4

The Ugly Duckling

The World of Paradox

In 1978, after getting a divorce, I joined the faculty at the Ackerman Institute for Family Therapy. I had sold our house in Brooklyn and moved into Manhattan to be closer to work, but the divorce still cast its somber light over my life. I felt as if I had murdered a child, and living alone in a white brick high-rise only compounded my pessimism. I was an older woman, a social worker, and single, three strikes right there. On the other hand, I had found another cradle of creativity. When I arrived at the Upper East Side townhouse that held the Institute, with its rickety elevator from Old Vienna, I found its training program in the midst of change.

This was particularly welcome because Peggy Papp and Olga Silverstein, redoubtable stars in what had by now become a performance field, were striking into new territory. In their work at the Brief Therapy Project at Ackerman, these two pioneers merged Palo Alto’s paradoxes with their Bowenian interest in the family of origin. They had also been influenced by the work of a research team in Milan headed by child psychiatrist Mara Selvini Palazzoli. This group’s seminal book, Paradox and Counterparadox (Palazzoli et al., 1978) had been translated from the Italian by Gillian Walker, one of our team members, and I read it with intense interest and admiration.

However, doing therapy and reading about it are not the same. Papp and Silverstein’s brand of brief therapy was very different from the structural approach I had cut my therapist teeth on, and training in this new model meant unlearning what I had worked so hard to know. Ackerman’s client population was at that time mainly white, middle-class, and educated, where the Philadelphia satellite clinic served people who were African-American, Hispanic, and poor. I was used to sympathizing with my families and advocating for them, where at Ackerman, many of the families we encountered were wealthier than most of the staff and I found them somewhat intimidating.

As a result, I was glad I had a team to back me up, and welcomed the paradoxical messages so pungently described by the Milan team as “bombs.” This work reminded of a TV program I once saw on opal mining. The miners lived in man-made tunnels underground, and every once in a while they set off small blasts of dynamite at the end of their burrows, hoping to dislodge precious stones. But this is too violent an image. Papp and Silverstein added a softening influence by linking the presenting problem to the thematic metaphors of the family’s history. Their work had a quality of poetic resonance that appealed to me. Papp, in her earlier life, had been an actress, and Silverstein a “poet of the revolution,” and under their regime I found that my gift for images was appreciated and extended.

When I joined it, the Brief Therapy Project consisted of two teams of four persons each, one headed by Papp and one by Silverstein. Periodically the teams would change leaders, but the teams remained the same. The following story concerns one of the first families I saw during my sojourn on Silverstein’s team. But before beginning, I must mention one huge blind spot. The family sessions in this project were videotaped but the conversations of the team were not. Not only was there no video camera in the room where the therapists met, but there seemed to be a covert policy that said “clients visible, therapists invisible.” Whenever we videotaped a family, the lens was focused on the faces of the family but only picked up the back of the therapist’s head. Although these one-way practices were challenged in later years (see Chapter 9), in the present narrative I have had to become a kind of spectral “we,” standing in for discussions behind the screen that were never recorded. But on to the story of my beloved thirteen-year-old Harry and his family. They gave me a run for my money but ended up lodged in my heart.

The Ugly Duckling

Harry’s family was first assigned to an Ackerman staff member who saw them for four sessions, then decided they would be perfect for the Brief Therapy Project. I was the therapist who drew the lucky card. This family had contacted Ackerman because Harry had been suspended from school for unruly behavior, including biking home from school whenever he felt like it. The spring report card was succinct: “During the course of the school year, Harry moved on to oppose teachers, all phases of the curriculum, established practices, and the principal.” The school held a meeting with Harry’s family, and an agreement was reached that he would be readmitted only if he went to therapy. Since he refused to do this, family therapy was the only other choice.

There was a lot of background information of course. The family consisted of Harry, who was adopted; Michael, sixteen, also adopted; and a natural daughter, Laura, twelve. Laura was conceived just as Harry, then a baby, was brought home. Even though from early on Harry had learning problems, the family perfected its own ways of dealing with the situation. They found a school that worked well for him, and he and they prospered. Then the family moved from the country to the suburbs. Accustomed to a school that sounded like a protracted kindergarten, Harry now faced one that emphasized responsibility and rules. The parents were accepted warmly by the old school while the new school had a policy of “parents stay out.” As a result, they did not even know Harry was in trouble until he was abruptly suspended. They were understandably upset and questioned the school’s ability to motivate their son. The school had its own side of the story, but the upshot was a tense school-family interface.

