JAMES FRAMO

By Israel W. Charny

Jim was consistently one of the nicest guys I knew. We met as colleagues and became immediate friends in Philadelphia in 1958, visiting each other's homes and periodically meeting for the fun of it. I visited him professionally in his work with Ivan Nagy at EPPI and then too at Jefferson Hospital, and was a very junior member of the faculty with him at the Family Institute of Philadelphia. After I moved to Israel in 1973, Jim and I remained in touch. In the 1980s, he brought me to San Diego, where, over a period of several summers, I served as a visiting lecturer at the United States International University. Those summers also gave me and my second wife, Judy, many opportunities to get to know Felise as the wonderful person and excellent professional that she is, and to enjoy the happiness in Jim and Felise's lives. In the late 1980s I had the great pleasure of bringing Jim and Felise to Israel to present a week-long workshop at Tel Aviv University.

What amazed me was that this great "buddy" of mine, with whom I just plain enjoyed hanging around—either at home or at the Del Mar Race Track cheering on a horse with our extravagant $2.00 bets—who spoke a kind of laid back, everyday simple American-guy talk, was consistently one of the deepest thinker-writers about human behavior in our field. From the beginning of our colleagueship-friendship back in Philadelphia in the late 1950s, I was struck over and over again by the uncanny depth of psycho-dynamic understanding of the individual that Jim Framo was able to express—either in conversation or in his excellent writing; and if this were not enough, I was awed by his ability simultaneously to see the drama of the individual's psychological path as defined and determined to such a large extent by the dynamics of his/her early family life and the replays and continuities in his/her current marriage and family life. As we all know, Jim was fascinated by the loyalties of people to their original families. He was a great explorer of the mysteries of devotion and continuation of emotional obligation, responsibility and affection to one's original family along with competing strains of anger, hatred and longings for independence; and he loved to teach the amazing inner representations of one's original family in people no matter how they grew older and older throughout their lives.

I never stopped learning from Jim, so that one part of my bond with this man includes the appreciation and love of a student for his excellent teacher. One of the reasons I was always learning from Jim was that he himself was always learning from his clinical work. While there was a streak in him, too, of the ideologue who stays hooked on his own pet belief system—in Jim's case, in my opinion, this seemed part of a devotion to a Family Therapy uber alles ideology—in point of fact I never knew a clinician who was more continuously open to questioning, looking and listening for the truths to be learned from his clinical experiences; I never knew a clinician—especially a senior world leader in the field like James Framo—who was more open to consistently telling, sharing, showing and playing recordings of sessions for colleagues, as well as inviting their feedback and asking for their wisdom; and I certainly know of few clinicians who love the mystery and discovery of new understanding in therapy as much as Jim did.

Like our field of family therapy as a whole, I too learned from him the concepts and practices of intergenerational family therapy. Over the years, as I go into an intergenerational family session, I am distinctly aware of Jim as an ever vital presence in my mind and heart. In my clinical work, this technique has been a life saver more times than not — there are occasions where it hasn't helped, but there are more times where the intergenerational family sessions have been the breakthrough tool for unjamming a stuck or ominous case, including at least one occasion when intergenerational sessions clearly saved a person's life. I was treating a colleague-therapist with whom I had an excellent personal relationship in individual therapy, but no matter how hard we both worked it was clear that she was getting more and more depressed and her dreams predicted that she was moving in real time towards fulfilling the increasingly suicidal intention she was talking about. When I proposed that we bring in her parents she adamantly refused, but I took the position that her situation was so serious that I would do so even against her wishes. "That's unethical," she yelled back. "I don't give a damn," I answered, "I'd rather be unethical than stand by and watch you go down the drain." I don't think that our "fight" did her depressed self any harm either (because I believe aggression can be good medicine for depression), but what really turned the trick was a series of several sessions with her parents to which she finally consented in which the open discussion with her parents of the possibility that she would kill herself led dramatically to a complete turnaround for the better in the course of her therapy and her life.

There are few clinicians who have the deep down gentleness, genuine attention and caring for the basic simple person that is in the patient than Jim consistently showed. There were interviews by him that brought tears to my eyes and a warm smile to my heart as he made contact with people and learned genuinely about their real selves.

On the stages of psychotherapeutic demonstrations, Jim was a fine showman and enjoyed himself, but he did not rely on pyrotechnics and smart you-know-what-part-of-the-body interventions; he was plainly, keenly and genuinely interested in drawing people out to tell their story and to make and repair their connections to the other people in their lives. That was what he was best at, I think.

Israel W. Charny — known to Jim as "Iz," a name which I can't stand, but tolerated perfectly comfortably with his gentle pronunciation; Professor of Psychology and Family Therapy, and Founder and Former Director, Program for Advanced Studies in Integrative Psychotherapy, Department of Psychology and Martin Buber Center, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Executive Director, Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, Jerusalem; Editor-in-Chief, Encyclopedia of Genocide.