The 8th issue of the electronic magazine Systemic Thinking & Psychotherapy could be called a “special issue”. And this is because it has particularities that exceed its usual structure and format.
Luigi Onnis passed away last Christmas night, at the age of 71. He left us as silently and discreetly as he was in life: discreet and decent. He was born and raised in Sardinia at the end of World War 2. The island of the Berlinguer family may have had an effect on his character: low-key but also decisive and dynamic.
The subject is fascinating and stimulates almost infinite reflections. Any approach will be necessarily limited and incomplete. My approach prefers to look on our common collective identity as human beings. It is divided into two parts. The first one could be called "what makes us be what we are?" and the second "what makes us be what we don’t want to be?”
In the reflected sunlight of the small kitchen, my 95-year-old mother and myself are silently stripping green beans, the others are asleep, the whole neighborhood is quiet, it's the siesta of summer.
The dialogue took place at the conference organized by the German systemic association Systemische Gesellschaft: "...Alles wirkliche Leben ist Begegnung..." (Martin Buber) SYSTEMISCH BEGEGNET WISSENSCHAFT at March 3-5/2016 in Dresden
My talk will be about a family systems approach in adult psychiatry, particular in hospital settings and also to some degree in community settings. And this is what I could speak about this morning, but I must not speak about it all. I would like to give you three brief introductions upon the history and current situation of psychiatry in Germany, and briefly about the actual situation of systemic therapy in Germany.
My decades-long contact with a great number of professionals in our field has offered me the possibility to observe the phenomena and the trends concerning the role we play in contemporary social reality.
Systemic thinking has caused a revolution in clinical practice, through the paradigm shift (Kuhn, 2000) from the individual and internal medicine to relationships and broader social networks.
“The pattern that connects” is the phrase used by Gregory Bateson in order to declare his faith in the existence of a common -connecting- pattern concerning form (isomorphism) as well as function, amongst the living creatures (creatura).