This was an attractive, accomplished family. Despite having to tell their story all over again to another group of professionals, they were extremely cooperative, and I was correspondingly grateful. The father, in his late forties, was an investment banker with a reassuringly thoughtful manner, and the mother, also in her forties, was a handsome, lively woman who was getting an advanced degree in English literature. Michael struck me as unusually good-natured for a teenager, and Laura, pretty and bright, shared her mother’s challenging mind and her enthusiasm for Women’s Lib.

Harry, in contrast, looked as if he had been dropped into this family by mistake. His clothes were sloppy; his hair stood up like straw; he interrupted conversations at will. During the interview, he created a constant rumble of distraction, drumming on the mike, banging on the radiator, humming, talking. This noise was punctuated by occasional witty remarks at my expense. When I used the phrase “I may be barking up the wrong tree,” Harry cut in to say, “Dogs don’t climb trees.” Later, when his father was speaking about him, Harry reminded him of something he knew his father disliked by saying, “The camera’s on you, Dad.”

With tactics like these, Harry wiped me out in the first round. I could hardly ask a question without his making some idiotic wisecrack that broke everybody up, including me. But, as you can imagine, the audience I was really concerned about was the one behind the screen. One feature of our strategic teams was the freedom to express ourselves backstage, sometimes at the family’s expense. The therapist was not exempt either. At times I was sure that I heard, despite the one-way glass, the sound of laughter. Hiding my discomfort, I steeled myself to endure what felt like an initiation rite.

Despite Harry’s constant intrusions, the parents made clear their disappointment with the school. They admitted that Harry had learning problems but said that it was the school’s job to teach and manage him. I learned that he had been in individual therapy since age six, and that during the previous summer he had become a “therapy drop-out.” I wondered whether the family might have agreed to family therapy as a way to track Harry back into a therapy of his own. We were all afraid that if the present school, which seemed to be a school of last resort, expelled him, he was headed for a locked facility.

When I took a break toward the end of the session to talk with my team, I was relieved to find how supportive they were. Far from laughing at me, they commiserated with me and praised me for my persistence. As a final task, they suggested that I ask the parents to make separate lists of the strategies they used to manage their irrepressible son, and to share these lists with us when we met again in two weeks. The parents did not want to bring Michael and Laura back in, but we had insisted on this for the first session, and we insisted on it again. One of the guiding rules at this stage of the family therapy movement was that the whole unit should be seen. We assumed, you see, that the family was benefiting from the problem because it served some important function, and if everyone wasn’t there, we couldn’t find out what this function was.

I myself was pondering how to understand Harry’s extreme behavior. Many factors obviously fed into it—the adoption, the learning impairments, Harry’s life stage, the new school—but I was convinced that it acted as a coded message that pointed to some feared event. My rationale was that if a therapist could figure out this message and find a more direct way to transmit it, the anxiety behavior would calm down. I had a bit of time in which to do this, as it was the spring break. So what I did during the following two weeks was to ask myself: “How is this problem a metaphor for something else?”

As I ruminated, I kept coming back to the theme of liberation, so often mentioned in a half-joking, half-serious way by various family members. Everybody paid it lip service, yet everyone in the family seemed enslaved. I initially thought of likening the household to a well-run hospital ward in which Harry was a patient, but that would have been terribly offensive. Liberation, on the other hand, was an image that was both affirming and ambiguous. I fortified myself with a plan of action that centered on this concept. All the same, I dreaded the next interview, and knew that with Harry around, I would never be safe from surprise.

The awful day came. I listened carefully as the parents read their lists, trying to block out Harry’s efforts to create turbulence. The father’s list was a long one. He said that seating was ruled by the need to “minimize disruption or maximize control.” In the car, Harry sat in front while the other two, despite Michael’s longer legs, sat in back. At the movies, Harry sat between his parents, “to minimize poking.” His father also gave him considerable private time. He would play games with Harry or sit and chat with him at bedtime. Last but not least, Harry cost more. He went to private schools while the others went to public schools and, because Harry was a “Hebrew school drop-out,” the family had to hire a tutor to prepare him for his bar mitzvah. In general, his father said, less was expected of him than of the others.

