Distinguished Contribution to Family Therapy Theory and Practice Award: Kaethe Weingarten

By Corky Becker

I met Kaethe at a Bread and Roses meeting in 1969 where, as we like to say, we saw each other across a crowded room and began a conversation that has lasted for 33 years.  Kaethe has been a mentor and guide as well as my closest friend.  At the time we met, she was a mental health worker in the Department of Psychiatry at Cambridge Hospital.  Two years later, when she left to go to graduate school, I was hired into her job.  Our work and personal worlds have been intertwined since then and the themes of our conversation are the themes that are familiar to a far wider audience, for they are also the themes of Kaethe's professional writing: she has been passionately engaged with me, and with countless others, in envisioning and articulating ways that lives can be intimate and just. 

She has brought her intellectual gifts and intense feeling to explorations of how couples construct their lives around work and family; create more intimate than non-intimate interaction; mother without obliterating the self; remain hopeful in the face of overwhelming trauma, domestic, political or medical; and now, in her latest book, she addresses how everyday witnessing can transform violence and violation. 

Her method of approach in all of these areas, whether through teaching, research, supervision, clinical work or family and personal relationships, is to provide what she has called "radical listening," for what is present and for what is absent.  Informed primarily by feminist and postmodern theory, she listens for what is not said in the context of the cultural discourses that are constraining. With sensitivity and awareness she creates the conditions for voice to be heard and exposes the discursive and relational impediments to that happening. 

Whether working in Kosova or in Cambridge, I have met no one else who can hold cognitive complexity with as much feeling as she.  She is always interested in the detail of people's lives, for she believes that these are fractals of the larger political issues of our times.  In Kosova, for example, she interviewed a family in front of 30 Kosovar colleagues, painstakingly checking in with each person to be sure that the meaning of her questions and their responses were mutually understood and culturally congruent. She wove a thread throughout the therapeutic conversation that changed the meaning of crying for the women and the men in the family, giving the expression of emotion a riverbed, so that their options were no longer to flood the banks or go underground. That afternoon she annotated the interview practically verbatim, while facilitating a conversation about gender and emotional expression with our Kosovar colleagues. 

Kaethe graduated Junior Phi Beta Kappa with distinction from Smith College.  She earned her Ph.D. in three years from Harvard University in Clinical Psychology and Public Practice.  During graduate school, she helped organize the Somerville Women's Health Collective, one of the first free-standing health clinics run for women by women, and she helped develop a home visiting family therapy program serving single mothers and their families living in federally-subsidized housing projects. 

From 1975-1978, she was an assistant professor in the department of psychology at Wellesley College with an appointment at the Wellesley Center for Research on Women, where she participated in the creation of that community, a premier research facility for scholars studying all aspects of women's lives. 

In 1979, the same year she became a charter member of AFTA, she was hired to develop an interdisciplinary family therapy training program for the Department of Psychiatry at Children's Hospital and Judge Baker Children's Center.  Each year until she left that position in 1987, there were upwards of 60 trainees and staff involved in the program.  In fact, she ran a seminar on supervision for 16 years and in the last year, 50% of the membership of the seminar had started in the first year of the seminar.

In 1987, she became Clinical Director of the Trauma Evaluation and Treatment Team, based at Judge Baker Children's Center, contracted by the Massachusetts Department of Social Services to provide evaluations and treatment for sexual abuse to children and their families.  The integration of a family and community centered, resiliency focused, narrative approach to trauma has been central to her more recent work, both in the United States and internationally.

She joined the faculty of the Family Institute of Cambridge in 1983, and collaborated with Sallyann Roth to develop two of the Institute's Core Programs, one on systemic family therapy, which developed into the program on Narrative Approaches to family Therapy.  She co-developed teaching methods that linked theory with practice, and allowed people to move flexibly between personal and professional themes, stimulating growth and development in both.

As in everything she has done, her professional passions have been animated by and consistent with her own personal learning.  Faced with a life-threatening breast cancer diagnosis and a year of arduous treatment, she resolved she would "turn private pain into public purpose."  She began writing in earnest for professional audiences in 1990 and has been writing steadily since.  She has written, co-written, edited or co-edited 5 books, and over 30 articles or book chapters. 

