So here it is: the fortieth anniversary of the Association of Family Therapists. A good time for reflection. I’ve been re-reading parts of a series of commentaries and notes I wrote for this Newsletter in the early 1990’s and came across these passages (slightly modified):

“I’m trying to reconstruct the past, the beginnings of this organization, in fact. Getting the historical record straight isn’t easy. Like family members, some remember the facts one way, others another. The harder I try to find out the true story, even though I was there, the more obscure the peripheral details seem. Why didn’t someone write it down at the time? Or if they did, where are the records?”

Here is the first telling of the story. It’s as I remember it with the help of phone calls to Marty Kirshenbaum and Joan Herrick who were also there at the beginning.

I grew up in a family with a dad who was a prominent psychoanalyst in New York City and an older sister who followed his footsteps to become a psychoanalyst on Long Island. With a background like that, it was pretty clear that I would follow suit in terms of career path. I proceeded to go to graduate school in clinical psychology back in the early 70s at the University of Rhode Island. While working on my dissertation, I was able to secure a part-time job in a youth guidance center, which would help pay the rent. The only problem was, I had never been particularly interested in working with children or teens. Lo and behold, I was assigned a supervisor who had been trained at the Ackerman Institute in N.Y. back in the 60s. Now, mind you, I had never so much as taken a course in family therapy at graduate school since there were no such courses. When Eliot Brown, my supervisor, saw my reluctance to working individually with the children, he smiled and said, "Well, why don't you...

One of the myths our county was founded upon is the story of George Washington, the first president, and the cherry tree.

Most of us heard the story when we began elementary school - that when George Washington was a boy he chopped down his father’s prized cherry tree. When confronted by his father, George said, the story goes, “Father, I cannot tell a lie. I did it with my little hatchet.”

We’ll never know if this really happened - but what did happen is that our first president is revered as a truth-teller, a man of integrity. Truth telling, integrity, were valuable qualities on which a great nation could be built.

Webster defines truth as a: quality or state of being true; sincerity, genuineness, honesty, quality of being in accordance with experience, facts, or reality; conformity with fact; reality, actual existence. And, integrity is defined as a: quality or state of being complete; unbroken condition, wholeness, entirety. The quality or state of being unimpaired; perfect...