The mother recited her list next. She seemed to be the one who was most affected by Harry’s misbehaviors. He would wake up the whole household early in the morning by calling “Mom, Mom,” from his bed. She said she had to ignore him for a long time before he would finally stop. She was infuriated by his constant biking home from school, because she was writing her dissertation and he made it impossible for her to work. Another annoyance, she said, was his “allergy” to soap and water. Since she sat next to him at meals, she said, she occasionally had to ask him to leave and take a bath.

I then asked Michael and Laura about their part in the effort to minimize Harry’s disruptive behaviors. Michael said that it was hard for him to have friends over because Harry interrupted their activities. He also resented having to do chores like shoveling snow while Harry was exempt. Laura said she often had to share her bike with Harry because his was always broken, and he would also come into her room and take things. If she objected, he would punch her in the stomach. However, if she screamed loudly enough, her father would come and remove Harry bodily.

During this part of the conversation, Harry moved to the seat next to Michael and began to trade punches with him. Tired of being constantly interrupted, I temporarily moved back to a structural approach and used an “enactment.” I asked to see an example of the family’s system of control. The mother told Michael to move to Harry’s vacated chair, which was next to the father on the outside of our semicircle. Michael, uncharacteristically, I thought, refused, and the father gently manhandled Harry back to his original seat. While Harry was sitting there, muttering to himself, I complimented the parents on being a “good team.” They looked a bit insulted and said they had always been a good team. I remarked that Harry was certainly giving them the chance to demonstrate it. The mother smiled and said, “We were a team before Harry came along. When he’s away at camp, we’re still a good team.”

I confess that part of my plan was to expose the way the problem influenced the family and then uncover the ways the family kept it going. White and Epston (1990) were to employ a version of this technique some years later in their “relative influence questioning,” but here I went in paradoxically, complimenting Harry for his bad behavior and implying that the family should be grateful to him. I turned to him and said, “You know, Harry, if you became an angel overnight, I don’t think that would be so good.” Harry started up in exaggerated shock and said, “Angel! Are you sick?” I said, “No, I really think the family would miss you.” He snorted. Then I pushed my luck. I said, “You’re an ugly duckling and an ugly duckling implies swans. And I think that what your family did just now was extremely graceful, they looked like swans.”

Michael rushed in to disagree, saying, “No, it’s ugly, it’s not graceful at all,” but the mother, who knew what I was doing, said, “If you mean that we need that to look good, I think you’re wrong.” I pointed out that I wasn’t talking about things they consciously did. For example, when Harry was acting up just then, Harry looked bad and Michael looked good. I added that Michael would have looked even better if he had given up his seat to Harry, and that I was surprised that he didn’t. There was a general family murmur against this idea, but Michael looked quizzically at me and began to smile.

The Prisoner

The next bit of conversation with the family allowed me to use the liberation image I had so carefully chosen beforehand as my weapon of choice. Here is a transcript of that passage.

LYNN:	You have a remarkable family. You’ve organized yourselves in such a way as to minimize the way Harry can disrupt things, though at some cost, and I ask myself, is this family like a sort of prison where Harry is the prisoner and the rest of you are the attendants, or are you the prisoners and is Harry the attendant?
HARRY:	(for once listening attentively) I’m in prison. I’m stuck with this family.
LYNN:	I don’t know. Maybe you’re the one that holds the key to the door and maybe not—it’s hard to say.
HARRY:	If I hold the key, then I’d be able to get out—I mean, isn’t that dumb? I don’t want to be in jail no more.
LYNN:	Well, it’s funny—maybe you do have the key, Harry, because (Harry tries to interrupt) no, you’re the attendant and all these people are in jail.
HARRY	If I say I’m in jail, I’m in jail.
FATHER:	It may sound organized—it sounds organized to me when I make a list—but of course these things evolve out of what seems necessary. I don’t look at it as a system, it’s just things that keep happening. It’s become a system.
MOTHER:	Did you say there was a cost involved? Because that’s certainly the way we feel.
LYNN:	Well, I just meant a price—absolutely a price. That’s why I asked all of you to come here, even though I knew you didn’t want to inconvenience Michael and Laura one more time, because I felt they were paying a price too, and if we were going to put our heads together they might as well be part of it, because they are.

