In honour of Jim Framo

by Maurizio Andolfi

It is a great pleasure for me to write this brief note to honour the life and work of Jim Framo for the AFTA Newsletter.

I first met Jim Framo in 1971, when he came to Rome to give a workshop at the Department of Psychiatry, at the University of Rome, "La Sapienza," the first pioneer in family therapy to do so. Among the attendees there were some of the founders of family therapy in Italy: Mara Selvini Palazzoli and Luigi Boscolo from Milan, Luigi Cancrini and myself.

He came to Rome with his first wife Mary and their son. He had already experienced the loss of his first son (to congenital cardiopathy) some time before and, unfortunately, shortly after his visit to Rome, the second son died, too from the same disease.

His open and honest way of talking about families, and his capacity for exposing himself personally to a large audience, impressed me a lot. He spoke about the fact that the essential element in therapy is the experience between therapist and family members.

One year later, I moved to New York. I lived there for a few years and used to commute weekly to Philadelphia, where I trained with Minuchin and Haley and stayed at Jim's house in a beautiful green area just outside the city. The first meeting with Jim in Philadelphia was very touching; he brought me to the cemetery to connect with his kids and I found this experience the sign of a deep friendship between us that went on for many years, till his passing over.

He was very generous and invited me to sit in on the multicouple groups that he was conducting at his home.  I learned from him how to work with three couples together and how to build up family of origin sessions with one or the other partner of each couple. Many years later I was invited by him to give an intensive course in family therapy at the University in San Diego, at U.S.I.U.

We met again in Tucson in 1997, at a conference organized by the Arizona Marital & Family Therapy Association. We had a fantastic clinical dialogue, interviewing the same family separately and then discussing the outcome of both sessions with the family in front of a large audience of therapists. There, I experienced again Jim's coherence and the openness in talking about families and about the therapeutic experience.

Jim worked mostly with the adult unit of the family, in order to empower them and to elicit their sense of responsibility to their three preadolescent kids, while I worked through the kids in order to reach the adults. It was interesting to see how much each member of the family felt understood and validated by both therapists. It is very interesting to see that you can reach the same goal by entering the family with totally different methodologies. In an era of increasing professional competition and occasional gender polarization, it was very educational to see two men capable of showing a great deal of curiosity and respect for one another.

Last December, I organized a large international conference on the Pioneers of family therapy, with my Institute, the Accademia di Psicoterapia della Famiglia in Rome. I invited Jim to be active part in this conference, and he began to make plans to come to Rome with his new wife Felise, but, in the end, he was not able to attend. We had many phone conversations before and after the conference and, though he was not physically present at the event, his presence was felt, both as a person and as one of the most relevant pioneers in the field. He sent me a series of pictures from his childhood, his early adult life (when he was fighting in Cassino with the American soldiers during World War II), and later, more recent times, and we made a family genogram out of it to show Jim's development. We also showed the AAMFT Master Series interview done by William Doherty, which I think is a MUST for all family therapists.

The best part of Jim was his openness, and his optimistic overview of family development and intergenerational resources. It always amazed me to see the courage and the openness in a man who was so deeply hurt by the loss of two children, and it led me to believe that the people who remain more alive throughout their lives are the ones who were able to integrate their personal experience with their professional work.

Therefore, he was not only an inspiring pioneer in his work with an intergenerational and psychodynamic perspective, but, even more, he was a man who coherently followed in his life what he wrote in his books.