In Remembrance of Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy M.D

In Remembrance of Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy M.D. MARGARET COTRONEO PH.D., R.N.w Fam Proc 46:269–270, 2007 I t is with appreciation for a lasting friendship that I offer these reflections to the family therapy community in memory of Ivan. He was a friend, a gifted clinician, a creative theoretician, and a generous teacher. Ivan saw himself as a contributorFa constructive giverFand his work as a contribution and a resource, not only to family therapy but also to the whole of psychotherapy and the realm of all human relating regardless of context. At the same time, like so many of our elders, he was a complicated person. The almost single-minded commitment to developing his concepts probably contributed to the isolation of his work from the mainstream of our field. However, it also fueled his rather remarkable intuition about the future of therapy. His body of work on relational ethics stands as a beacon for those who understand the essence of therapy as healing that strives to maintain the integrity of one’s relational world. Random acts of kindness were part of working with Ivan. My daughter still recalls his surprise appearance in her hospital room when she was seriously ill. Postcards to the staff would routinely arrive from faraway places, concern extended for a sick child, offers of assistance with finding medical resources, and a kind of guardianship of students and trainees that generously made his work available to them. On Ivan’s terms, patient understanding was required of those who wanted a deeper understanding of human relationships. I use the word deeper because anyone who worked closely with Ivan would surely have participated in the long dialogues about ‘‘deep relational structures and processes’’Fplumbing the depths of ideas, linking them, applying them, and then rethinking themFnever thinking in straight lines but in spirals of linked concepts. Ivan’s was a mind that sought to integrate, and he would draw from disparate sources of knowledge like economics, history, law, ethics, sociology, biology, anthropology, and medicine to weave a rich therapeutic framework that he came to call contextual therapy. Therapy, in the contextual sense, was never divorced from social conditions but actually could be applied to understand and intervene in them. Ivan was a clinician-teacher first and always. Sitting in on a therapy session with him, I was always struck by how he might ‘‘plant a seed’’ that could elicit such powerful responses from family members. Trust and fairness, the often colliding wAssociate professor of psychiatric-mental health nursing emerita, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. 269 Family Process, Vol. 46, No. 2, 2007 r FPI, Inc. 270 / FAMILY PROCESS claims of entitlement and indebtedness, and the invisible motivation of loyalty resonated with family members’ experiences of their relationships. He would often say that the contextual approach had one main therapeutic technique: multidirected partiality. He was fond of outlining how the therapeutic guidelines of the contextual approach could be applied to understanding and intervening in relational systems like terrorism and could be linked to new sources of knowledge like genetics. After more than 30 years of applying contextual therapy in diverse contexts, I continue to believe that its greatest contribution is teaching us about living in the world of today in such a way that we prevent destructive consequences for future generations. In reflecting on his life and work, I think Ivan would like to be remembered as someone whose lifelong commitment to finding the essence of therapy reflects what he really believed: that a love of and trust in humanity forms the basis of all therapy. www.FamilyProcess.org