What was interesting to me and the team about this jail analogy was the way everybody chimed in to comment on it. Unlike the kind of interpretation that “points things out,” which often alienates people, this sort of metaphor gets them thinking. The father, who looked as if he were less burdened by Harry’s behavior than the mother, dismissed it as “things that keep happening,” but the mother zeroed right in on the cost. I had the impression that she felt particularly oppressed, even though I was not sure why this should be. But what was really striking to me was the experience of being directly connected to Harry for the first time. No longer deflecting, intruding, disrupting, he seemed to speak from his heart, and for the first time I got a sense of the enormous sadness in this boy who was “stuck with this family.”

Shortly after this, I took a break to meet with the team. The hypothesis we came up with was a version of the belief that the child’s problem mediated a struggle between the parents. I suggested the idea of mother as a kite, with Harry, who represented father’s interests, holding onto the string. If she started to sail too far out or become too “liberated,” Harry would do something to pull her back. But Silverstein, with her usual (or unusual) intuition, thought we should stay with the metaphor of liberation. When we crafted the final message, she suggested we express our belief that someone in the family wanted to escape and that it was Harry’s job to prevent this. The message below was thus our version of “prescribing the system”—a statement from the team that made Harry the protector of the family and cheered him on.

LYNN:	My team was struck by the way in which it is confusing whether the family is like a cage, or a prison, and it’s unclear whether Harry is the person you’re keeping watch over, or whether it’s he who’s keeping you locked up.
HARRY:	They’re keeping me locked up.
LYNN:	It’s a kind of game of jailers and prisoners, and we’re not sure who is which—and I think a lot of the pain that everyone experiences comes from that. The other thing the group noticed was that somebody here, secretly in their heart, might want to escape (Harry makes an abrupt hiss), but this might be very devastating to the family because it’s a very close family …
HARRY:	I can run away—I can run away …
LYNN:	… and in a sense, Harry, your job is to keep this game of prisoners and jailers going (Harry makes a snorting noise), because otherwise that person might in reality try to make a break for it.
HARRY:	I’m the one that’s locked up.
LYNN:	I don’t know, I’m not so sure.
HARRY:	I know. I can see …
LYNN:	I think it’s very important for you to play the part that you play, whether it’s the one of being locked up, or the one of being the one who’s locking everybody else up.
HARRY:	Do you have the rules?
LYNN:	I think those are the rules of the game, that you play that part.
HARRY:	To keep it going?
LYNN:	Yep.
HARRY:	Those are dumb rules. (starts talking to Michael about how dumb they are)
MOTHER:	(looking thoughtful) Are you saying that the group felt that the family is constricting maybe for some or all of us at some time, or that there’s somebody in particular?
LYNN:	I wasn’t sure. They felt that it might be more than one person, but at least probably one person might be feeling particularly constricted and—they weren’t so sure—Harry says he’d like to make a break for it, but they weren’t so sure, they weren’t so sure. And so their admonition, really, was for Harry to continue playing this game, certainly until we find out a little more about it and (to Harry) what the consequences might be if you stopped. Okay?
HARRY:	Excuse me …
LYNN:	Will you agree, Harry, to continue playing this game of jail?
HARRY:	Maybe. Uh …
LYNN:	Please, will you agree?
HARRY:	Maybe.
LYNN:	Maybe? Oh, that’s very noncommittal. Yes or no?
HARRY:	What college did you go to?
LYNN:	Yes or no? Will you agree to play this game?
HARRY:	(quickly) No. (louder) Where did you go to college?
LYNN:	That makes me a little worried. Harry said that he wouldn’t agree to play this game. However, I think that he probably has no choice.
HARRY:	(gasping indignantly) Hah!

At this point, I made a date for the next session and the family left. Our team felt that the mother’s curiosity about who might want to leave, and Harry’s concerned response, confirmed our hypothesis, which was that Harry’s behavior was keeping his mother in line. Two weeks later, although Harry was reportedly behaving better, it was Easter break, and when I spoke to the mother on the phone, she sounded particularly angry. She felt that the school had mishandled Harry from the beginning. I asked what might happen if the school refused to keep him. Would the next step be to send him away from home? The mother answered with an emphatic, “Yes.”

