Impressions of a European who returned to American Family Therapy

By Jochen Schweitzer

I had my first family therapy training in Boston and Philadelphia back in 1979–80, and became an AFTA member in 1996. However, until now I really "knew" AFTA primarily through it's newsletter. The 2002 convention in New York City was my first opportunity for personal contact with many members and with AFTA as a system.

I was very impressed by the reception I received as a newcomer. My "program partner" and the "new members breakfast" made me feel comfortable and at ease very quickly. Even beyond those pleasant start-off rituals, people came to me and introduced themselves, introduced me to their neighbors, asked me where I came from and what I thought about the conference. I had not expected such a strong welcome to a stranger.

The most noticeable feature of AFTA to me is it eagerness to acknowledge and respect diversity, in regards to gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. This fits well with the dominance of the narrative approach as the most prominent theoretical orientation. It also fits well with the design of the conference, which provided more conversation and reflection than traditional lectures or leader-focused workshops. However, it was also noticeable that some members mourn what they see as the neglect of "good old clinical family therapy stuff" and of "straight systems theory."

Since Family Therapy is almost 50 years old now, in order to avoid nostalgia, the field has to seek out new areas of development. It seems to me that the most important current new arena is the dialogue about public and community issues. The "Public Conversation Project" labels this development most clearly. Clinically, multi-family-groups seem to be developed more strongly than does therapy with single families. Reconciling family therapy and neurobiology seems to be a strong trend theoretically as well as clinically, e.g. in the arenas of ADHD and learning disabilities in children, and of depression in adults.

I also felt I may have detected some signs of depression. People seem to regret the dominance of psychopharmacology over psychotherapy, symbolized by the triumph of Prozac. Another area of depression is managed care, "the worst system of wasting energy ever invented in the health field," as an executive of a mental health agency called it. A third seems to be a decrease in the number of members of AFTA. I do not know how strong this decrease is, and I did not discern an answer to the question, "where have all these members gone?"

On an larger, political level, the urge to appear patriotic after September 11 seems to make it difficult for the American colleagues to criticize the current government, although many of them seem to dislike it strongly. In all arenas, both signs of depression and signs of a fighting spirit against these negative developments could be observed in the discussions of the conference.

The end of June, the time when AFTA always meets, is a difficult time to get away for somebody who works at a German University. School here does not end until middle of July. As a result, I will not come back every year. But I hope to stay in contact—through e-mail, through reading Family Process, Families, Systems and Health and the AFTA Newsletter, through AFTA members visiting Europe, and specifically Heidelberg. And I hope to be back before long.

Jochen Schweitzer, Ph.D. is vice director of Heidelberg University Hospital Medical Psycholoy Department and is one of the founders of the Helm Stierlin Institute, a leading training institute for systemic therapy in Germany. He co-edits Psychotherapie im Dialog, a journal on the dialogue between psychoanalysis, behavior therapy and systems therapy. He is co-author of the Teaching Book of Systemic Therapy and Consultation, which is Germany´s most widely sold textbook in the field. He was vice president of the German Association for Family Therapy from 1997 until 2000.