BRIDGING TWO CONTINENTS; A CONJOINT AFTA-EFTA PLENARY SESSION

June 2001

Carlos E. Sluzki

This is a report about a first-of-a-kind, ground-breaking event that took place during the AFTA Annual Meeting last June 2001. At 6:30 AM on Saturday the 30, an enthusiastic bunch of AFTA members—some 100 early risers—witnessed and participated in a conjoint plenary session between AFTA and EFTA (the European Family Therapy Association), via teleconferencing. It linked a plenary session at EFTA's Annual Meeting—in Budapest, Hungary, middle of the afternoon, main auditorium, many hundreds of participants—with our dawn session at AFTA –in Miami, Florida.

This project has been the brainchild of Don Bloch, who, together with Tamas Kuriamy, the local organizer of the EFTA/Budapest conference, struggled valiantly against the "It can't be done" viewpoint and carried on this project to its success.

It was, I must confess, a thrilling, moving experience for many of us: EFTA was, in fact, here, and we were, in fact, there, "teleported" in a series of presentations and conversations that showed the potential of this media for building bridges. Large screens were projecting the scene from other side, and in a corner of the screen a mini-projection fed-back what the other side saw –our image of their image of us, and vice-versa. The transmission was crisp and clear, and the whole thing a lot of fun.

The plenary consisted of a series of short presentations by both organizations. The EFTA panel included Gill Gorell Barnes (from the UK), Luigi Boscolo (from Italy), Mony Elkaim, founder and past president of EFTA (from Belgium), Juan Luis Linares, current President of EFTA (from Spain), and Tamas Kurimay (from Hungary).

The AFTA panel was comprised of Donald A. Bloch, AFTA President Celia Falicov (she passed the gavel the following day), Salvador Minuchin, Froma Walsh, and myself.

It started with words of welcome by Tamas, Don, Juan Luis and Celia.

Froma Walsh then discussed the increasing variety of shapes that families display as they evolve resiliently in an ever-changing world. She highlighted the paradox that the notion of "global village" coexists with increased regional fragmentation and a growing distance between the rich and the poor. The nostalgia for the (illusion of) simplicity of the past—and that social construct, "normality" —clashes with the challenges of complexity. Change, rather than an exception, seems an ever-present reality in our lives, and families need help coping with this process. The construct, "resilience," is a flexible tool for witnessing and facilitating the many pathways toward "strength under stress"—in stark contrast to classifications that tend to pathologize the family.

Gill Gorell Barness navigated the space between the personal and the political. Our assumptions as therapists change and adapt with the emergence of multiple shapes of families, including single parent, foster and adoptive families, with their unavoidable multiple stresses and pains—and strengths and resilience. Further, the envelope can be pushed to include the new reproductive technologies and the way they are affecting family process and shape. She raised the questions, how do we train ourselves to keep a flexible mind and to acknowledge actively our own ignorance? and how do we maintain personal and political awareness? And she offered her own recipe: the lenses to be privileged in training programs are: ethnicity, gender, and family histories.

Carlos Sluzki discussed the need to expand the boundaries of our focus toward the social fabric that includes all our meaningful interpersonal links, our personal social network, crucial for our identity and our emotional and physical well-being. He discussed the special relevance of this view with an increasingly mobile society—and the reality of some 50 million refugees and internally displaced persons in our world. The social networks lens is a powerful vantage point to work with this population, and with any family. The boundaries between clinical practice and human rights practices begin to blur as we see ourselves a part of the expanded social fabric of the human family.

Mony Elkaim brought to our attention two dangerous developments in Europe: the creations of laws that regulate psychotherapy, excluding some professions –social workers, other health workers--, and the trend to medicalize human pain and manage it biologically, while denying scientific value of family therapy and other "talk therapies." He called for a need to defend our field, and to retain what has been the main trait of our field, its creativity.

Salvador Minuchin , expanding on the themes of his AFTA key-note plenary, discussed the risks of the exclusive focus of therapy in cognition and language at the expense of emotions and the experiential process. He fears that many therapist may be political prisoners of their own ideology, and even of their own political consciousness. The psychiatric establishment has been successful in moving with the times, while we, family therapists and, in theory, systemic thinkers, abandoned our dialogue with the mental health community forty years ago, and are now paying the consequences. He was, however, optimistic when analyzing new trends in our field, including  home-based family therapy for poor clients, which empowers the family ands allows the therapist to reconnect, once again, with the social context.

Luigi Boscolo brought us a vignette from Italy—until thirty years ago, a country of emigrants—, currently in the midst of progressive waves of immigrants, many undocumented, from North Africa, the Middle East, and more recently Albania. Accompanying the social problems created by their difficult assimilation—and an increase in petty crimes and panhandling—, there has been an increasingly powerful right-wing political current of intolerance and racism. In turn, health institutions and health workers are not prepared to provide health services to this population, nor aware of their own prejudices. A post-modern focus on the therapist's biases, fostering humility, and favoring reflective teams has been the training avenue he favors, aimed at enhancing the therapist's awareness and their therapeutic efficacy.

Celia Falicov closed the event intertwining the auspicious theme of our 2001 convention: "Meeting of the Americas: The Family in a World Without Borders" with the no less inviting title of EFTA's Congress, "Traveling thorough Time and Space." Through this historical event, she stated, we are opening up to contacts world-wide, linking dialogues across continents.

Simultaneous sustained standing ovations in Florida and in Budapest crowned the conjoint session and acknowledged the impact of this encounter.

Post Scriptum: As I proofread this summary of this marvelous event, full of promises of joint endeavors, loaded with projects for a more luminous future—of an event that seems to have taken place so long ago, namely some three months before September 11—, I wonder how many times can we lose our optimism, and how much energy we have to devote to rebuild it, once and over again. Peace.