However, we were not yet at that point, and so we decided to set up a meeting between Harry, his parents, and the school, to try to get him back to school as soon as possible. The meeting seemed to go well. The school agreed to share information with the parents on a weekly basis, Harry agreed to try to limit the number of misbehaviors per class, and the parents promised that if Harry left school without permission, they would impose a consequence. This was all written down in contract form, signed, and Harry was readmitted on a half-day basis.

All the same, I was uneasy. I kept feeling that there was some rhyme, some reason, for Harry’s incessant need to bike home, which was as yet opaque to all of us. Worse yet, the school contract seemed set up to be broken. Harry was unlikely to turn into a good citizen overnight and the parents were tired of being told to impose consequences. Some huge anxiety, whatever it might be, kept pulling at Harry, and the school had made it clear that he would not be given another chance. I was sure that if he were to be placed in a facility that he could not leave at will, he might begin acting in such a disturbed way as to bring a heavy label on his head.

The Secret

Into the general blackness of my mind came a ray of light. I had been rereading Paradox and Counterparadox, and had been transfixed by the paradoxical letters the Milan team sent to their families. These messages seemed to have a powerful effect in depriving symptoms of the oxygen they needed to grow. So I devised a Milan-style letter and showed it to my team. Silverstein added the bit about Harry, but otherwise they approved and accepted it intact. I sent it to the parents and told them that my team would like the father to read the message to the family some night at dinner or whenever they were together. The message, dripping with positive connotation, read as follows:

Dear Family:

There is a secret in this family which Harry is part of and is protecting. Because of this secret, he refuses to leave home the normal way. The secret has to do with mother, who lovingly puts her family before her own self-interest or liberation. Taking care of Harry is the best way she knows to prove that fact. Father knows this and lovingly helps mother to fulfill her task. Laura and Michael know this too, and do their part to show mother they truly appreciate her sacrifice. And Harry knows this best of all.

At the bottom of this mutual concern is a secret that may be painful but keeps the family together. Under no account do we believe that this secret should be revealed.

The Ackerman Team

At the next meeting, attended by the parents and the two younger children (Michael was off somewhere), I encountered a nest of polite hornets. The father asked if we were playing some kind of a game, and Harry made a rude comment. But the mother said that, although the note had angered her, it also made her think. In the car the day before, she and the father were having a “mild” argument, and Harry, as he often did, got upset and told them to stop. She had asked him if he were afraid they would get a divorce. He said yes and that he would not like it. According to the father, Harry had said that if they got a divorce, he’d be “split.” Harry, who was then sitting between his parents, corrected them: “No, I’d be in the middle.” I asked Laura, who was sitting apart, if she had the same fears, and she said, “No.”

Harry immediately began to disqualify what he had said, saying he had “made it up.” The mother came in to say, “It’s his reality, it’s not our reality.” Her own hypothesis was that because Harry had been adopted, he was especially sensitive to anything that was going wrong in his family. The father had another explanation: he had been tougher on Harry since they had been in therapy and that was why he was acting up. It seemed that Harry had asked him one day if they were going to get rid of him, something that was very hard for this father to hear.

Since the subject of divorce was not going anywhere, I asked how Harry was doing in school. Not well. He was coming home at all hours, and the school was threatening to expel him for good. The mother said that, if they threw Harry out, it was his responsibility—she had ceased to care. At this point, I was responding to a sixth sense that told me what a disaster it would be for her if she gave up on Harry, and I decided that I must challenge her statement at any cost. So I said that of all the persons in the family, she was the one who would most resist sending him away. She disagreed sharply with me, and I backed off.

The interview ended on the subject of consequences, which the school was insisting on. Richard said that Harry could not be punished because there was so little he cared to do or have. I remarked that the only thing he seemed to care about were his parents. I also wondered if he might not continue to make trouble to keep his fears from coming true. The mother asked, “Do you mean his greatest fear is that we would get divorced?” Harry exclaimed, “Damn right!” He added that an even greater fear was that he would be sent away. I said that if he were sent away, it would probably be to a place he couldn’t run away from every time he wanted to check things out at home. At that point he said, “That’s why I run home, to see if my parents got divorced yet.”

