w10 theories video Integrating Systemic and Psychoanalytic Therapy

Hello, and welcome to the AAMFT podcast, your all-access pass to the latest news developments and thought leaders in the world of systemic therapy. Strive to relate, educate, and innovate. one episode at a time. I'm your host, Dr. Eli Karam, and we're brought to you by the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy. Our podcast explores topics that relationship-based therapists care about. In addition to featuring unique conversations and interviews with established experts, our show provides information and education on direct practice and emerging trends in the MFT profession. For more information, please visit us at aamft.org. Thanks for listening and enjoy the show. Eli, back with you on the AAMFT podcast. Today, we welcome our first husband and wife combo to the show. And when I think of melding systemic thinking with a more psycho dynamic object relations approach, I only think of two people, Jill and David Scharf. They have had a great personal and professional collaboration over the years and you get to hear all about their story and still even in... Semi-retirement so active and so vital and as I'll say in the interview, you know, we often think of the world of object relations kind of removed from our classic systemic models and thinking of family therapy. When I think of their work, I think of working within the mind and between people. So it's a within and between approach. I'll tell you a little bit about Jill and David. Jill and David are the founders of the International Psychotherapy Institute, which you'll hear them talk about, and I'll talk a lot more about at the end of the show. David is a former vice president of the International Association for Couple and Family Psychoanalysis. He was a clinical professor of psychiatry. Georgetown. He was a teaching analyst at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute and former president of the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists, which we know as ASECT. Both Jill and David are frequent presenters throughout the years at AMFT and clinical fellows. David received his medical degree from Harvard, his residency training in Massachusetts Mental Health Center, and his child psychiatry fellowship at Beth Israel Hospital and Children's Hospital in Washington. Jill, in addition to co-founding with David the International Psychotherapy Institute, was a professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University Medical School and a teaching analyst at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. She and David have maintained a private practice right outside of D.C. in Chevy Chase, Maryland. And you know them from their many, many collaborations and books, great co-authors, including Object Relations Family Therapy. Object Relations Couple Therapy and what I remember reading in graduate school, Sharp Notes, Primer of Object Relations Therapy, and that's had two editions. The latest was in 2005. I've had many other publications too. Both of them, they have a vital couple life, which you'll hear about, and Jill is actually very involved in dance and theater. back after the interview. Okay, I'm so happy to be joined on the podcast today by Jill and David Scharf. These are a couple that are both professionally and personally linked, and I have been wanting to interview them for a long time for both those reasons, because this is a favorite part of the AAMFT interview is to learn about the person behind the model. So the first question I always ask Jill and David is, like, how did you get to MFT? Because both of you are... MDs by trade, psychiatrists, classically trained, psychoanalytic. Sometimes people think that that is a world away from thinking systemically and doing the practice of marriage and family therapy. And I wanted to interview you guys because you have, over the years of your career, found a way to integrate both. But tell us, before we talk about the personal, tell us how you got even interested in working with couples and families coming from a background that is not necessarily related to that. As a psychiatrist, I was interested in working with... adolescence, particularly at that time. I mean since then I've also worked with children. But because of that I really had to be involved with parents and it was a short step from that to notice that parents are part of a family, as is the child, and that there is that whole unit to be concerned with, not just parents. being treated by one person and the child being treated by another. So that was a natural segue into family therapy for me. And I later became an analyst to improve my family work. That was the reason for it. I wanted more of an in-depth understanding of unconscious processes. So Jill, you thought actually systemically, you started working with part of the system with kids and you're like, I got to know what's going on with the parents and the family. And then the actual analytic part. came after that. Yes, it did. Well, mine was a little different. I went to medical school intending to do analytic training. That was the only route allowed in the United States at that time, even though Freud thought you didn't need to be a doctor to be an analyst, which is true. But in medical school, one of my teachers, a guy named Les Havens, exposed me to the family research that was going on at Massachusetts Mental Health Center with Mishler and Waxler, and I just thought it was fascinating. So before I even did residency, I was interested in families. And that was at a time when there was no division between thinking about families and thinking about individuals psychodynamically and psychoanalytically because there was no field of family therapy. Give us a date here, David, approximately. Well, I did my... So when I first heard about this was about 1965. When I was a resident between 1967 and 1970, people were just beginning to be invested in families, but it was long before systemic family therapy split off from analysis. And one of my early experiences was that I was seeing a family as a resident, so this would have been 1968 or so, and Nathan Ackerman came to visit. And of course, he had not the idea of rejecting. analysis or splitting them apart, but simply that analysts had been neglecting families. And he interviewed a family of mine. Now he was a brilliant interviewer. Of course he shocked the hell out of them and they never came back after that, but that wasn't really the point, although it was dramatic. The point was that it was possible to understand families using analytic concepts, not the ones that were exclusive to individuals, but the ones that gave us an internal family system. idea that the families were not just there in the outer world interacting but were installed inside each person in the family and that idea really I thought was very powerful. Well we were both trained in object relations theory which it I mean it took a step beyond Freud to offer a way of thinking that was more cybernetic. I think object relations is often misunderstood by MFTs in the sense that It is the integration of these two worlds we're talking about. It lets you work both within and between, if you know what I mean. Exactly. Good way to put it. Yeah. So you all knew that early on. And I think Nathan Ackerman, what a great person to watch doing that. Our field, as you all know, is marriage and family therapy. It was a ragtag group of professionals from desperate disciplines, but certainly many psychiatrists who knew that there was more out there than... Freudian thinking. So the object relations part spoke to both of you. I am curious, kind of parallel to this is your professional evolution, but also your personal evolution. How did you all meet? And I'd love to hear that story because I know nothing about that and then you're both personal and professional collaboration. Was that there from the start or did that evolve over time? Well, we really were trained in very separate countries, in separate institutions. Our lives were quite different. Jill, you were from the UK, right? Yes, from the UK. I'm actually Scottish. Yeah, so I trained in Aberdeen and Edinburgh before I moved to London for specialist training at the Tavistock Centre. And it was there that I came upon David, who was doing a year's sabbatical at that time. We met in a group relations training event, which is also part of the history of our interest in family therapy. We were both very interested in unconscious dynamics in groups and in institutions. Of course, one very important institution is the family. So learning about the functioning of groups was another way of expanding the uniquely useful bridging aspects of object relations theory to apply to family work. People that have never heard of Tavistock, I mean, it has this great connotation. And obviously, there's many parallels between understanding group processes and family therapy. And certainly, the group therapy movement led to family therapy. Talk about that must have been a very rich experience to meet each other. Yeah. in that type of setting. Talk about, for those that don't know about Tavistock, how important that was to shaping our field. Well, the Tavistock is the British sort of mecca for object relations thinking, that is, for thinking about the way that the family influences development and is always part of theoretical thinking. And it really is the main place in the English-speaking world that has promulgated these ideas, both in individual and family. and group ways of thinking. So that I had discovered some of the British theorists with some teachers who had been there while I still was in the States, and I thought I would then try to do a sabbatical. in London at the Tavistock before getting sucked into analytic training, after which it's almost impossible to move anywhere because you're sucked into a long-term lifestyle, professional lifestyle. So I went to the Tavistock to really immerse myself in some of the same people who were the teachers and thinkers that Jill had simply grown up with. She didn't know any better. She didn't even know it was called object relations. It just was the way thinking was. But for me, it was a kind of pill. pilgrimage, which changed everything about my professional life simply to be there. And I agree with what Jill said, that these interests in groups and institutions and families were all of a theoretical piece, because as far as we can see, they're all on a continuum. So the individual is connected to the family, to the wider group, to the society, through a series of links. And that was a feeling we always had, although more recently... recently we've discovered a theoretician who preceded all of us, including the people we'd gone to the Tavistock. Well, you piqued my interest on that one. We'll get back to the couple. Tell me who that theorist is. Okay. So about, oh, seven or eight years ago, our South American colleagues said to us, and we have many South American colleagues, they said, by the way, you don't know the work of Enrique Pichon-Riviere, who formulated the idea of the link as an interactive link, not not simply in the unconscious, but between people in their current interaction. That is equally important in thinking about families and couples. And he had been working in institutions and with families in the 40s and 50s. And actually, all of the systemic therapists who migrated from South America were taught by Pichon-Riviere. And he really is the inventor of family therapy. And he did so in the 40s and 50s and was teaching people like... Karl Osluski. I don't know if Mnuchin actually worked with him, but he certainly was influenced by him. And many of the people that we regard as founders were influenced by him earlier than family therapy was even thought of in the English-speaking world. So I've been part of, both of us have been part of, trying to bring his original writings to the attention of the English-speaking world because they are so helpful. Yeah, but one problem with him was he didn't write that much. But he didn't write. A lot of what's written down is from people that studied with him. From his students. Sort of writing from notes they took of the wonderful things he said. So it's all sort of had to be reconstructed. I think it's why he hasn't been given his due. If I was going to find Riviere's work, where would I even look now? Well, now we've gotten it translated into a book from Carnac or Routledge that's edited by... Bye. three of us, Roberto Lasso, Leah Setton, and myself. So it is now, and it's called The Link in Psychoanalysis, the pioneering work of Enrique Pichon-Riviere. So now it's really available. I also did an article in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis summarizing these findings and comparing them to contemporary object relations theory. And this now has become a building block so that our colleagues throughout the world, actually. the ones we work most closely with, and including at the Tavistock, have now begun to incorporate this language into their current language. That's wonderful. So this, if he was in the 40s and the 50s, did the British school and what we most commonly associate with object relations, did they know of his work or were those two kind of segmented populations? They couldn't read his work. delight but because it was only in spanish he could read theirs but he he drew from fairbairn and klein very liberally and uh usefully but they did not know of his work actually it's come into the into european thinking uh through the french and italians more recently so important people like renee caisse and uh antonino farrow have really drawn liberally on