MEMORIES OF TOM ANDERSEN - LYNN HOFFMAN
On the morning of the seminar’s second day, Tom’s group was conspicuouslyabsent. The meeting was half over when the three of them crept in, veryapologetic, with Vidje wearing cracked glasses. They explained that they hadgone down to the waterfront the evening before and found a boat, in which theyspent the night “celebrating.” That morning, getting out of the boat, Tomstepped on Vidje’s glasses. They were incredibly sorry. But Tom, even at hismost apologetic, was clearly a star. He had gone up North to the “RedUniversity” in Tromsoe after he got his medical degree, and was teaching therewhen I met him. He seemed to be much entangled in professional politics andcomplained about the antagonism shown him by the establishment psychiatrists inthe South.
At the time, I was teaching at the Ackerman Institute. The Milan team had beeninvited to show their work to us the year before, and I had become an instantfollower. So I formed my own team: it contained Peggy Penn, who was just comingout of her internship, plus the late John Patten and Jeff Ross, twoneurolinguistic psychiatrists from Payne Whitney who had heard of us and camealong just as we needed them. By this time, Boscolo and Cecchin had started atraining center and were holding international summer workshops in the Italianlakes. The team organized by Peggy and myself went to the very first one, which(I think) was held on an island called Montisola in Lake Garda. Karl Tommbrought a team from Canada, and Tom’s Tromsoe team was there too, plus ascattering of people who were not in teams.
Throughout these meetings, Tom seemed to me like a person who was finding histrue family. Peggy became a special object of adoration for him, and he clearlyworshipped Boscolo and Cecchin - well, we all did. I will never forget the nightTom decided to carry a very heavy Luigi in his arms (I have a photograph ofthat) and sprained his back so badly that Vidje had to tie his shoes for a week.When he met Harry Goolishian, who joined the Milan Meetings at a later point, hebecame an instant son. Me he called his “little sister,” and would always takemy arm in his when crossing icy patches of road.
I remembered a story he told us about his father being held in a German prisonjust across the border with Russia. When his father finally came home, Tom wassix. During the family’s reunion, the father made much of Tom’s older brotherand sister, but ignored Tom,who must have been very small when he left. Thelittle boy went outside while the family celebrated and went to work digging upthe back garden. It took him six hours. Nobody noticed his offering or praisedhim for it. The story left me with an understanding of Tom’s intensive effortson behalf of others. In fact, he seemed almost offended if you thanked him, andliterally brushed any attempt at praise away.
The teams meetings morphed into a yearly celebration. They took place at firstin the Italian lakes, then moved on to Ireland, to Britain, and most recently toNorway and Finland. Starting with Boscolo and Cecchin, the later ones wereusually organized by Tom and took place in Arctic settings. They had an alwayschanging cast of characters revolving around a more slowly changing inner group.In the mid-eighties, a benevolent inspiration propelled Tom to the forefront ofthis evolving web. Tom came up with a variation on the Milan team that his groupcalled a Reflecting Team. Instead of the observer/observed structure that turnedthe team into expert researchers and its clients into objects, its shape becamemore like a small democracy, with the family included respectfully as equals. Iwrote a foreword to Tom’s book (Anderson, 1991) on this development, and Ialways liked my first sentence:
“One could call this a book, but one could also call it a description of a newflying machine.”
I think the various forms of reflective conversation have indeed moved us to aFifth Dimension. There is something about this net-based style that avoidsprescriptions or structured interventions. It depends on serendipitousdiscoveries that come from mutual exchange rather from any one individual. Inlight of recent Internet-inspired writing like James Surowieki’s “The Wisdom ofCrowds,” this may be a blessing. The innovative group of people out of which thediscovery of the reflecting team emerged had a special genius. No one personever became the big guru, as so often happened with schools of therapy that hada founder. As a result, our floating band never calcified into a fixed shape,but kept sending out roots or shoots from which new and unexpected modes oftheory and practice blossomed.
And this “growing edge,” as Carl Whitaker once called it, is well establishednow and never rests. Thanks to the work of French philosophers Gilles Deleuzeand Felix Guatteri, freshly rediscovered by my Canadian colleague Chris Kinman,I am seeing the emergence of a new guiding metaphor, the Rhizome, that replacesthe System. System talk was useful in its day, but was limited by its base inthe technology of control. Rhizomes are linked to the natural world, and bring alooser and more adventurous element to the table. Go to Kinman’s blog atchristopherkinman.blogspot.com to see how he has built on what he calls the“rhizome experiment.”
I used to compare family therapy to crabgrass, because it had a subversivestreak, and would pop up in the neighbor’s yard if eradicated in one’s own. NowI think that we are living in a “Rhizome Century.” The Internet, itself arhizome, is bringing us a shape-changing horizon as powerful as the GutenbergBible. We are also seeing a movement toward ways of organizing that are lesscentralized and less hierarchical than we are used to, typified by outfits likeGoogle, Amazon, eBay, craigslist, and Skype. A brilliant new book, “The Starfishand the Spider,” by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom (2006), puts their centralidea succinctly on its book jacket, and I quote:
“If you cut off a spider’s head, it dies; but if you cut off a starfish’s leg,it grows a new one, and that leg can grow into an entirely new starfish.Traditional top-down organizations are like spiders, but now starfishorganizations are changing the face of business and the world.”
Tom’s work and writing prefigured this new decentralized world. His therapeuticiconoclasm undermined the top-down structures of the so-called helpingprofessions, and his practices explored the subversive or stifled voices sooften hidden in the body as well as the body politic. One of Tom’s favoritephrases came from Harry Goolishian: “You never know what you mean to say untilyou say it.” Finding not only the meaning but the place in the body where themeaning resided was for Tom an esssential part of his work. The other essentialwas to find out who should hear that meaning and make sure that they heard it.
I know that many people, those present at Tom’s memorial and others like myself,who regret not being there, have heard and treasured Tom’s meanings. We willcarry it with us on our own journeys. After all, we have a new flying machine.
References:
Anderson, T. (1991)The Reflecting Team. New York: W.W. Norton
Surowiecki, James, (2006)The Wisdom of Crowds.New York: Anchor books.
Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom (2006) New York, Penguin Books
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