The Therapist’s Most Important Tool

Psychotherapy trainees today are buried beneath textbooks on theory, bombarded by lectures on current research, and taught to be experts in a variety of therapeutic methods. But where and when do they learn who they are and how to use their own selves in therapy?

At 92 years old, Salvador Minuchin, the world’s most famous living family therapy pioneer and probably the most imitated clinical practitioner ever, is still too young for retirement. Now, nearly 50 years after helping foment a revolution in psychotherapy and becoming himself an icon and an institution, the old lion is back in the arena, and with the publication of his latest book, The Craft of Family Therapy, he’s once again challenging the therapeutic status quo.

During the mid-1950s, when Minuchin first began his psychiatric career, almost all therapists followed the psychoanalytic rule book. The goal was to bring to light the individual intrapsychic conflicts from which the patient’s life problems were thought to originate. Because truly meaningful change was thought to emerge only from within the patient’s mind—carefully cultivated and encouraged, but never imposed from without—the therapist wasn’t supposed to get in the way. Well-trained clinicians were expected to embody a kind of divinely empty blank screen, maintaining a posture of reticence and neutrality, so as not to interfere with the workings of the holy transference: the patient’s subconsciously generated projections…