ideas about the link and now we are as well so it's it's in our our latest writing most most thoroughly in a book called the interpersonal unconscious that we did in 2011 great I know we're gonna talk about a little about that later so okay take us back we're in we're in Tavistock you're at your sabbatical you all have this powerful connection around the work is it love at first sight or does that develop over time pretty close Pretty close. These group relations conferences are very powerful, and you gave us a way of getting a good core sample about each other. Well, that's the truth. We were in the same small group as it happened. So, yeah, at the same time, you know, I was applying for a job at the Tavistock in the department where David was seconded for his sabbatical. It so happened that at that conference, and I'd been to two or three others. of them before. You know, they're residential. They go in for two whole weeks of intense learning. They're just amazing. People can hardly afford to do them anymore. It's too bad. I think they still go in Britain. Really formational. Anyway, other members of that department, including the chairman of that department, these people were attending the conference in other small groups. It was a very extensive job interview. You took the words out of my mouth again. Well, that's happened before. Sorry. I mean, it was that. that and then also it was this like it was kind of an extended interview of david as a future possibility anyway we were not it was not struck at first i thought you were kind of a brash pushy american and that was right that hasn't always changed but but there were also many other wonderful features which proved compelling over time and i imagine you get when do you get if you meet then how long Are you together before you get married? Well, I left the Tavistock. I was there for a year, but I left just before Jill came to the Tavistock. She did get the job at the Tavistock, so she had a year of what would have been probably a four-year appointment. It was. took a chance and came to the US where she had to do her, not just her board, she had to do her licensing material all over again, including anatomy and physiology. Although she was already registered as a specialist in the UK. Okay. So I am grateful she was willing to do that. I don't know if I would have done it. Now, did you come over? I mean, long distance relationships are very difficult. So you were a year apart. Did you come over knowing that you were going to be together for the long haul, Jill? No, no, I didn't. The only reason I really came was that I thought it had a fair chance of working, but I would need time to see. But I covered myself by getting a green card and also by getting the job of my dreams here, which was to work with John Zinner. and Roger Shapiro, which that was an appointment, not an appointment, an interview that you set up for me, David. Good for me. There was no job, but they liked me, and they said they would make a job for me. I think those names, John Sinner and Roger Shapiro. Yeah, tell our listeners about, for not being familiar. Well, I'd been reading about them in England, in London at the time. Yeah, I'd read their articles in the International Journal, and they're absolutely superb. They are clinicians and also beautiful writers. Well, they're both analysts who were doing family therapy research at NIMH with Lyman Wynn. So they were writing analytic family therapy studies of adolescents and their families. Evidence-based. Which were evidence-based, highly researched, wonderful articles. And no one was doing that at the time with an analytic base. So that was groundbreaking, yeah. And actually Helm Stierlin was part of their research group. Later he became systemic, but he was an analyst, and he was working with them analytically. So that was a very powerful research group. John Zinner had... been actually a friend of mine before. He and I both moved to Washington because of the Vietnam War because this was a way of doing something useful instead of being drafted basically. And so they became our very close colleagues in those years. Jill actually worked for them but they treated her as a peer and she ran an adolescent unit for them for a year. She founded and ran an adolescent unit. And then she, because she was forced to still be a trainee for the licensing requirement, she trained in child psychiatry, which I had already done. And that meant we really shared an even broader base of our understanding of families because so many family therapists do not have child training and can't deal with the young children. And at this time now we're in the 70s, right? Well, Jill came in 74. Okay. us through the through those the mid-70s again so this is what we think of the golden age of mft so are you thinking of yourself if i had to ask if i had to ask you uh about your professional identity this time would you say you were a psychiatrist would you say you were an analyst would you say you were a family therapist how would you describe uh to your colleagues what your professional identity was at the time and then how would you describe it now well i think we're we're definitely known as couple and family therapists That's what we write about. That's what we think about. Everything funnels into that large category. But we do identify with all the other things. We are psychiatrists. We are psychoanalysts. We see lots of individual patients analytically, including four times a week. Jill has founded a psychoanalytic training program. But in that training program, we want our analytic trainees to know family therapy. Yeah. Absolutely. We include it as part of it. But I'm going to ask you a lot about that because we have a lot of therapists in training and young professionals listening to this podcast of how you integrate both. But let's stay with the timeline. So now you're personally connected. you have uh we get married in 1975 after a year yeah a year of probation here led to marriage in october of 75 when do you start i mean when people think of you all they think of all the great publications you've done you know around couples and families one of my favorites is still sharp notes by the way and preparing for any exam that has all of the terms a beautiful easy to comprehend uh it takes psychoanalytic terms and explains them to practitioners but those were professional collaborations yeah good you up to date you like there is a second edition of that book really a primer of object relations what what so what would I notice is the biggest differences in the second edition oh it's got about 30% more material and brought up to date trauma material on chaos theory material on attachment so a lot of couples that's how they they start They start by their professional correlations by writing together. And you're all, I mean, I can't tell. Your writing style is so nice. It meshes. I can't tell who does what when I read your all stuff. So that's one way to do it. But how did it start? Obviously, I want you to talk about the International Psychotherapy Institute, the IPI, and the evolution and how that started. But I'm guessing you worked together a long time before you started that in the 90s. It's way before that. The first writing project was the research into school leaving that you had begun in London and I took over after you had left and then you wrote the book on this on the sexual relationship. I had some influence over that in terms of the Fairbairn chap. writing about early adolescent school leavers, that is not delinquents but those who left as soon as they could at 16, and the family issues as well as the individual and institutional school issues about that. We'd each done about a year of research on that and I did a little more in the United States. But out of that developed a group-based training for teachers which we had the opportunity to do as a kind of modification of the group relations model for educational institutions. We did at American University, we did it at a school for learning difficult learning kids, Mark Twain School. That model really became the model for our training in psychotherapy at the International Psychotherapist. At our own institute. But that's jumping ahead to nineteen... But that was the first writing we did also was about that training program. Yeah, that's right. That was... cool written. But we were teaching family and couple therapy together at the Washington School of Psychiatry starting in 1977 I think. You were there maybe a year or two sooner and that was was a very successful program teaching family and couple therapy from an analytic point of view it included john center and roger shapiro on the faculty and other colleagues uh uh here uh and during that year during those years i wrote a book called the sexual relationship which was very very counter to i imagine the behavioral base masters and johnson thing that was going around in pop culture at the time so it was it was looking at the sexual relationship from a internal lens. That's true, although I was incorporating Masterson-Johnson kind of behavioral treatment from an analytic point of view in my treatment of couples for sexual difficulty, and I still do. And I have personally remained interested in the sexology. field and there are a few of those people who are less behavioral and will listen to the psychodynamics of sex so i have a degree of respect in among some of those people and i still continue to learn about it, of course, as that field has evolved enormously as well. After I did that book, we then, then we really decided we would do the book that I'd been wanting to write since I was a resident, since I was a child fellow, on object relations family therapy. And we, we wrote that book, I guess it, well, we wrote it in... 86, was it? 85, 86, it got published in 87. We wrote it in 85, 86, and it was published in 87. So that was really... really our first major thing we'd done together before that we'd written some articles separately but that was really our first we got a lot of encouragement from alan german remember we did the late great alan german yeah he was just so great to us he was terrific he was terrific i think that's good for our listeners to know that even though this was kind of groundbreaking integration and you all were passionate about it that it wasn't it wasn't an easy sell necessarily to start well alan Alan and another, Michael Kahn, another systemic therapist, were reviewers for the publisher that I went to first. And they gave it very good, strong reviews and said publish it. the publisher found another reviewer who said, this is crap. He didn't want to publish it because he knew it wouldn't be a big seller. It's not going to be like a big course adoption for Psychology 101 or something like that. Anyhow, we went to Jason Aronson who took it on the spot actually. He read part of the first chapter and he called us and said yes. And he then promoted our work and he not only promoted our work in our future writings, but he used, I don't know if you remember this little magazine he had, Psychotherapy News or something like that, which was mailed to thousands of people. Yeah and frontline clinicians would read that. People that wouldn't read an academic journal. would read a publication like that. Yes, exactly. And he gave us free advertising for the book tour promoting our books, which he put us up. He wanted that book tour and he actually invited us out to his house with our children, which I felt suspicious of, like why would he want to include these little kids, but he did. Around the pool he started recruiting them to persuade us to do this book tour. on the grounds that they would earn money for packaging leaflets or something. For selling the books. He sold it to the whole family. He sold it to the kids. Yeah, it was really a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun. And he's become and still is a good friend. So this is interesting in that you knew you had, going back to Tavistock, you knew you had this like-minded thinking, and then you knew you could write together through these projects. At what point do you start doing, if at all, this co-therapy together because I've seen you all work in several training videos and it's actually I love it because you're not you know it's not a group think you're both you can very share your interpretations and challenge each other and kind of unbalance the system so to speak but I'm wondering at this point are you actually you're writing about it and you're passionate about it are you actually doing the work together well this is the big secret which is actually we really don't work together we we do do it for video purposes, for teaching purposes. And anytime anyone invites us to come and do it in the... Open, let's say in a big conference for a demonstration interview, we'll do it. And we quite like doing it. But in our practice, it's just too expensive for families, and we can just as well do the work ourselves. But for training, it's really useful, because you can show the countertransference reactions to the transferences in the family, because they get displayed between the co-therapists. Yes. So we had the really good fortune when I worked at the military medical school, which is here in Bethesda, of having this studio set up where we could interview couples and families. And we were doing one almost every week. Not all of them were worth developing into teaching tapes. And we have hundreds of tapes that never see the light of the day. So we got to do this. And then, of course, the editing of that, as you may know, Eli, because you're going to edit this series, takes an enormous amount of time. So a lot of