Paradox and Counterparadox: A New Model in the Therapy of the Family in Schizophrenic Transaction - Tapa dura

This book will make the brilliant work of Mara Selvini Palazzoli and her gifted team more widely known in this country. The internal consistency of their approach-combining a systemic theory of family with a systemic theory of change-results in a therapy that is elegant, powerful, and economic. Using their knowledge of families as natural, rule-governed systems, the team proposes a hypothesis to explain the function of a problem in the family. They then base an intervention-paradoxical or otherwise-upon this hypothesis. The intervention serves to validate (or disprove) the hypothesis and to suggest further moves. The moves themselves are astoundingly compact. Palazzoli and her team are masters of the art of co-opting the resistance. They use the forces deployed by the family against change to produce change. It is as if one were to use the rules of Alice's Looking-Glass Kingdom to break the looking-glass. After the solemnity which surrounds the practice of the therapeutic art in this country, it is refreshing to find a practice which relies upon drama, wit, surprise, and (of course!) paradox. This is a book which should not only be acted upon but read. -- Lynn Hoffman, A.C.S.W., Ackerman Institute of Family Therapy This volume is a treasure chest of new and interesting ideas. The most luminous jewel in the collection is a paradigm, a new epistemology that takes seriously the revolutionary perspectives on human behavior introduced by Gregory Bateson, Watzlawick, Jackson, Haley, and others...Mara Selvini Palazzoli and her Milanese colleagues have labored with courage and humility and have provided us with a book of stellar magnitude. -- Donald A. Bloch, M.D.

Paradox and Counterparadox introduces the English-speaking public to the first results of a research plan drawn up my the Milan Center for Family Studies at the end of 1971 and put into practice at the beginning of 1972. The book reports the therapeutic work carried out by the authors with fifteen families, five with children presenting serious psychotic disturbances, and ten with young adults diagnosed as schizophrenics in acute phase. The reader will recognize, in the cases presented, the stimulating originality and efficacy of this approach, one whose interest exceeds the purely clinical and which offers new points of departure for an ecologic vision of human relationships.