REFLECTIONS ON JIM

By Timothy Weber, Ph.D.

As I stood at Jim's graveside with my wife, Misty, on that sunny, late summer day in the suburbs west of Philadelphia, it all seemed too sudden, untimely even at seventy-nine years, for this dear one who gifted me much during our fifteen years of friendship and collaboration. Flanked by the graves of his two sons on the right and his parents on the left, Jim was resting in the midst of what was so dear to his life and his work—"family." He was quintessential Italian. I was privileged that he extended to me his hospitality. Jim, Felise, and I were in the finishing stages of a book on family of origin consultation we had been working on for sometime. Our pace had slowed due to the vagaries of publishing and life including Jim's struggles with his own body. Our many meanderings in conversation were to blame as well. Over the years we paused frequently to enter musings about our own evolving family stories, politics, movies, sports (especially Penn State football), health care, aging, and faith, capped off with late night ice cream—preferably gelato. Our growing friendship over this work did not compel us to speed up. Besides, Jim always wanted to be a movie director. I think he liked the discovery of drama and could be distracted by the drama of relationships. What did Jim mean to me? As much as language is only a hint, whisper, and guess of so much more, he gave me two true gifts:

First, Jim's warmth, intimacy, and compassion. A driver in all his work was his commitment to healing family rifts and fostering bridges of intimacy and "knowingness" between family members. His heart was alive with this commitment as witnessed in his own family biography in his 1992 book, Family-of-Origin Therapy. Saturday morning calls with his siblings in Philadelphia were fundamental.  He took the intimacy of friendship seriously, uncomfortable with perfunctory familiarity. When he inquired from me "How are you and what happened with…", he really was interested in the details and followed the story across time. I think my marriage got better simply by watching his beach walks hand-in-hand with Felise and witnessing their tenderness and the rhythm of their joint meal preparation. He loved his daughters, delighted in his grandchildren, and invested himself in their growing. Their life with grandpa was too short.

Second, Jim's truth-telling and congruence. Jim was always at risk for disclosing his vulnerabilities, his critiques, his concerns, his worries, his wounds, his loves, his truth. Diplomacy could be sacrificed for something more important, sometimes to his peril. He insisted on writing about his therapeutic errors in our book. He wanted others to come to terms with the ambivalent feelings we have about ourselves and others. And he served that mandate to himself. He admitted his secret cravings like opening a new book and looking first to the reference section to see how many times he was cited. He was dismayed that his own work especially, as well as the work of the other "pioneers" in the field was being lost in the busyness of professional politics, marketplace concerns, and therapeutic "fads" as he called them. He had a hunger for being acknowledged, a fear of being forgotten. Don't we all? But he could talk about it and couldn't really shake it with any ascent to "detachment." He struggled with his sorrows, errors, regrets in living—the deaths of his two sons, the hidden suffering within WW II as he experienced during his military duty in Italy, his feelings of betrayal in leaving his colleagues on the battlefield as he was sent home, his struggle with the emptiness of the church and his yearning for something "more." I think I became less fearful of myself in all this.

Jim once described the best kind of therapist as a "mensch," a real human being quite apart from any theoretical bent. His style of "naturalistic therapy" invited families to access the molten core of their relationships across time and generations with courage because, as he once said, he didn't want to ask anyone to do something he wasn't willing to do himself. He was post-modern before modern.

I learned much in my years of collaboration with Jim and, thankfully, I think we discovered how to feed each other in mutual seeking. I have a deep commitment to continuing this intergenerational work on family-of-origin consultations only in part to honor Jim but, more so, to support the power of this work for healing and good spirit. In the end, however, my feelings about Jim are embarrassingly simple as much of life, I guess, really is: I wondered why he liked me. I have my own ideas about that. But that I liked him and he liked me in the give-and-take of the friendship we crafted over the years is what mattered most as I stood above his graveside. Thank you, Jim.

Timothy Weber, Ph.D. is a Clinical Psychologist and Director of the Systems Counseling Program at the Leadership Institute of Seattle/Bastyr University in Seattle, Washington. He met Jim in 1986 and, together with Jim's wife, Felise Levine, they have been collaborating on a book, Coming Home Again: Family of Origin Consultation, which is soon to be published.

November, 2001