work goes into a tape, not because you can't show somebody a whole hour of a tape. It's just too long. So we had this opportunity over a period of several years of having access to these marvelous studios, and the crews were terrific. And also the kind of families that they brought in through the clinics. Yes, so it was a real diversity. of families. What an amazingly clinically rich time. So how do we get from there to this idea, and I believe 1994, of starting the International Psychotherapy Institute, also known as the IPI? So I was directing the Washington School of Psychiatry for seven years, where Jill was also a senior teacher. And we started our program there. But at a certain point, it became clear that there were internal... internal conflicts really about the money for the institution, which I felt the faculty were not being fair to the institution because the faculty were being paid especially for supervision but the institution was really struggling. So I left. with some degree of conflict and we continued the program that we had started there which I directed at first and then Jill had taken over and we well the program you mean the object relations theory and practice program right which we then used to start our own institution and several of our most valued faculty members came with us to this new institution whose fate was to be determined and And one huge advantage of splitting and having to start over was that we had realized even earlier while we were at the Washington School that there were people coming from all over the country who wanted to train with us, some of whom could really start kind of satellite chapters and be part of a larger institution. And Jill said, you know, now that we're doing this ourselves, we're free to do that. And I hadn't put those things together. And David, these were people from all different. disciplines right? They were yes Eli because because we always have had a very interdisciplinary idea about this so social workers, counselors, MFTs, pastoral counselors, nurses, nurse practitioners. You were very inclusive. Anybody that wanted to learn more about object relations you were you were willing to train. Yeah oh absolutely and of course it's true that most psychiatrists now are not interested in psychotherapy so it's a good thing where it's psychologists do, by the way. So it's a good thing that we have our colleagues in all these other disciplines. And for every discipline, the serious psychotherapy training in family or individual is after graduation. It's after the terminal degree. So it really made no difference. And while people brought different backgrounds that offered different assets, they could work really fruitfully together. Now, we've seen quite a few changes in who applies for the training over the years. Well, let me ask you this. because you're reading my mind. So many times, and these are the type of questions that I got from young professionals as preparing for this interview. They get their MFT training, and it's usually steeped to exposure, not necessarily depth, but breadth of models, your classic models, and you're working in a very behavioral or cognitive behavioral way. But they get through their training, and they say, I know I've lifted some constraints, but I get stuck. with certain client systems and i want to go deeper and usually that deeper are these historical family of our origin or object relations way of working so unfortunately in many mft training programs as i am a faculty member and train mfts all over the country you get a chapter and usually the chapter around object relations is very broad and not not necessarily meaty or technique driven so many young uh mfts uh do not know where to go or what that training would look like so let's let's assume i have gone through my mft training i've been in the field and i want to go deeper in my work with my clients and this is where you know you can talk about your training model or how you think object relations should be built in or integrated more into the way we train mfts i'm curious to your thoughts on that okay well in the old days People came for training who were already trained, like five, ten years out. They just wanted to learn the object relations part of things. Correct. They'd been doing it their way for a long time. Exactly. Now we're getting people like the ones you're mentioning. The recently graduated LMFT or social worker. The others, and this may not be true of LMFT, they don't get very much analytic instruction at all. So it's all new to them. They're young professionals. They don't have a big income. at their disposal and they're really at the beginning of learning about the unconscious and its various manifestations. So your LMFT would come to us. We aren't going to offer them a lot of techniques about how to reach the depth of the family system. What we're going to do is give them instruction, of course, lectures, workshops, clinical case conferences, videos, but the meat of the of the training is the small group where they discuss what they are learning. And they do this with a group leader who's trained to deepen the conversation so that what they're doing is integrating the cognitive material they've been given with the emotional response they have to it and the group process that develops as a result of dealing with these primitive mental mechanisms. Yeah, that's beautiful. That is a full circle. Takes you back to Tavistock where you all met, right? Absolutely. Yes. Well, this is, and yes, you're right. We're right back where we were because in developing a group method of education, what we discovered very early on was that if you have an open systems group discussion after a lecture, the issues that came up in the lecture will be in the group in an experiential way. And so then people are there, have the possibility of learning from a meeting. immediate experience. So if we teach, for instance, just to give you an example of how one person puts her interior world into her partner through projection, and we teach a lecture about that, and then six or eight or ten people go into a small group experience, that will be happening in the group. And they can learn about it from inside with the help of the group leader who's trained to really pull that out. And so then they can really evaluate a concept, decide whether it's valid for them, decide how it applies, and often have really a very high emotional impact kind of experience in the group itself. And it's a way of teaching and learning the concepts. It's also a way of developing yourself as an instrument. You learn your own defensive process. You learn how you connect to others. You learn what things resonate with you and what don't. And you just become more able to use your own body and your own mind for the clinical work. It's not a matter of applying techniques of this or that or the next thing. It's just being a person who is fully present. I like how you say that because I think some people that have a very cursory understanding or young therapists, they see the objects relations chapter in the book and it is not. As you said, it's not technique driven. There's not a lot of things in there, but it's more of a process. And you can teach that in this parallel way. So you learn to use yourself as a therapist, as an instrument. And the more attuned you are to yourself, the better you will be when you are practicing from this framework with clients. Having said that, we have taken a lot of time trying to spell out. What it is we're doing with our own therapeutic instrument. In our books, we've really tried to make that something that can be passed on. I noticed quite early on with the systemic family therapists, particularly those who would use paradoxical instructions, that they're absolutely brilliant. And you could trace how they had got to that particular point of view from a deep unconscious. appreciation of what's going on in the family. But I always had the feeling it was hard for them to teach that. Because they were saying the unconscious doesn't matter so once you amputate the unconscious, you can't, even though they learned it from analytic training, it wasn't just Mnuchin, Selphie Palazzoli and Dolphy, all these people had analytic training, but then when they amputated that training for their trainees, they couldn't really then teach it. So I think that's, it's really been a pity, the splitting off of psychodynamics and family therapy. My mentor, Doug Sprinkle, would say kind of a one of the errors of our field is throwing out the baby with the bathwater and that's an example of that to to in the need to make themselves so different from psychoanalytics that these these classically uh trained early systemic thinkers that they didn't want to do what you also naturally have done which is integrate their past into their to their current because there really is the connection as you're demonstrating this hour is not that difficult it's not that big a leap to make from the within to the between as i said um Now, this is interesting in the sense that if I, because a lot of people are like, oh man, I want to go and do this. Is this like a, am I having to take a sabbatical? Can I do this within the context if I am a frontline clinician in a private or a group practice? How much time am I blocking out to get this training? Well, thank you for that lead in. That's a soft pitch, I'd say. Okay, so our institution has been set up for distance learning. And what we do is we Even if people enroll in all of our training, they would come for a week in the summer and four long weekends. And in between, all the training is by distance training, say at a once weekly basis or so. Now we use the platform Zoom. but you know it started with Skype of course or even the telephone but now it's so easy and so effective to use these distance learning techniques that we've got people not only all over the country but all over the world that we're training who don't have to be here that often and they certainly don't have to take a sabbatical themselves to do it. Well there is a range of degree of involvement for instance you can just attend one weekend and see what you think of it or you can attend an online course and never come here in person. Or you can sign up for the whole shebang and do a two-year certificate training or analytic training, which is more like four years. I think the thing that's going to be most relevant to people listening to this podcast would be the course in couple therapy that I run that has 15 sessions a year. It's approximately twice a month, not on a regular, you know, the dates are set out ahead during the academic year from September to May, where we explore mainly couple therapy from a variety of perspectives. And it goes along, I mean the first three years of that course we made into a book called Psychoanalytic Couple Therapy that Jill and I edited, but bringing in the major teachers in the field of analytic couple therapy. So that is kind of the textbook that is the background for the course. International authors. They're international authors, many of them from the Tavistock, because we did that course in partnership with the Tavistock Marital Studies Unit in the beginning. And we continue to have international teachers. So now I chair an international group from the International Psychoanalytic Association devoted to psychodynamic couple and family therapy. And those teachers... I'm sure that'll be a big surprise to Eli's listeners. There is now a group of analysts who are really devoted to couple and family therapy. That's wonderful. Now, if that last question was a soft pitch, I'll ask you a hard one in the sense that... You know, I'm all for spreading the word and using technology to do that. I think there's also something about what we do as relational healers that is very face-to-face. So you told us about this very powerful experience of the group in this Tavistock-based training that you all have adapted. How can I get the same if I am just doing this from distance learning? It seems like that group process is so important to making yourself an instrument from this object relations framework. How can I get that? I think that's harder. But I have to say that we have recently found that we can have those group affective experiences online. Yes, but we haven't done it with people who didn't also come and spend some time. That's why I like your model of going for a week, because if I can have that and have that frame to go with, and then I can use that, these online experiences to probably build into that. And I think that's the best when I think of training people. Once I make a connection with them, Then we can do face-to-face then we can do it from distance so of your people that train there how many come for that intensive week Before they get the rest of the training. Well all the people who train in depth with us all the certificate all the certificate programs Originally were a week in the summer and four long weekends a year for at least two years and Then doing the groups on online where you can you know, this is a small group so you can see people you already know as you listen to them all on the screen. That's okay, but we wouldn't want to do that really without having worked together in person face to face, just as you're saying. Now we do have more more programs now where people don't have to come to Washington to be with us in person because travel has gotten so expensive at the same time that the online communication has gotten so much better. But really to train in depth, you need to spend some time face-to-face. I think that's true. I mean, this is so fascinating. Now, to listen to you all, it