Despite Harry’s validation of our hypothesis, I was discouraged when I went backstage for our team discussion. But Silverstein, as she so often did, provided an idea that opened the path forward. She told me to say to the family that the team agreed with my statement that the only thing Harry cared about was his parents. But then she added her trademark leap: I was to say that the team felt that the only way the parents could punish Harry for infractions like biking home from school would be to openly disagree about the consequences if he did. Arguing about their differences in front of him would be the ultimate deterrent.

I was amazed at the effect of this simple suggestion. Harry became extremely agitated and kept repeating, “If I did something bad they’d both get mad, right?” The father said that they hardly ever disagreed. The mother said she did not agree that they did not disagree. She said that she took the position that Harry should be held more responsible for his actions than his father did. She also said that it would be a good idea for them to discuss this issue in front of Harry, rather than going behind closed doors to make their decision, as they usually did.

Harry was now beginning to interrupt, drum on the radiator, and show other signs of restlessness. I feared that the small disagreement that had already surfaced was too much for him, so I swung into a digression with the hope of calming him down. Here is a rough transcript of this conversation, which ends the interview. Harry’s father had just said that even though it was an article of faith that they shouldn’t let the kids play one of them against the other, maybe that wasn’t right. In reply, I said that things that were right for one point weren’t always right for another. Then I turned to Harry, who was pulling the window curtains over himself.

LYNN:	Harry, you’re not at fault, you’re standing on a fault. Do you know what a fault is?
HARRY:	Yes.
LYNN:	A fault in the crust of the earth, two platelets, like the San Andreas fault?
HARRY:	(indignantly) I know what it is!
LYNN:	Well, in a family that has two parents, there’s two people who are moving through life and they can’t possibly be moving at the same rate. And I have the feeling that you are supersensitive to the rate of movement, especially of people in your family, and to these slight differences, which are so minute but which creep from year to year, (to parents) He’s like those people who can put their ear to the ground and hear a storm far off or an army many miles away, (to mother) And I really feel that it would help if you would air some of your thoughts about his misbehavior—not about personal things but when he misbehaves—I don’t mean playact.
MOTHER:	I don’t think we’d have to play-act.
FATHER:	No, but we’d have to create divisions where they don’t really exist. We react spontaneously to what Harry does—at least we react without having a conference on how to react. And he hears us.
LYNN:	But do you comment on what each other is doing? (to mother) Do you comment on whether you think your husband is behaving correctly?
MOTHER:	No.
FATHER:	(to mother) When I think you’re too tough, I just keep quiet.
MOTHER:	And when I think you’re too soft, I tell you later, privately.
LYNN:	I would say have it out right there. Would you give that a try anyway?
MOTHER:	Okay.
HARRY:	Okay. Goodbye.
LYNN:	And Harry—
HARRY:	What do you want?
LYNN:	If you hear of any earthquakes, let me know.
HARRY:	(patting Lynn on the shoulder as he went out) You’re right!

This was the first time I had any sign of acceptance from Harry, and I wanted to hug him. As for the metaphor of the fault, I had used it before in writing about the position of the “identified patient.” I believed that this person was literally standing on a fault or split in the family, but that the practical effect on the other family members was to make them feel that the fault was within him.

The next session was a tense one. Only Harry and his parents were present. The parents said they had not done the homework, so the team suggested that I ask them to discuss the issue of whether or not they should impose consequences right there in the room. The mother started out by saying that in the past, when she and Richard discussed whether or not to punish Harry for something, she was for punishing him and he was against it, and ninety-eight percent of the time he won.

She then mentioned a recent infraction (she had caught Harry smoking) and stated her opinion that they should impose a fine. She asked the father, “What would happen if for once you backed me two hundred percent and we did impose a fine? Then maybe he wouldn’t do it again.” The father said, “That would be papering over our differences. I can’t do something I don’t feel like doing. I have to be me.” The mother replied, “But when I agree to do what you want, isn’t that papering over our differences?’’The father said, “You’re saying ‘Just agree with me,”’ and began to talk about family bylaws and constitutional differences.

The mother began to look confused and turned to me, explaining, “Well, that’s the problem. I want to do the harsher thing and he wants to do the softer thing, and I feel that I’m wrong, so I give in.” I confess that I had a feeling of sympathy for this mother, knowing from my own experience how easy it is to “give in.” If we had seen this case in a stronger feminist environment, 1990 instead of 1980, we might well have supported the mother more openly, but at that time we believed that taking sides would jeopardize our effectiveness. In this particular situation, I think that, if I had sided with the mother, the family would have swung to the father’s defense and the “differences” we were trying to get at would have vanished.

