Lifetime Achievement Award:
Olga Silverstein

Peggy Papp

I shall never forget a live family demonstration interview Olga did during an Ackerman conference some years ago. A young son had committed a disturbing act that sent shock waves through the whole extended family system and divided the members into opposing factions. When the family entered the session I wondered how on earth she was going to handle this hot bed of guilt, anger, betrayal, blame, and mistrust. The audience watched with bated breath as Olga, calmly confronted the situation head on. With exquisite skill and sensitivity she unwound the complex emotional threads that ran through three generations of the family and put her finger on the central issue. By the end of the interview she had transformed a situation that could have torn the family apart into an enlightening experience that provided new options for reconciliation. It was a masterful interview. One of the awestruck participants came up to her afterwards and exclaimed, "You must be psychic!" Olga, who was standing next to her husband and her daughter cautioned, "Be careful what you say. I have to go home with these two people."

I have known Olga 35 years and I don't believe she is psychic but I do believe she has an amazing ability to intuit the underlying interplay of family relationships. In Argentina the participants of a conference began referring to her as a "witch" after observing her uncanny perceptions. In Spain, where she is known as "The Mother of Family Therapy" they believed her unusual insight came from a hidden crystal ball.

It's hard for me to believe Olga was once one of my students. I chose her from among six other applicants who were applying for training at the Ackerman Family Institute. She answered my questions with a candor that was humorous and slightly audacious and I thought she would make a challenging student. Little did I know I was choosing someone who was to become one of the major leaders in our field. It was the first time I had ever supervised and half the time you couldn't tell who was supervising whom. Her clinical virtuosity was immediately apparent and upon completing her training she was hired as a staff member at the Ackerman Institute where she has taught, supervised and mentored for the past 27 years. Her reputation for being a great teacher soon spread throughout the family therapy community and students clamored to take her classes. Her teaching has had a profound impact on the many generations of students who have been the recipients of her original thinking and artistry. It was this original thinking and artistry that inspired Brad Keeney to write The Therapeutic Voice of Olga Silverstein. In this book Keeney analyzes a single treatment case revealing Olga's step-by-step therapeutic thinking and interventions. It is rare for a therapist's work to be considered interesting enough to devote a whole book to analyzing one case. The book captures the elegance and simplicity of her interventions and her unique gift for zeroing in on the essentials and eliminating the chaff.

In the middle l970s Olga and I formed the Brief Therapy Project at the Ackerman Institute where we developed strategic interventions from a systems perspective. Olga's training tape, "Who's Depressed" dramatically demonstrates the effectiveness of this approach. It was during our work together on this project, I came to realize it was a disservice to think of Olga's work in terms of intuition, a sixth sense, or magic. These descriptions dismiss her accumulated theoretical knowledge, her highly disciplined skill and her innate wisdom that are the result of her total life experience.

As the daughter of Hungarian immigrants, Olga came to this country when she was seven. She married young and was a stay-at-home mother raising three children until she was forty. She then decided to return to school and with the spirit and determination of her immigrant tradition spent the next seven years obtaining first a high school diploma, then a bachelor's degree, and finally an MSW. Unfortunately, when she applied to Columbia University School of Social Work her extraordinary potential was not recognized and she was rejected because at 47 they thought she was too old to make a contribution to the field. She was admitted to Hunter College where they seemed to have more foresight. Poetic justice came years later when many of the people who turned her down at Columbia later attended her workshops.

With the emergence of the women's movement in the l970s Olga and I joined Marianne Walters and Betty Carter to form The Women's Project in Family Therapy. Having become aware of the sexism in our field, our goal was to examine the sexist concepts and theories that dominated our clinical practice. We began giving workshops in this country and abroad on women's relationships in families. This pioneering work resulted in our writing The Invisible Web: Gender Patterns in Family Relationships. We decided to each write separate chapters and to meet periodically to critique each other's work. Whenever Olga was late with her chapter, she tried to convince us it was because she had a "writing disability." When questioned further as to what she meant by this she would always say, "You know, it's like a 'learning disability' only it's a 'writing disability'--like a dysfunction in the transmitters that control the 'writing neurons'."

Despite her self-diagnosed "writing disability," upon publication of the book, her brilliant chapter on mothers and sons caught the eye of a publisher who signed her to write an entire book on the subject. The result was The Courage to Raise Good Men, a revolutionary book that challenges the ancient cultural conventions governing mother-son relationships. It is a radical interpretation that strikes at stereotypical ideas of parenting, childhood development and gender definition. Here are some quotes from a few of the reviews. Gloria Steinem wrote, "The Courage to Raise Good Men gives us the faith and know-how to begin a new world in which boys are not betrayed into 'masculinity' by their mothers' retreat, and men and women keep their revolutionary birthright of empathy, love, and connection." Harriet Lerner commented, "A rare and brilliant achievement . . . and an invigorating celebration of human possibility." To Andre Gregory it was, "A stunning work . . . [Silverstein] has woven an exquisite and complex tapestry, blending the personal, the cultural, and the psychological. The Courage to Raise Good Men is a unique and totally original book, which I recommend to any man who has ever had a mother, any mother who has ever had a son, and anyone who has ever had a family." The book was widely read around the world and Olga became an international expert on mother-son relationships. (We should all have such a "writing disability." And by the way, to this day she will still insist she has one.).

Olga's list of other accomplishments is long. She has served on many boards including Family Process, The Annual Review of Family Therapy, the American Family Therapy Academy, and The Journal of Feminist Family Therapy. She has taught as an adjunct clinical instructor at Hunter College School of Social Work, has served as a clinical research associate at Texas Tech University, and as an honorary Professor of Clinical Psychiatry in Spain. After presenting at a conference in Bilboa the host of the conference graciously thanked Olga's husband for his allowing his wife to come and present for them, whereupon her quick-thinking husband graciously thanked Olga for allowing him to accompany her.

On a personal note, I can't think of a more devoted, loyal and loving friend than Olga. Over the years I have turned to her during many crises and she has always been there with comfort, support, understanding and encouragement. We have laughed together around the world, cried occasionally, created together, worked, played and presented together, agreed, disagreed, gossiped, confided, and shopped together. I can think of only one time when our relationship was seriously threatened. That was when we were presenting at the Tavistock in London and Olga came out wearing the same navy polka dot dress as I on the day I was presenting. (But I forgave her. Nobody's perfect.) One of the things I love most about Olga is her irreverent sense of humor. She has an acute appreciation of the absurdities of life and the ironies of human behavior. Many a stressful situation has been relieved with one of her quick witticism. She confessed to me once that she has always had a secret desire to be a clown. She got her chance a number of years ago at an Ackerman conference in the Berkshires. The staff decided to put on a show for the participants and Olga came out in a clown outfit and proceeded to suck her thumb. She brought the house down.

Recently she played the "dizzy blonde" in a game of "Murder" and had every one in stitches with her impersonation. This Lifetime Achievement Award is long overdue. It is being presented to Olga for her courage in challenging some of society's most disabling gender beliefs, for her questioning traditional notions of manhood and motherhood, for the brilliance of her teaching and therapy that has benefited hundreds of families and students, and for her vision of a new world in which intimacy and equality between men and women is possible.