is hard to believe that, you know, five decades plus. Into this field you all are as vital as you were when you started which in doing these I'm a study therapist factors So what makes and model developers that in there is this common factor the passion for doing it? I mean you all could easily Retire if you wanted to could do what you want, but you are still doing the work So these are kind of legacy questions. What do you think all these years later still drives you? And then what if anything do you have left to achieve in this next? portion of your career Well, I'll go first because I'm driving a little harder than Jill at this point, who has decided she would also like to do more dancing and piano. But I've actually, having handed over our institute to our very able successors, and we continue to teach very actively in the institute. And it is in the third generation of leadership now. It's in the third generation of leadership. Was that hard or easy to transfer? I imagine. That's your baby. That's hard. It's hard. In fact, only now am I giving up being chair of the board. And yes, it's a loss, but it needs to happen if the institution is going to thrive, of course. But what I've done is to develop training programs in China and Russia. So I'm safely out from, I don't have to step on my colleagues feet. I can go to other places and I'm very, very interested in the cultural differences in Russia and China where people are very equal. eager to learn this stuff. It surprises everybody who learns that psychoanalysis is hot stuff in China. It's really the theory that they value the most. And we have the only training program in couple and family psychoanalytic therapy there. So we've got a niche to ourselves. In Russia, the same thing's true. They've embraced psychoanalysis, but they've kept it very small. And nobody else has really applied it to couple and family in the... way we do of really starting a training program. Almost like over there in Russia and China, it's like it was in the 70s here. It's a whole new world. Yes, exactly. That's right. And so that's a treat for us. And it also gives us a chance to share that experience with our colleagues from IPI, from the International Psychotherapy Institute, who are delighted to get to come along and join in the teaching. You know, it's also nice to hear sometimes people put an international behind their institute or their... their training facility and it's only a name only. You all truly are international. So, I mean, that is a natural outgrowth. What is it like teaching with the language barrier? Well, I don't speak either Russian or Chinese. Those are two hard ones to learn, yeah. So, we have terrific translators. And just this morning, before we did this interview, I was online with a group of 12 of the sort of senior students, junior faculty there. ...doing a case conference and I feel I know them even though we have a translator between us. Of course it's a translator we all know very well who we who's an integral to the process and is is a character in the field clearly and And it's a wonderful thing to do because the translation isn't just language. It's our different ways of thinking, which we value and which we learn from. This teaching in China and Russia, it's not... a colonial kind of outreach. It's at the invitation of partners in China and Russia. So we go along work with them, learn their culture, and we use the group affective model with them with translation, which I mean it's kind of mind-blowing that it actually works. But and and one of the things that drives both of us I think is how much we learn from them. Yeah. Because it sets all our assumptions about Western culture. kind of on their head. Individuality, it's very different in China, where the thinking is grouped. So it really is a wonderful learning opportunity. So you were asking what drives us at this point. What's driving me, other than my interest in other artistic pursuits, is my interest in technology. Although I myself am kind of a technophobe, I'm very interested in what technology can do for communication. around the world and I've invested a lot in thinking about teleanalysis, teletherapy. Can you do this with couples? Yes you can. Could you do it with families? I'm sure you could although I have not personally done that at a distance with the whole family. But it's an emerging, it's a leading edge, it's an emerging field. There's so many controversies about it, criticisms about it, it's not confidential. it's not private, it's this, it's that, it's not real, it's not in person, but you find that if you have met the person in person, an established process in a relationship, this can be contained over a screen. You look at a picture on the screen, but you're relating to the actual presence of the person that you're talking about. you connect to virtually while looking at their picture on the screen. And what's most interesting about it is that you then can begin to learn what is essential about the traditional methods that we've been trained with. What is it that really continues to be effective when the conditions have changed? by having to be done through technology instead of being done in an office with the door closed. Well, also, the same is true for training. This kind of podcast, which would not have been possible 10 years ago or 15 years ago, whatever it is, is now can spread information and training in radically advanced ways. And I think that what you're just saying, and this is a commonality, and again, talking to so many other leaders in the field who are doing this podcast, is how to take their original ideas and to use technology instead of thinking of it as a constraint to how the work was originally done. See it as something that can enhance and spread the message and update. the way we think and the way we connect, both with other therapists and with our potential clients. So when you think of how you want to be remembered, and you are still passionate, you still have lots of interest, but how you want the field of marriage and family therapy to remember you either individually or as a couple, what would that be? Eli, I'll answer that question. One thing we've been doing is distributing books worldwide for free. We have a publishing venture with our original publisher, Jason Aronson, called FreePsychotherapyBooks.org that has distributed a million... and a half downloads of books worldwide for free, psychotherapy books. So we just want people to know that that's also part of the technology wonder. And any of the listeners who happen to have written a marriage... marriage and family texts, even a chapter. We can do short books. If it's out of print, they can send it to us and it'll be distributed for free. There's no money in it, but there's no money in publishing anyway for the author. Right. Not our kind of publishing anyway. But it's a place that old books can go and reach new audiences. But new books too. And new books. That's wonderful, yes. So how do you want to be remembered, Jill? That's the question. You're not... I don't really think about that much, do you? Well, I don't know, Eli. The truth is probably none of us will be remembered 100 years from now, so we can't get too caught up in it. I think that we really have to take solace, if you will, since life is ephemeral, in enjoying it and feeling we're being productive and helping people now and passing it on in an immediate way to our students. And what will happen is things... evolve and change over a period of 20 or 50 years, I think none of us can be confident that our names will be written. Well, when I think of you all, I think of you as a great team, personally and professionally. And this interview has solidified that genuine and people that have, again, taken something that people thought could not integrate, kind of a here and now systems thinking with a more historical psychoanalytic object relations way of working and really have put it in a way that is easy to understand and as to disseminate it in this model i mean i want you here at the end to plug anything you want but i'm certainly somebody that has been in the field now for two decades i would love to kind of deepen my understanding of uh again object relations in this way of working so i'll i'll speak just personally as this is something i always think one great thing about our profession right as you age Most professions you can age out of. This is as long as you're vital. Like you are, the older you are, the more wisdom you have, the better time you have. This is one of the few professions that age makes you better and you don't have to age out of. So, I mean, I love that about this. We love that too. Well, that we continue to learn and that is a learning we can share with even our youngest students. And you get as much, I love what you said too, because I feel the same way. You get as much when you do these Specialist International Trainings. You learn as much from them as... they learn from you. So I think that is wonderful as well. Before you plug it, just the last last question. So this I always ask these people too, because sometimes like you all mentioned you know your kids. When I'm talking to these model developers, some of them their kids know nothing. I went to my late late great mentor Doug Sprinkles Memorial last year and his closest family members had no idea his contribution to the field. He was just an uncle or dad or A cousin. What do your kids think about what you've done or do they even care? Our oldest daughter, Kate, is in the field. She's picked up a niche specialty in divorce and really helping people be more collaborative in divorce. But she is a psychodynamic therapist. She knows. And she teaches for us and with us when she's available. The others, what you say is absolutely true. They've got no idea. and what they have taken from us, I think, is a kind of entrepreneurial interest in their own fields. Very different fields. But they really are go-getters and we love it that they are. One's in education. reform uh one's a lawyer who has become chair of the board of a women's shelter um one is an international journalist and has set up an international journal a journalistic project for reporting on women who are ignored worldwide and as and a son who's a young businessman who's trying to change the way the world eats yeah yeah so we love it we know more about what they do than they do about what we do i think so yeah you had four kids And I kept five. Wow. Why are you doing all this? That is amazing. So it's been wonderful to be with you this hour. Tell us again. Tell us about the IPI, where we can get this training, anything you want to plug here at the end. Okay. Well, we'd be happy. Well, first of all, we'd like you to come to a weekend. I'd love to. Sign me up. The next family one. I'd love to. Yeah. I'd love to. Yeah. Yeah. Please do. So it's theipi.org. is the website, T-H-E-I-P-I.org. We've just revamped our website, so it's much more informative than it used to be. Or anybody can feel free to get in direct touch with us, and maybe you can list the emails. Put it in the podcast link, yeah. Yeah, that would be great. Because we're really always happy to talk to somebody who thinks they might be interested. So even though you have all these other interests, international travel, and Jill doing her creative, you know. piano and dance you all will still do the training if somebody comes to you have a great staff but if somebody we have a new one starting that it always starts in june starts next week actually we have a new next one yeah and we have weekends all through the year and we think our our faculty are terrific and we are part of it we we are an a very active part of the faculty still so outstanding thank you so much for being part of the podcast thank you i thank you this has been fun to do Eli back with you boy that sure was fun I really enjoyed talking to Jill and David and you can tell not only how much passion they have for the work they do how much they still enjoy doing the work whether it be in the states or internationally. And they clearly have a vibrant marriage and have a lot of fun together. That's the first, but will not be the last of our couples on the podcast. A big couple coming up for you in a future installment. A little teaser there, if you will. But let me just reference again what we spent a good amount of time talking about in the interview with Jill and David founded and are still heavily involved in the training, the International Psychotherapy Institute. That is the theipi.org. You can find out everything about it. The IPI presents national certificate training programs that bring mental health professionals and institute faculty together to study with international contributors at the leading edge of the field. And the IPI offers quality programming in a variety of formats. There's the short courses, there's multi-year training programs, as you heard them talk about, and advanced clinical training. And there are also weekend conferences. which are very popular. Listener feedback, we love it and it really drives the episode. In fact, I'd wanted to talk to Jill and David for a while but I had gotten an email talking about how You can have a systemic focus, but also have an object relations or a psychoanalytic frame. And when I thought of that, I thought, well, I'm going to call Jill and David up, and they were so gracious, and I thanked them for the time. You can drop me a line at info at elikaram.com. That's I-N-F-O at E-L-I-K-A-R-A-M.com. Find me on Twitter at Dr. Eli Lai. You can follow the AMFT at the AAMFT. The hashtag is always stay systemic. And until next time, my friends, stay systemic.