So all I said to the mother was, “If you only win two percent of the time, that must make you feel pretty ineffective.” The mother replied, “Well, at least we can air our differences, even if we don’t do anything about them.” Then she came out with a rather astonishing statement: “I’m not sure why, but even the little bit of disagreement that we had in front of Harry last week seems to have taken an enormous burden off my shoulders. I feel that the world won’t fall apart, and Harry won’t fall apart, if we don’t speak in one voice.” I had noticed that Harry, for the first time ever, was lying on the couch next to his mother, leaning against her and frowning tenderly. With the disagreement between the parents so openly stated, I was worried and launched once more into prophetic mode. I told Harry that there might be some kind of earthquake ahead, but that if he were to deliberately make some small explosions, maybe he could avert the big one. I said that I had full confidence that he would protect the family by doing this. I wanted to prescribe what I was worried about in the hope of preventing it, but I worried that it would happen anyway.

It did. A week later, the mother called to say that Harry had brought his bike into the classroom every day that week and would not let anyone else take it; also that he biked home every chance he got. The school decided they had had enough and expelled him. But here was the surprise. The mother stated that I must have had a crystal ball when I predicted that she would never agree to send Harry away. She said she had made a 180–degree turn and had decided to keep him at home if she had to tutor him herself. She also said that she wanted to continue with family therapy as she, at least, had profited greatly from it. Now it was the mother I wanted to hug.

Armed with this encouraging news, I called the school psychologist, with whom I had been careful to maintain a good relationship. I said I thought that Harry’s behavior was a temporary aberration and that the family had made a real shift. Since it was now the end of the school year, I hoped that the school would re-think their decision and that maybe we could work something out for the fall. I added that the mother wanted to continue with family therapy and was prepared to cooperate fully with the school. To my relief, the mother and the school worked out a half-day tutoring schedule for the coming fall, and the crisis was averted. Laura and Michael went off to camp, and Harry, who was shortly going to camp too, came in with his parents while we discussed the new arrangements.

During the session, we asked Harry to sit behind the screen, which he did. Amazingly, he stayed quietly glued to the mirror the whole time. The mother wanted to try to convince the father to commit himself to therapy. She said that she was now a true believer and hoped he would want to continue too. The team got nervous and called me out to discuss how we might get the father out of his bad position. Here were two females, both favoring family therapy, ganging up against him. So they told me to go back in and tell the father that I valued his skepticism much more than his support because I too was a family therapy doubter (which was true). The team also suggested that the mother explain to her husband what changes she wanted to work on. So she said to him that she felt they should be firmer in disciplining Harry when he misbehaved. The father, in what felt to me like a outstanding concession, agreed to do this.

In regard to meeting again, I said that I would not even consider it if the father were not involved. The father asked why Harry couldn’t go back into individual therapy, since he had apparently already agreed to do this. I felt that I was in a delicate position, because I might lose the father if I pushed to see them all. So my team came to the rescue. They sent in a message stating that “the men in the group” didn’t think that I really understood what an important role the father played for his son, and how important it was for the father to help the boy “in his struggles against authority,” meaning, of course, female authority. The father smiled and said that he had never for a single moment thought of not being included.

Dr. Harold

After this, we adjourned for the summer. Harry went to camp, and nothing was heard from the family until the middle of the summer, when Michael suddenly surfaced as the new identified patient. True to our theory that the family “needs” its symptom, the team had already stated that if Harry ever did vacate his position of troublemaker, Michael might very well take his place. The mother had called around mid-August, saying that the crystal ball had worked again and that they were now worrying about Michael.

Despite my prediction, I was surprised. From being a wonderful, helpful teenager, Michael had become a sullen, long-haired hippie. His “bad” behaviors were surprisingly similar to Harry’s. He was staying out all night without telling his parents where he was (actually, he was at the home of his girlfriend), and had announced that he was not going to college. At Michael’s request, I saw him a couple of times. He was worried about himself, felt quite depressed, and had lost interest in school. I tried to normalize this state of affairs and to point out that it had been topsy-turvy for his younger brother to be a rebellious teenager before he was. After all, he needed a chance to rebel too. I hoped that this way of prescribing the problem would work. At any rate, something did. His grades had gone from good to failing that fall, but he made such a quick recovery that by spring he was accepted in the college of his choice.