Writing has been key to her contribution to family therapy. She has been committed to illuminating issues of power and justice from a feminist perspective, and to making these ideas accessible and clear, grounded in story. She writes beautifully, with clarity and grace. She presents complex theoretical ideas through anecdotes that are vividly familiar.  In her paper on intimacy there is a vignette about her father falling asleep in her hospital room and her daughter vomiting on her that exemplify using the commonplace to make significant theoretical distinctions. In a later paper, "The Small and the Ordinary," she makes explicit that it is by exploring and not ignoring the small and the ordinary that she is trying to expose the ways large systemic oppressions impact our lives.  These are ideas she has written about and practiced with hundreds of clients and well over 1000 students and supervisees.  She has also given hundreds of workshops locally, nationally and internationally. 

She has been recognized for her achievements and received a number of honors and prizes, including the 1994 Psychotherapy with Women award of Division 35 of APA.  She is a Fellow of Divisions 43 and 35 of the American Psychological Association, a distinction held by fewer than 3% of APA members.   She serves on four editorial boards, and served as a Board member of AFTA from 1995-2001.

Since 1997, she has been working internationally in South Africa, Kosova, and New Zealand.  She has sustained close friendships and collaborative relationships by e-mail.  She is committed to staying mindful of her American white-skinned privilege in these consultative relationships.   She says it has been humbling, terrifying and inspiring to turn on her computer, usually before the sun rises, to read about the lives of people her friends are passionately working to assist.  Nothing has been more effective in bringing home the relativity of what people witness everyday. 

Kaethe's ability to use her life experience to clarify, educate and inspire others is unrivaled. She has enormous persistence, resilience, humor, and a deeply felt and lived compassion.  A central gift is her ability to frame and pose questions that instantly foster clarity and generate possibility.  Her questioning is gentle, appreciative, and respectful.  She is exquisitely sensitive to process in whatever group or task she is involved in and she uses this to make space for the contributions of marginalized persons and ideas.

Peggy Penn wrote to me that Kaethe's biggest move was one she had been preparing for her whole life: a move from the local to the global, taking her ideas about trauma, witnessing and radical listening and moving them from a two-person conversation to ideas about reducing global violence.  

I have never known anyone as resilient, resourceful, or courageous in rebounding, day after day, week after week, year after year, from an onslaught of challenges to her physical health.   As a witness to her life, I want this award to honor her incredible spirit too. She awakens every morning and, no matter what she has been through the day before, she faces each day with commitment and a hope that if she lives her life full throttle and writes well she may make a difference to the lives of others. I am honored and grateful to present her with this award.

Selected Readings

Weingarten, K. (1991). The discourses of intimacy: Adding a social constructionist and

feminist view. Family Process, 30, 285-306.

Weingarten, K. (1992). Consultations to myself on a work/family dilemma: A

postmodern, feminist reflection. Journal of Feminist Family Therapy, 4, 3-29.

Weingarten, K. (1995). Radical listening: Challenging cultural beliefs for and about

mothers.  In K. Weingarten (Ed.), Cultural Resistance: Challenging Beliefs about Men, Women, and Therapy (pp. 7-22). New York: Haworth Press.

Weingarten, K. (1997). The Mother's Voice: Strengthening Intimacy in Families. (Second

Edition). New York: Guilford.

Weingarten, K. (1998). The small and the ordinary: The daily practice of a postmodern

narrative therapy.  Family Process, 37, 3-15.

Coll, C.G., Surrey, J., and Weingarten, K. (Eds.). (1998). Mothering Against the Odds:

Diverse Voices of Contemporary Mothers. New York: Guilford.     

Weingarten, K. (1999). Stretching to meet what's given: Opportunities for a spiritual

practice. In F. Walsh, (Ed.) Spirituality in Families and Family Therapy (pp.240-255). New York: Guilford.

Weingarten, K. (2000). Making sense of illness narratives: Braiding theory, practice and

the embodied life. In Working with the Stories of Women's Lives (pp.11-126). Adelaide, Australia: Dulwich Centre Publications.

Weingarten, K. (2000). Witnessing, wonder and hope. Family Process, 39, 389-401.

Weingarten, K. (in press). Common Shock: Everyday Witnessing and the Transformation

of Violence, to be published in 2003 by Dutton Press.

Corky Becker, Ph.D. has been a member of AFTA since 1992. Corky teaches family therapy at the Family Institute of Cambridge. She is a member of the Public Conversations Project and has presented the work of the Public Conversations Project at AFTA conferences. She has made four trips to Kosova as part of the Kosovar Family Professional Education Collaborative, AFTA's Human Rights Committee project in Kosova. She is currently on the AFTA 2002 conference organizing committee.