I'm your host, Dr. Eli Karam, and we're brought to you by the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy. Our podcast explores topics that relationship-based therapists care about. In addition to featuring unique conversations and interviews with established experts, our show provides information and education on direct practice and emerging trends in the MFT profession. For more information, please visit us at aamft.org.

Thanks for listening and enjoy the show. Eli, back with you on the AAMFT podcast. Today, we welcome our first husband and wife combo to the show. And when I think of melding systemic thinking with a more psycho dynamic object relations approach, I only think of two people, Jill and David Scharf.

They have had a great personal and professional collaboration over the years and you get to hear all about their story and still even in... Semi-retirement so active and so vital and as I'll say in the interview, you know, we often think of the world of object relations kind of removed from our classic systemic models and thinking of family therapy. When I think of their work, I think of working within the mind and between people.

So it's a within and between approach. I'll tell you a little bit about Jill and David. Jill and David are the founders of the International Psychotherapy Institute, which you'll hear them talk about, and I'll talk a lot more about at the end of the show.

David is a former vice president of the International Association for Couple and Family Psychoanalysis. He was a clinical professor of psychiatry. Georgetown. He was a teaching analyst at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute and former president of the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists, which we know as ASECT. Both Jill and David are frequent presenters throughout the years at AMFT and clinical fellows.

David received his medical degree from Harvard, his residency training in Massachusetts Mental Health Center, and his child psychiatry fellowship at Beth Israel Hospital and Children's Hospital in Washington. Jill, in addition to co-founding with David the International Psychotherapy Institute, was a professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University Medical School and a teaching analyst at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. She and David have maintained a private practice right outside of D.C. in Chevy Chase, Maryland. And you know them from their many, many collaborations and books, great co-authors, including Object Relations Family Therapy.

Object Relations Couple Therapy and what I remember reading in graduate school, Sharp Notes, Primer of Object Relations Therapy, and that's had two editions. The latest was in 2005. I've had many other publications too. Both of them, they have a vital couple life, which you'll hear about, and Jill is actually very involved in dance and theater. back after the interview. Okay, I'm so happy to be joined on the podcast today by Jill and David Scharf.

These are a couple that are both professionally and personally linked, and I have been wanting to interview them for a long time for both those reasons, because this is a favorite part of the AAMFT interview is to learn about the person behind the model. So the first question I always ask Jill and David is, like, how did you get to MFT? Because both of you are...

MDs by trade, psychiatrists, classically trained, psychoanalytic. Sometimes people think that that is a world away from thinking systemically and doing the practice of marriage and family therapy. And I wanted to interview you guys because you have, over the years of your career, found a way to integrate both.

But tell us, before we talk about the personal, tell us how you got even interested in working with couples and families coming from a background that is not necessarily related to that. As a psychiatrist, I was interested in working with... adolescence, particularly at that time. I mean since then I've also worked with children. But because of that I really had to be involved with parents and it was a short step from that to notice that parents are part of a family, as is the child, and that there is that whole unit to be concerned with, not just parents.

being treated by one person and the child being treated by another. So that was a natural segue into family therapy for me. And I later became an analyst to improve my family work.

That was the reason for it. I wanted more of an in-depth understanding of unconscious processes. So Jill, you thought actually systemically, you started working with part of the system with kids and you're like, I got to know what's going on with the parents and the family. And then the actual analytic part.

came after that. Yes, it did. Well, mine was a little different.

I went to medical school intending to do analytic training. That was the only route allowed in the United States at that time, even though Freud thought you didn't need to be a doctor to be an analyst, which is true. But in medical school, one of my teachers, a guy named Les Havens, exposed me to the family research that was going on at Massachusetts Mental Health Center with Mishler and Waxler, and I just thought it was fascinating. So before I even did residency, I was interested in families.

And that was at a time when there was no division between thinking about families and thinking about individuals psychodynamically and psychoanalytically because there was no field of family therapy. Give us a date here, David, approximately. Well, I did my...

So when I first heard about this was about 1965. When I was a resident between 1967 and 1970, people were just beginning to be invested in families, but it was long before systemic family therapy split off from analysis. And one of my early experiences was that I was seeing a family as a resident, so this would have been 1968 or so, and Nathan Ackerman came to visit. And of course, he had not the idea of rejecting.

analysis or splitting them apart, but simply that analysts had been neglecting families. And he interviewed a family of mine. Now he was a brilliant interviewer.

Of course he shocked the hell out of them and they never came back after that, but that wasn't really the point, although it was dramatic. The point was that it was possible to understand families using analytic concepts, not the ones that were exclusive to individuals, but the ones that gave us an internal family system. idea that the families were not just there in the outer world interacting but were installed inside each person in the family and that idea really I thought was very powerful. Well we were both trained in object relations theory which it I mean it took a step beyond Freud to offer a way of thinking that was more cybernetic. I think object relations is often misunderstood by MFTs in the sense that It is the integration of these two worlds we're talking about.

It lets you work both within and between, if you know what I mean. Exactly. Good way to put it.

Yeah. So you all knew that early on. And I think Nathan Ackerman, what a great person to watch doing that. Our field, as you all know, is marriage and family therapy. It was a ragtag group of professionals from desperate disciplines, but certainly many psychiatrists who knew that there was more out there than...

Freudian thinking. So the object relations part spoke to both of you. I am curious, kind of parallel to this is your professional evolution, but also your personal evolution.

How did you all meet? And I'd love to hear that story because I know nothing about that and then you're both personal and professional collaboration. Was that there from the start or did that evolve over time? Well, we really were trained in very separate countries, in separate institutions.

Our lives were quite different. Jill, you were from the UK, right? Yes, from the UK. I'm actually Scottish. Yeah, so I trained in Aberdeen and Edinburgh before I moved to London for specialist training at the Tavistock Centre.

And it was there that I came upon David, who was doing a year's sabbatical at that time. We met in a group relations training event, which is also part of the history of our interest in family therapy. We were both very interested in unconscious dynamics in groups and in institutions.

Of course, one very important institution is the family. So learning about the functioning of groups was another way of expanding the uniquely useful bridging aspects of object relations theory to apply to family work. People that have never heard of Tavistock, I mean, it has this great connotation. And obviously, there's many parallels between understanding group processes and family therapy. And certainly, the group therapy movement led to family therapy.

Talk about that must have been a very rich experience to meet each other. Yeah. in that type of setting. Talk about, for those that don't know about Tavistock, how important that was to shaping our field. Well, the Tavistock is the British sort of mecca for object relations thinking, that is, for thinking about the way that the family influences development and is always part of theoretical thinking.

And it really is the main place in the English-speaking world that has promulgated these ideas, both in individual and family. and group ways of thinking. So that I had discovered some of the British theorists with some teachers who had been there while I still was in the States, and I thought I would then try to do a sabbatical. in London at the Tavistock before getting sucked into analytic training, after which it's almost impossible to move anywhere because you're sucked into a long-term lifestyle, professional lifestyle.

So I went to the Tavistock to really immerse myself in some of the same people who were the teachers and thinkers that Jill had simply grown up with. She didn't know any better. She didn't even know it was called object relations.

It just was the way thinking was. But for me, it was a kind of pill. pilgrimage, which changed everything about my professional life simply to be there. And I agree with what Jill said, that these interests in groups and institutions and families were all of a theoretical piece, because as far as we can see, they're all on a continuum. So the individual is connected to the family, to the wider group, to the society, through a series of links.

And that was a feeling we always had, although more recently... recently we've discovered a theoretician who preceded all of us, including the people we'd gone to the Tavistock. Well, you piqued my interest on that one. We'll get back to the couple. Tell me who that theorist is.

Okay. So about, oh, seven or eight years ago, our South American colleagues said to us, and we have many South American colleagues, they said, by the way, you don't know the work of Enrique Pichon-Riviere, who formulated the idea of the link as an interactive link, not not simply in the unconscious, but between people in their current interaction. That is equally important in thinking about families and couples.

And he had been working in institutions and with families in the 40s and 50s. And actually, all of the systemic therapists who migrated from South America were taught by Pichon-Riviere. And he really is the inventor of family therapy.

And he did so in the 40s and 50s and was teaching people like... Karl Osluski. I don't know if Mnuchin actually worked with him, but he certainly was influenced by him.

And many of the people that we regard as founders were influenced by him earlier than family therapy was even thought of in the English-speaking world. So I've been part of, both of us have been part of, trying to bring his original writings to the attention of the English-speaking world because they are so helpful. Yeah, but one problem with him was he didn't write that much. But he didn't write.

A lot of what's written down is from people that studied with him. From his students. Sort of writing from notes they took of the wonderful things he said.

So it's all sort of had to be reconstructed. I think it's why he hasn't been given his due. If I was going to find Riviere's work, where would I even look now?

Well, now we've gotten it translated into a book from Carnac or Routledge that's edited by... Bye. three of us, Roberto Lasso, Leah Setton, and myself.

So it is now, and it's called The Link in Psychoanalysis, the pioneering work of Enrique Pichon-Riviere. So now it's really available. I also did an article in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis summarizing these findings and comparing them to contemporary object relations theory. And this now has become a building block so that our colleagues throughout the world, actually. the ones we work most closely with, and including at the Tavistock, have now begun to incorporate this language into their current language.

That's wonderful. So this, if he was in the 40s and the 50s, did the British school and what we most commonly associate with object relations, did they know of his work or were those two kind of segmented populations? They couldn't read his work. delight but because it was only in spanish he could read theirs but he he drew from fairbairn and klein very liberally and uh usefully but they did not know of his work actually it's come into the into european thinking uh through the french and italians more recently so important people like renee caisse and uh antonino farrow have really drawn liberally on ideas about the link and now we are as well so it's it's in our our latest writing most most thoroughly in a book called the interpersonal unconscious that we did in 2011 great I know we're gonna talk about a little about that later so okay take us back we're in we're in Tavistock you're at your sabbatical you all have this powerful connection around the work is it love at first sight or does that develop over time pretty close Pretty close. These group relations conferences are very powerful, and you gave us a way of getting a good core sample about each other.

