological Association, and has been honored with AAMFT's cumulative contribution to marriage and family therapy research award.

Bill has also been a wonderful colleague for those of us who work with him.  He brings an intense excitement to every activity, yet finds time to personally connect.  He models openness for everyone as he speaks of the struggles in his own life.  He also lives the family model, rather than just talking about it, focusing much of his time and energy on his wife, Susan, and two young adult children.  He not only offers psychotherapy, but believes in it, readily citing stories from his life as a client.

For all these reasons, Bill is an exemplary and much deserving recipient of the Distinguished Contribution to Family Therapy Theory and Practice.  He can play all the positions on the field, sometimes all at the same time, and each one marvelously.

Jay Lebow, PhD, is a senior therapist and research consultant at the Family Institute at Northwestern and Adjunct Associate Professor at Northwestern University.  He has served on AFTA's Board of Directors, as AFTA's Treasurer, and as chair of AFTA's research committee. He is a member of the editorial boards of JMFT and Family Process, is a contributing editor for the Networker, and is the author of numerous articles about the interface of research and practice, research in couple and family therapy, and integrative methods of practice.