But an even bigger surprise was Harry. When he came back from camp, he was truly a changed character. He had won the camp award for Most Personal Improvement. He was acting responsible, behaved with decorum, and was no longer harassing people in his family or anywhere else. The main problem was that he had become his older brother’s ferocious little watch dog, yelling at his parents when they reprimanded him, and at the same time telling Michael to start working at school or else he would end up a bum.

That fall, Harry’s own school career began to go well. He had the good fortune to be assigned a tutor who was a natural therapist, and came into the few sessions we had calling himself “Dr. Harold,” and saying things like, “Dr. Harold says you mustn’t smoke.” The only time he reverted to his former behavior was when his father’s father died. Harry was impossible at the funeral, creating disruptions and clowning around in the most appalling way. But this behavior was short-lived. By the end of the year, Harry was routed into a normal tenth grade. He had some trouble at first, but soon adjusted.

There was one more tiny eruption that threatened to occur. Just when Harry and Michael were straightening out, the mother called to say that she was worried that Laura was not pursuing her studies as assiduously as she should. However, before a meeting could be set up, Laura had promised to reform. The major regret I had was that I had never made any real connection with Laura, the natural child. Not having any problems, she became invisible to me.

My experience with this family caused me to question some of my beliefs. Some family theorists predicted that if the problem child got better, the marital relationship would get worse. This did not happen. When asked about their personal issues, the parents said they had no substantial concerns and I believed them. However, I had read some research showing that older people give off clues about their death during the year before they die. The death of a grandfather will set all sorts of bells tolling, and I wondered if Harry’s rambunctious displays were not in response to a premonition of this sort. The mother’s father had died in 1978 and the father’s mother in 1979, just before we saw the family, so there was already a plague of deaths. Also, I thought that Harry was particularly sensitive to the vulnerability of his father. One comment jumped out at me while I was going over the tapes. When I asked what would happen if Harry became an angel overnight, Laura had jokingly remarked that “Dad would have a heart attack,” and Harry had passionately concurred.

In our last session, we asked a question of each family member except Michael, who was away at college: “What would each of you have to do to bring the situation back to where it was when you first came into this room?” This was a strategic intervention based on the idea was that if you prescribed a relapse, it was less likely to happen. It was also a way of obtaining evidence of change, and the answers were interesting in that respect. The mother said she would have to go back to thinking she could handle everything. The father said that he would have to go back to not airing disagreements openly. Laura said that she would have to scream whenever Harry came near her. And Harry said that he would have to go back to being a “nasty rotten kid,” but added that this would be difficult because of “Dr. Harold.”

One interesting difference was that instead of doing everything as a bloc, with Harry as a centripetal force, there was a marked weakening of fixed alliances. Michael, when not at college, was often at the house of his girlfriend. Laura and her mother had taken a trip together. The father and Harry had gone off together too. There seemed to be greater flexibility for all. I wondered if this were not the hallmark of the elusive “happy family.” The coalitions, as we called them then, seemed looser, and the individuals seemed freed up too.

In saying goodbye, I thanked Dr. Harold for taking such good care of Harry, and was rewarded with a manly handshake and a charmingly exaggerated “God bless me!” When we contacted the family a year later, everyone was doing well. The entire course of these conversations had lasted over a period of a year and a half and included thirteen family sessions and two couple sessions at approximately monthly intervals. There were also two individual sessions with Michael.

So much for brief therapy. The Milan team was now describing its work as a kind of long brief therapy, with separations of two weeks to a month between sessions. If the family was indeed a many-layered kinship system (as it certainly was in Italy), an intervention would take a much longer time to percolate through it than conventional therapies allowed for (Selvini et al., 1980b). I myself had become more and more enthralled with the unusual thinking and unorthodox practices of this group. I began to make yearly pilgrimages to Milan to sit behind the one-way mirror at the Centro per lo Studio della Famiglia in Via Leopardi, No. 19, and watch the team at work. In the next chapter, I will describe the way Peggy Penn and I developed a new team at Ackerman, which was organized more strictly along Milan lines, and which allowed us to explore the strengths and also the limits of this fascinating approach.