Well, that's the truth. We were in the same small group as it happened. So, yeah, at the same time, you know, I was applying for a job at the Tavistock in the department where David was seconded for his sabbatical.

It so happened that at that conference, and I'd been to two or three others. of them before. You know, they're residential. They go in for two whole weeks of intense learning. They're just amazing.

People can hardly afford to do them anymore. It's too bad. I think they still go in Britain.

Really formational. Anyway, other members of that department, including the chairman of that department, these people were attending the conference in other small groups. It was a very extensive job interview.

You took the words out of my mouth again. Well, that's happened before. Sorry.

I mean, it was that. that and then also it was this like it was kind of an extended interview of david as a future possibility anyway we were not it was not struck at first i thought you were kind of a brash pushy american and that was right that hasn't always changed but but there were also many other wonderful features which proved compelling over time and i imagine you get when do you get if you meet then how long Are you together before you get married? Well, I left the Tavistock.

I was there for a year, but I left just before Jill came to the Tavistock. She did get the job at the Tavistock, so she had a year of what would have been probably a four-year appointment. It was.

took a chance and came to the US where she had to do her, not just her board, she had to do her licensing material all over again, including anatomy and physiology. Although she was already registered as a specialist in the UK. Okay. So I am grateful she was willing to do that.

I don't know if I would have done it. Now, did you come over? I mean, long distance relationships are very difficult. So you were a year apart.

Did you come over knowing that you were going to be together for the long haul, Jill? No, no, I didn't. The only reason I really came was that I thought it had a fair chance of working, but I would need time to see.

But I covered myself by getting a green card and also by getting the job of my dreams here, which was to work with John Zinner. and Roger Shapiro, which that was an appointment, not an appointment, an interview that you set up for me, David. Good for me. There was no job, but they liked me, and they said they would make a job for me. I think those names, John Sinner and Roger Shapiro.

Yeah, tell our listeners about, for not being familiar. Well, I'd been reading about them in England, in London at the time. Yeah, I'd read their articles in the International Journal, and they're absolutely superb.

They are clinicians and also beautiful writers. Well, they're both analysts who were doing family therapy research at NIMH with Lyman Wynn. So they were writing analytic family therapy studies of adolescents and their families. Evidence-based. Which were evidence-based, highly researched, wonderful articles.

And no one was doing that at the time with an analytic base. So that was groundbreaking, yeah. And actually Helm Stierlin was part of their research group.

Later he became systemic, but he was an analyst, and he was working with them analytically. So that was a very powerful research group. John Zinner had... been actually a friend of mine before.

He and I both moved to Washington because of the Vietnam War because this was a way of doing something useful instead of being drafted basically. And so they became our very close colleagues in those years. Jill actually worked for them but they treated her as a peer and she ran an adolescent unit for them for a year. She founded and ran an adolescent unit. And then she, because she was forced to still be a trainee for the licensing requirement, she trained in child psychiatry, which I had already done.

And that meant we really shared an even broader base of our understanding of families because so many family therapists do not have child training and can't deal with the young children. And at this time now we're in the 70s, right? Well, Jill came in 74. Okay. us through the through those the mid-70s again so this is what we think of the golden age of mft so are you thinking of yourself if i had to ask if i had to ask you uh about your professional identity this time would you say you were a psychiatrist would you say you were an analyst would you say you were a family therapist how would you describe uh to your colleagues what your professional identity was at the time and then how would you describe it now well i think we're we're definitely known as couple and family therapists That's what we write about. That's what we think about.

Everything funnels into that large category. But we do identify with all the other things. We are psychiatrists. We are psychoanalysts.

We see lots of individual patients analytically, including four times a week. Jill has founded a psychoanalytic training program. But in that training program, we want our analytic trainees to know family therapy.

Yeah. Absolutely. We include it as part of it. But I'm going to ask you a lot about that because we have a lot of therapists in training and young professionals listening to this podcast of how you integrate both.

But let's stay with the timeline. So now you're personally connected. you have uh we get married in 1975 after a year yeah a year of probation here led to marriage in october of 75 when do you start i mean when people think of you all they think of all the great publications you've done you know around couples and families one of my favorites is still sharp notes by the way and preparing for any exam that has all of the terms a beautiful easy to comprehend uh it takes psychoanalytic terms and explains them to practitioners but those were professional collaborations yeah good you up to date you like there is a second edition of that book really a primer of object relations what what so what would I notice is the biggest differences in the second edition oh it's got about 30% more material and brought up to date trauma material on chaos theory material on attachment so a lot of couples that's how they they start They start by their professional correlations by writing together.

And you're all, I mean, I can't tell. Your writing style is so nice. It meshes. I can't tell who does what when I read your all stuff. So that's one way to do it.

But how did it start? Obviously, I want you to talk about the International Psychotherapy Institute, the IPI, and the evolution and how that started. But I'm guessing you worked together a long time before you started that in the 90s. It's way before that. The first writing project was the research into school leaving that you had begun in London and I took over after you had left and then you wrote the book on this on the sexual relationship.

I had some influence over that in terms of the Fairbairn chap. writing about early adolescent school leavers, that is not delinquents but those who left as soon as they could at 16, and the family issues as well as the individual and institutional school issues about that. We'd each done about a year of research on that and I did a little more in the United States.

But out of that developed a group-based training for teachers which we had the opportunity to do as a kind of modification of the group relations model for educational institutions. We did at American University, we did it at a school for learning difficult learning kids, Mark Twain School. That model really became the model for our training in psychotherapy at the International Psychotherapist.

At our own institute. But that's jumping ahead to nineteen... But that was the first writing we did also was about that training program.

Yeah, that's right. That was... cool written. But we were teaching family and couple therapy together at the Washington School of Psychiatry starting in 1977 I think. You were there maybe a year or two sooner and that was was a very successful program teaching family and couple therapy from an analytic point of view it included john center and roger shapiro on the faculty and other colleagues uh uh here uh and during that year during those years i wrote a book called the sexual relationship which was very very counter to i imagine the behavioral base masters and johnson thing that was going around in pop culture at the time so it was it was looking at the sexual relationship from a internal lens.

That's true, although I was incorporating Masterson-Johnson kind of behavioral treatment from an analytic point of view in my treatment of couples for sexual difficulty, and I still do. And I have personally remained interested in the sexology. field and there are a few of those people who are less behavioral and will listen to the psychodynamics of sex so i have a degree of respect in among some of those people and i still continue to learn about it, of course, as that field has evolved enormously as well.

After I did that book, we then, then we really decided we would do the book that I'd been wanting to write since I was a resident, since I was a child fellow, on object relations family therapy. And we, we wrote that book, I guess it, well, we wrote it in... 86, was it?

85, 86, it got published in 87. We wrote it in 85, 86, and it was published in 87. So that was really... really our first major thing we'd done together before that we'd written some articles separately but that was really our first we got a lot of encouragement from alan german remember we did the late great alan german yeah he was just so great to us he was terrific he was terrific i think that's good for our listeners to know that even though this was kind of groundbreaking integration and you all were passionate about it that it wasn't it wasn't an easy sell necessarily to start well alan Alan and another, Michael Kahn, another systemic therapist, were reviewers for the publisher that I went to first. And they gave it very good, strong reviews and said publish it. the publisher found another reviewer who said, this is crap. He didn't want to publish it because he knew it wouldn't be a big seller.

It's not going to be like a big course adoption for Psychology 101 or something like that. Anyhow, we went to Jason Aronson who took it on the spot actually. He read part of the first chapter and he called us and said yes. And he then promoted our work and he not only promoted our work in our future writings, but he used, I don't know if you remember this little magazine he had, Psychotherapy News or something like that, which was mailed to thousands of people.

Yeah and frontline clinicians would read that. People that wouldn't read an academic journal. would read a publication like that. Yes, exactly. And he gave us free advertising for the book tour promoting our books, which he put us up.

He wanted that book tour and he actually invited us out to his house with our children, which I felt suspicious of, like why would he want to include these little kids, but he did. Around the pool he started recruiting them to persuade us to do this book tour. on the grounds that they would earn money for packaging leaflets or something. For selling the books. He sold it to the whole family.

He sold it to the kids. Yeah, it was really a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun.

And he's become and still is a good friend. So this is interesting in that you knew you had, going back to Tavistock, you knew you had this like-minded thinking, and then you knew you could write together through these projects. At what point do you start doing, if at all, this co-therapy together because I've seen you all work in several training videos and it's actually I love it because you're not you know it's not a group think you're both you can very share your interpretations and challenge each other and kind of unbalance the system so to speak but I'm wondering at this point are you actually you're writing about it and you're passionate about it are you actually doing the work together well this is the big secret which is actually we really don't work together we we do do it for video purposes, for teaching purposes. And anytime anyone invites us to come and do it in the... Open, let's say in a big conference for a demonstration interview, we'll do it.

And we quite like doing it. But in our practice, it's just too expensive for families, and we can just as well do the work ourselves. But for training, it's really useful, because you can show the countertransference reactions to the transferences in the family, because they get displayed between the co-therapists. Yes.

So we had the really good fortune when I worked at the military medical school, which is here in Bethesda, of having this studio set up where we could interview couples and families. And we were doing one almost every week. Not all of them were worth developing into teaching tapes.

And we have hundreds of tapes that never see the light of the day. So we got to do this. And then, of course, the editing of that, as you may know, Eli, because you're going to edit this series, takes an enormous amount of time. So a lot of work goes into a tape, not because you can't show somebody a whole hour of a tape.

It's just too long. So we had this opportunity over a period of several years of having access to these marvelous studios, and the crews were terrific. And also the kind of families that they brought in through the clinics.

