Meet Dr Paolo Bertrando

Are you curious about the Phoenix teaching team? Then welcome to the seventh of the Teaching Team Introduction series of blogs to introduce Leonie and the Phoenix Family Therapy Teaching Team Associates and Guest Teaching Associates.

Relationships are at the heart of family therapy and systemic practice and start with introductions.  It’s important that at Phoenix we practice what we teach and embrace the relational principles that we espouse. So let’s keep going with getting to know the team in this blog series.

From Paolo:

How did your interest in family therapy and systemic practice get sparked?

In the beginning—many years ago, alas!—I was a young psychiatrist, mainly interested in social psychiatry: it was the time when in Italy a law had closed mental health hospitals for good, opening community centers and wards in general hospitals instead. It was an interesting time for this kind of humanistic psychiatry. I was working in a research unit, and we decided to research families of the mentally ill. I was chosen to discover methods of working therapeutically with them, and so I found the Milan team—it was easy, since I lived at working distance from the Milan Family Therapy Centre. I underwent my training at the Centre, discovering that, independent of my interest in psychosis, systemic family therapy could be my area of interest. More than anything else, I was fascinated by systemic thinking, this kind of counterintuitive way of looking at human phenomena. After all these years, it still amazes me. I think this is why I remain in the field, and I’m convinced by this approach exactly as I was so many years ago.

What frameworks are you drawn to and why? And which figures in family therapy have been your biggest influences?

Of course, Milan systemic therapy has been for many years my preferred approach. I was directly trained by Luigi Boscolo and Gianfranco Cecchin. I wrote two books together with Luigi, and established a research group with Gianfranco, so they were my main mentors in the field. I’ve been indirectly influenced by many other therapists, inside and outside the systemic field, but I think my main sources of inspiration are outside therapy: Gregory Bateson, of course, as the founding father of the systemic approach, Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and among later theorist, Zygmunt Bauman, Byung-Chul Han, Judith Butler and Bell Hooks.

How has systemic thinking and practice influenced your work?

I think that my whole practice has been influenced by systemic thinking, in the sense that I probably wouldn’t be a therapist, in the first place, if I hadn’t subscribed to systemic thinking. As I see it, working systemically doesn’t simply mean to use an array of techniques—although I frequently use many, and I always use some: it means to think in terms of patterns, relationships, and connections, to investigate the space between people, and be open to see the form of our interactions.

Lately, I have merged my systemic perspective with a dialogical one, emphasizing the dignity of any speaker in a session—or in any human encounter. Still, I think that dialogue is limited for me if it’s not comprised in a broader systemic framework.

Why have you chosen to go into a teaching/supervising/mentoring role in this field?

I began teaching the Milan Approach thirty years ago, at the Milan Centre, encouraged especially by Luigi Boscolo, who thought I had a good cultural perspective on therapy, and could add some of it to the Milan teaching. In later years, together with my colleague and partner Claudia Lini, we developed what we call a systemic-dialogical approach, substantially different from the original Milan Approach, albeit sharing its core systemic epistemology: we like to use artistic material, such as contemporary art installations, modern music, or literature, as a support for our teaching work. Rather than “teaching”, I can add, today we prefer to see our activity as “transmitting” ideas, reflections and practices to younger or less experienced colleagues: in training and supervision, I like to use the idea of a music producer we once invited, who said: “When I work with musicians, I must always remember they are the artists—not I”. I think this also applies to the therapist/client relationship. 

If you could give one piece of advice to our program participants starting the 2-year accredited training program, the Advanced Certificate in Systemic Family Therapy and Practice, what would it be?

“Don’t try to be smart!”. More often than not, an inexperienced therapist will try to think out smart hypotheses, or ask smart questions to clients (sometimes I’m afraid I’m simply talking of myself, as I was when I began—but I’ve noticed many younger colleagues doing the same). If a therapist tries to be smart, it means they are paying more attention to themselves and their presentation than to the clients themselves. Instead, I believe we must always be attuned to them, and divert our attention from ourselves.  

What is something you love to do when you aren’t working?

I must confess my first and foremost passion is still reading—not necessarily professional books. As I said, I think that good literature is a great resource for a therapist: it gives you different perspectives on life, it allows you to live many lives at the same time, and it’s a good pleasure too! So the first thing I do when I have some leisure time is to read—and after that any kind of artistic enjoyment: movies, theatre, galleries, and so on. But in the end, when I go to bed, my last pastime of the day is a good book.

Paolo Bertrando

Psychiatrist, psychotherapist

Co-Director, Systemic-Dialogical School of Therapy

Bergamo, Italy

Teaching Team Member Phoenix Family Therapy Academy

Please note that this article is educational in nature and does not constitute professional or therapeutic advice or suggestion.