Yes, so it was a real diversity. of families. What an amazingly clinically rich time.

So how do we get from there to this idea, and I believe 1994, of starting the International Psychotherapy Institute, also known as the IPI? So I was directing the Washington School of Psychiatry for seven years, where Jill was also a senior teacher. And we started our program there.

But at a certain point, it became clear that there were internal... internal conflicts really about the money for the institution, which I felt the faculty were not being fair to the institution because the faculty were being paid especially for supervision but the institution was really struggling. So I left.

with some degree of conflict and we continued the program that we had started there which I directed at first and then Jill had taken over and we well the program you mean the object relations theory and practice program right which we then used to start our own institution and several of our most valued faculty members came with us to this new institution whose fate was to be determined and And one huge advantage of splitting and having to start over was that we had realized even earlier while we were at the Washington School that there were people coming from all over the country who wanted to train with us, some of whom could really start kind of satellite chapters and be part of a larger institution. And Jill said, you know, now that we're doing this ourselves, we're free to do that. And I hadn't put those things together. And David, these were people from all different.

disciplines right? They were yes Eli because because we always have had a very interdisciplinary idea about this so social workers, counselors, MFTs, pastoral counselors, nurses, nurse practitioners. You were very inclusive.

Anybody that wanted to learn more about object relations you were you were willing to train. Yeah oh absolutely and of course it's true that most psychiatrists now are not interested in psychotherapy so it's a good thing where it's psychologists do, by the way. So it's a good thing that we have our colleagues in all these other disciplines. And for every discipline, the serious psychotherapy training in family or individual is after graduation.

It's after the terminal degree. So it really made no difference. And while people brought different backgrounds that offered different assets, they could work really fruitfully together. Now, we've seen quite a few changes in who applies for the training over the years. Well, let me ask you this.

because you're reading my mind. So many times, and these are the type of questions that I got from young professionals as preparing for this interview. They get their MFT training, and it's usually steeped to exposure, not necessarily depth, but breadth of models, your classic models, and you're working in a very behavioral or cognitive behavioral way. But they get through their training, and they say, I know I've lifted some constraints, but I get stuck.

with certain client systems and i want to go deeper and usually that deeper are these historical family of our origin or object relations way of working so unfortunately in many mft training programs as i am a faculty member and train mfts all over the country you get a chapter and usually the chapter around object relations is very broad and not not necessarily meaty or technique driven so many young uh mfts uh do not know where to go or what that training would look like so let's let's assume i have gone through my mft training i've been in the field and i want to go deeper in my work with my clients and this is where you know you can talk about your training model or how you think object relations should be built in or integrated more into the way we train mfts i'm curious to your thoughts on that okay well in the old days People came for training who were already trained, like five, ten years out. They just wanted to learn the object relations part of things. Correct. They'd been doing it their way for a long time.

Exactly. Now we're getting people like the ones you're mentioning. The recently graduated LMFT or social worker. The others, and this may not be true of LMFT, they don't get very much analytic instruction at all. So it's all new to them.

They're young professionals. They don't have a big income. at their disposal and they're really at the beginning of learning about the unconscious and its various manifestations.

So your LMFT would come to us. We aren't going to offer them a lot of techniques about how to reach the depth of the family system. What we're going to do is give them instruction, of course, lectures, workshops, clinical case conferences, videos, but the meat of the of the training is the small group where they discuss what they are learning. And they do this with a group leader who's trained to deepen the conversation so that what they're doing is integrating the cognitive material they've been given with the emotional response they have to it and the group process that develops as a result of dealing with these primitive mental mechanisms.

Yeah, that's beautiful. That is a full circle. Takes you back to Tavistock where you all met, right? Absolutely. Yes.

Well, this is, and yes, you're right. We're right back where we were because in developing a group method of education, what we discovered very early on was that if you have an open systems group discussion after a lecture, the issues that came up in the lecture will be in the group in an experiential way. And so then people are there, have the possibility of learning from a meeting. immediate experience. So if we teach, for instance, just to give you an example of how one person puts her interior world into her partner through projection, and we teach a lecture about that, and then six or eight or ten people go into a small group experience, that will be happening in the group.

And they can learn about it from inside with the help of the group leader who's trained to really pull that out. And so then they can really evaluate a concept, decide whether it's valid for them, decide how it applies, and often have really a very high emotional impact kind of experience in the group itself. And it's a way of teaching and learning the concepts. It's also a way of developing yourself as an instrument.

You learn your own defensive process. You learn how you connect to others. You learn what things resonate with you and what don't.

And you just become more able to use your own body and your own mind for the clinical work. It's not a matter of applying techniques of this or that or the next thing. It's just being a person who is fully present. I like how you say that because I think some people that have a very cursory understanding or young therapists, they see the objects relations chapter in the book and it is not.

As you said, it's not technique driven. There's not a lot of things in there, but it's more of a process. And you can teach that in this parallel way. So you learn to use yourself as a therapist, as an instrument. And the more attuned you are to yourself, the better you will be when you are practicing from this framework with clients.

Having said that, we have taken a lot of time trying to spell out. What it is we're doing with our own therapeutic instrument. In our books, we've really tried to make that something that can be passed on.

I noticed quite early on with the systemic family therapists, particularly those who would use paradoxical instructions, that they're absolutely brilliant. And you could trace how they had got to that particular point of view from a deep unconscious. appreciation of what's going on in the family. But I always had the feeling it was hard for them to teach that.

Because they were saying the unconscious doesn't matter so once you amputate the unconscious, you can't, even though they learned it from analytic training, it wasn't just Mnuchin, Selphie Palazzoli and Dolphy, all these people had analytic training, but then when they amputated that training for their trainees, they couldn't really then teach it. So I think that's, it's really been a pity, the splitting off of psychodynamics and family therapy. My mentor, Doug Sprinkle, would say kind of a one of the errors of our field is throwing out the baby with the bathwater and that's an example of that to to in the need to make themselves so different from psychoanalytics that these these classically uh trained early systemic thinkers that they didn't want to do what you also naturally have done which is integrate their past into their to their current because there really is the connection as you're demonstrating this hour is not that difficult it's not that big a leap to make from the within to the between as i said um Now, this is interesting in the sense that if I, because a lot of people are like, oh man, I want to go and do this. Is this like a, am I having to take a sabbatical?

Can I do this within the context if I am a frontline clinician in a private or a group practice? How much time am I blocking out to get this training? Well, thank you for that lead in. That's a soft pitch, I'd say.

Okay, so our institution has been set up for distance learning. And what we do is we Even if people enroll in all of our training, they would come for a week in the summer and four long weekends. And in between, all the training is by distance training, say at a once weekly basis or so. Now we use the platform Zoom. but you know it started with Skype of course or even the telephone but now it's so easy and so effective to use these distance learning techniques that we've got people not only all over the country but all over the world that we're training who don't have to be here that often and they certainly don't have to take a sabbatical themselves to do it.

Well there is a range of degree of involvement for instance you can just attend one weekend and see what you think of it or you can attend an online course and never come here in person. Or you can sign up for the whole shebang and do a two-year certificate training or analytic training, which is more like four years. I think the thing that's going to be most relevant to people listening to this podcast would be the course in couple therapy that I run that has 15 sessions a year. It's approximately twice a month, not on a regular, you know, the dates are set out ahead during the academic year from September to May, where we explore mainly couple therapy from a variety of perspectives. And it goes along, I mean the first three years of that course we made into a book called Psychoanalytic Couple Therapy that Jill and I edited, but bringing in the major teachers in the field of analytic couple therapy.

So that is kind of the textbook that is the background for the course. International authors. They're international authors, many of them from the Tavistock, because we did that course in partnership with the Tavistock Marital Studies Unit in the beginning.

And we continue to have international teachers. So now I chair an international group from the International Psychoanalytic Association devoted to psychodynamic couple and family therapy. And those teachers... I'm sure that'll be a big surprise to Eli's listeners.

There is now a group of analysts who are really devoted to couple and family therapy. That's wonderful. Now, if that last question was a soft pitch, I'll ask you a hard one in the sense that...

You know, I'm all for spreading the word and using technology to do that. I think there's also something about what we do as relational healers that is very face-to-face. So you told us about this very powerful experience of the group in this Tavistock-based training that you all have adapted. How can I get the same if I am just doing this from distance learning? It seems like that group process is so important to making yourself an instrument from this object relations framework.

How can I get that? I think that's harder. But I have to say that we have recently found that we can have those group affective experiences online.

Yes, but we haven't done it with people who didn't also come and spend some time. That's why I like your model of going for a week, because if I can have that and have that frame to go with, and then I can use that, these online experiences to probably build into that. And I think that's the best when I think of training people.

Once I make a connection with them, Then we can do face-to-face then we can do it from distance so of your people that train there how many come for that intensive week Before they get the rest of the training. Well all the people who train in depth with us all the certificate all the certificate programs Originally were a week in the summer and four long weekends a year for at least two years and Then doing the groups on online where you can you know, this is a small group so you can see people you already know as you listen to them all on the screen. That's okay, but we wouldn't want to do that really without having worked together in person face to face, just as you're saying. Now we do have more more programs now where people don't have to come to Washington to be with us in person because travel has gotten so expensive at the same time that the online communication has gotten so much better. But really to train in depth, you need to spend some time face-to-face.

I think that's true. I mean, this is so fascinating. Now, to listen to you all, it is hard to believe that, you know, five decades plus. Into this field you all are as vital as you were when you started which in doing these I'm a study therapist factors So what makes and model developers that in there is this common factor the passion for doing it?

I mean you all could easily Retire if you wanted to could do what you want, but you are still doing the work So these are kind of legacy questions. What do you think all these years later still drives you? And then what if anything do you have left to achieve in this next? portion of your career Well, I'll go first because I'm driving a little harder than Jill at this point, who has decided she would also like to do more dancing and piano. But I've actually, having handed over our institute to our very able successors, and we continue to teach very actively in the institute.

And it is in the third generation of leadership now. It's in the third generation of leadership. Was that hard or easy to transfer?

I imagine. That's your baby. That's hard.

It's hard. In fact, only now am I giving up being chair of the board. And yes, it's a loss, but it needs to happen if the institution is going to thrive, of course.

But what I've done is to develop training programs in China and Russia. So I'm safely out from, I don't have to step on my colleagues feet. I can go to other places and I'm very, very interested in the cultural differences in Russia and China where people are very equal. eager to learn this stuff. It surprises everybody who learns that psychoanalysis is hot stuff in China.

It's really the theory that they value the most. And we have the only training program in couple and family psychoanalytic therapy there. So we've got a niche to ourselves.

In Russia, the same thing's true. They've embraced psychoanalysis, but they've kept it very small. And nobody else has really applied it to couple and family in the... way we do of really starting a training program. Almost like over there in Russia and China, it's like it was in the 70s here.

It's a whole new world. Yes, exactly. That's right.

And so that's a treat for us. And it also gives us a chance to share that experience with our colleagues from IPI, from the International Psychotherapy Institute, who are delighted to get to come along and join in the teaching. You know, it's also nice to hear sometimes people put an international behind their institute or their...

their training facility and it's only a name only. You all truly are international. So, I mean, that is a natural outgrowth. What is it like teaching with the language barrier?

Well, I don't speak either Russian or Chinese. Those are two hard ones to learn, yeah. So, we have terrific translators.

And just this morning, before we did this interview, I was online with a group of 12 of the sort of senior students, junior faculty there. ...doing a case conference and I feel I know them even though we have a translator between us. Of course it's a translator we all know very well who we who's an integral to the process and is is a character in the field clearly and And it's a wonderful thing to do because the translation isn't just language.

It's our different ways of thinking, which we value and which we learn from. This teaching in China and Russia, it's not... a colonial kind of outreach.

It's at the invitation of partners in China and Russia. So we go along work with them, learn their culture, and we use the group affective model with them with translation, which I mean it's kind of mind-blowing that it actually works. But and and one of the things that drives both of us I think is how much we learn from them.

Yeah. Because it sets all our assumptions about Western culture. kind of on their head. Individuality, it's very different in China, where the thinking is grouped. So it really is a wonderful learning opportunity.

So you were asking what drives us at this point. What's driving me, other than my interest in other artistic pursuits, is my interest in technology. Although I myself am kind of a technophobe, I'm very interested in what technology can do for communication. around the world and I've invested a lot in thinking about teleanalysis, teletherapy. Can you do this with couples?

Yes you can. Could you do it with families? I'm sure you could although I have not personally done that at a distance with the whole family. But it's an emerging, it's a leading edge, it's an emerging field. There's so many controversies about it, criticisms about it, it's not confidential.

it's not private, it's this, it's that, it's not real, it's not in person, but you find that if you have met the person in person, an established process in a relationship, this can be contained over a screen. You look at a picture on the screen, but you're relating to the actual presence of the person that you're talking about. you connect to virtually while looking at their picture on the screen.

And what's most interesting about it is that you then can begin to learn what is essential about the traditional methods that we've been trained with. What is it that really continues to be effective when the conditions have changed? by having to be done through technology instead of being done in an office with the door closed.

Well, also, the same is true for training. This kind of podcast, which would not have been possible 10 years ago or 15 years ago, whatever it is, is now can spread information and training in radically advanced ways. And I think that what you're just saying, and this is a commonality, and again, talking to so many other leaders in the field who are doing this podcast, is how to take their original ideas and to use technology instead of thinking of it as a constraint to how the work was originally done.

See it as something that can enhance and spread the message and update. the way we think and the way we connect, both with other therapists and with our potential clients. So when you think of how you want to be remembered, and you are still passionate, you still have lots of interest, but how you want the field of marriage and family therapy to remember you either individually or as a couple, what would that be?

Eli, I'll answer that question. One thing we've been doing is distributing books worldwide for free. We have a publishing venture with our original publisher, Jason Aronson, called FreePsychotherapyBooks.org that has distributed a million...

and a half downloads of books worldwide for free, psychotherapy books. So we just want people to know that that's also part of the technology wonder. And any of the listeners who happen to have written a marriage... marriage and family texts, even a chapter.

We can do short books. If it's out of print, they can send it to us and it'll be distributed for free. There's no money in it, but there's no money in publishing anyway for the author. Right.

Not our kind of publishing anyway. But it's a place that old books can go and reach new audiences. But new books too.

And new books. That's wonderful, yes. So how do you want to be remembered, Jill? That's the question. You're not...

I don't really think about that much, do you? Well, I don't know, Eli. The truth is probably none of us will be remembered 100 years from now, so we can't get too caught up in it.

I think that we really have to take solace, if you will, since life is ephemeral, in enjoying it and feeling we're being productive and helping people now and passing it on in an immediate way to our students. And what will happen is things... evolve and change over a period of 20 or 50 years, I think none of us can be confident that our names will be written.

Well, when I think of you all, I think of you as a great team, personally and professionally. And this interview has solidified that genuine and people that have, again, taken something that people thought could not integrate, kind of a here and now systems thinking with a more historical psychoanalytic object relations way of working and really have put it in a way that is easy to understand and as to disseminate it in this model i mean i want you here at the end to plug anything you want but i'm certainly somebody that has been in the field now for two decades i would love to kind of deepen my understanding of uh again object relations in this way of working so i'll i'll speak just personally as this is something i always think one great thing about our profession right as you age Most professions you can age out of. This is as long as you're vital.

Like you are, the older you are, the more wisdom you have, the better time you have. This is one of the few professions that age makes you better and you don't have to age out of. So, I mean, I love that about this.

We love that too. Well, that we continue to learn and that is a learning we can share with even our youngest students. And you get as much, I love what you said too, because I feel the same way.

You get as much when you do these Specialist International Trainings. You learn as much from them as... they learn from you. So I think that is wonderful as well. Before you plug it, just the last last question.

So this I always ask these people too, because sometimes like you all mentioned you know your kids. When I'm talking to these model developers, some of them their kids know nothing. I went to my late late great mentor Doug Sprinkles Memorial last year and his closest family members had no idea his contribution to the field.

He was just an uncle or dad or A cousin. What do your kids think about what you've done or do they even care? Our oldest daughter, Kate, is in the field. She's picked up a niche specialty in divorce and really helping people be more collaborative in divorce.

But she is a psychodynamic therapist. She knows. And she teaches for us and with us when she's available. The others, what you say is absolutely true. They've got no idea.

and what they have taken from us, I think, is a kind of entrepreneurial interest in their own fields. Very different fields. But they really are go-getters and we love it that they are.

One's in education. reform uh one's a lawyer who has become chair of the board of a women's shelter um one is an international journalist and has set up an international journal a journalistic project for reporting on women who are ignored worldwide and as and a son who's a young businessman who's trying to change the way the world eats yeah yeah so we love it we know more about what they do than they do about what we do i think so yeah you had four kids And I kept five. Wow.

Why are you doing all this? That is amazing. So it's been wonderful to be with you this hour. Tell us again.

Tell us about the IPI, where we can get this training, anything you want to plug here at the end. Okay. Well, we'd be happy. Well, first of all, we'd like you to come to a weekend.

I'd love to. Sign me up. The next family one.

I'd love to. Yeah. I'd love to.

Yeah. Yeah. Please do.

So it's theipi.org. is the website, T-H-E-I-P-I.org. We've just revamped our website, so it's much more informative than it used to be. Or anybody can feel free to get in direct touch with us, and maybe you can list the emails.

Put it in the podcast link, yeah. Yeah, that would be great. Because we're really always happy to talk to somebody who thinks they might be interested. So even though you have all these other interests, international travel, and Jill doing her creative, you know. piano and dance you all will still do the training if somebody comes to you have a great staff but if somebody we have a new one starting that it always starts in june starts next week actually we have a new next one yeah and we have weekends all through the year and we think our our faculty are terrific and we are part of it we we are an a very active part of the faculty still so outstanding thank you so much for being part of the podcast thank you i thank you this has been fun to do Eli back with you boy that sure was fun I really enjoyed talking to Jill and David and you can tell not only how much passion they have for the work they do how much they still enjoy doing the work whether it be in the states or internationally.

And they clearly have a vibrant marriage and have a lot of fun together. That's the first, but will not be the last of our couples on the podcast. A big couple coming up for you in a future installment.

A little teaser there, if you will. But let me just reference again what we spent a good amount of time talking about in the interview with Jill and David founded and are still heavily involved in the training, the International Psychotherapy Institute. That is the theipi.org.

You can find out everything about it. The IPI presents national certificate training programs that bring mental health professionals and institute faculty together to study with international contributors at the leading edge of the field. And the IPI offers quality programming in a variety of formats.

There's the short courses, there's multi-year training programs, as you heard them talk about, and advanced clinical training. And there are also weekend conferences. which are very popular. Listener feedback, we love it and it really drives the episode.

In fact, I'd wanted to talk to Jill and David for a while but I had gotten an email talking about how You can have a systemic focus, but also have an object relations or a psychoanalytic frame. And when I thought of that, I thought, well, I'm going to call Jill and David up, and they were so gracious, and I thanked them for the time. You can drop me a line at info at elikaram.com. That's I-N-F-O at E-L-I-K-A-R-A-M.com.

Find me on Twitter at Dr. Eli Lai. You can follow the AMFT at the AAMFT. The hashtag is always stay systemic. And until next time, my friends, stay systemic.

Transcript for:w10 theories video Integrating Systemic and Psychoanalytic Therapy

Transcript for:
w10 theories video Integrating Systemic and Psychoanalytic Therapy