Carl Whitaker and Murray Bowen were about as opposite in process as two family therapists could get. Bowen developed an elegant theory-based practice; Whitaker avoided theory in favor of developing the spontaneity of the therapist. Bowen preferred to work alone, focusing on coaching the most differentiated person in the family system; Whitaker most often worked with cotherapists. Bowen worked on big stages at NIMH and Georgetown University in Washington, DC; Whitaker started his career in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the largest institutions for which he would work were state universities.
Whitaker’s symbolic-experiential approach to family counseling, though certainly spontaneous, was not without structure. Whitaker’s approach to family counseling was similar to that of some existential therapists. He believed that families often got stuck in patterned responses, routines, and rules that stagnated the growth of both the system and the individuals within the system. He believed that real change did not occur without anxiety, so rather than providing warmth and acceptance, Whitaker and colleagues were much more likely to up the ante, seed the unconscious, and engage in the absurd. All of this was in the service of creating more flexibility in the family system, helping family members to be more human, and promoting real intimacy within the family.
Whitaker and John Warkentin started seeing families together at Oak Ridge Hospital in Tennessee between 1944 and 1946. In 1946, they left Oak Ridge to start the Department of Psychiatry in the medical school at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Thomas Malone came to Emory to work with Whitaker, and together they would write one of the foundational texts for their approach to psychiatry (Whitaker & Malone, 1953/1981). Whitaker would also start to hold conferences twice a year in which family therapists primarily from the Philadelphia area would join his staff in demonstrations of counseling behind one-way screens— perhaps the first use of this method in the field. The last meeting in 1955 included Gregory Bateson and Don Jackson. Whitaker’s private practice in Atlanta, where he worked for 9 years, included colleagues John Warkentin, Thomas Malone, and Richard Felder. It was after his move to the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1965 that his most important works would be published. Gus Napier and Whitaker (1978) teamed up to write what many consider one of family counseling’s masterpieces, The Family Crucible. Whitaker and David Keith would bring their work to the center of family counseling scholarship, and in the late 1980s, Whitaker and William Bumberry (1988; Bumberry & Tenenbaum, 1986) produced a video and book on Carl’s intensive work with a depressed family from the heartland of the United States.
At multiple conferences over many years, Whitaker and Salvador Minuchin sparred with each other professionally, both claiming to learn from and influence the other. By the time Carl Whitaker died in April 1995, he was one of the most revered practitioners in the field. (A chapter on Whitaker’s model is available at www.jamesrobertbitter.com.)
It is easy to see that until this point men dominated the origins of family counseling. This was true both in actual practice and in the orientation of the field. So at this point, I want to introduce the parallel stories of two of the first women to leave their marks on family counseling.
The Stories of Two Women: Virginia Satir and Lynn Hoffman
They came from very different backgrounds. One was born and raised on a farm in Wisconsin. Her name was Virginia Pagenkopf. She was the daughter of first-generation German Americans at a time in America when Germans were not well received. Early on, she was fascinated by the power and functioning of parents in family life, and she resolved at the age of 5 to be a children’s detective on parents.
The other woman was born 40 miles from New York City on the Hudson in a community of painters, composers, and writers. Her name was Lynn, and she was the daughter of Ruth Reeves, an artist renowned for her work in fabric design.
Virginia started her education in a one-room schoolhouse, worked her way through high school and college, and became a teacher and even a principal for a short period of time. Eventually she would enter graduate school in social work at Northwestern University and complete her degree at the University of Chicago, although the experience of graduate school was neither nurturing nor rewarding for her.
Lynn went to progressive schools and lived in a family in which literature, art, music, and politics were prized. When she first encountered psychology in college, it was like entering an alien world with a foreign language. She wanted to be a writer and not escape into teaching—“the” career for women. She was accepted at Radcliffe University, where she would eventually graduate summa cum laude with a degree in English literature.
Virginia married a man named Gordon Rodgers in 1941. He was a dashing young soldier on his way to war. When the war was over, they, like many such couples, would discover that they had grown far apart. Early in their marriage, Virginia would suffer an ectopic pregnancy, which would result in a hysterectomy. Gordon and Virginia divorced in 1949. In 1951, Virginia married Norman Satir and adopted the name by which she would be known for the rest of her life, Virginia Satir. Their marriage would last until 1957.
Lynn married Ted Hoffman, a man who would begin teaching at Bard College in the theater department but who moved so often that the family had to adapt to his new and better positions in Oxford, England; Berkeley, California; Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh; and again to California at Stanford University. After a year at Stanford, Ted would get a grant that would require him to travel around the country in support of regional theaters while Lynn Hoffman was home with the children, occasionally editing papers for psychologists who were not such good writers. The distance between Ted and Lynn widened emotionally, eventually resulting in divorce.
Virginia began seeing young adolescents in private practice after she received her master’s degree. She remembered talking to a young woman, and as the counseling progressed, she began to wonder whether this young woman had a mother. Sure enough, she did, and when Virginia invited the mother to join them, the young woman became quiet and nonresponsive, returning to earlier levels of functioning. After working with the mother and daughter for a while, Virginia wondered whether maybe there was a father involved, and again there was. When he joined the family in counseling, both women became quiet, again regressing to earlier levels of functioning. This was the beginning of Satir’s family work with its emphasis on self-esteem, nurturing triads, and congruent communication. In time, Satir would meet with Murray Bowen in Washington, DC, and later join Don Jackson, Jay Haley, Jules Riskin, and others at the Mental Research Institute (MRI) in Palo Alto, California.
It was during her time at MRI that Satir completed the rough draft of her first book, Conjoint Family Therapy (Satir, 1964/1983). Lynn Hoffman remembered that some clarity was needed in the middle part of the manuscript, and she was called to see whether she could help bring the book to a conclusion, which she did. Lynn noted one of her first impressions of Virginia:
It is safe to say that Mrs. Satir does impress people. She is physically imposing. She glitters with jewelry and she likes bright, clear colors. She has a look which fits (forgive me, Virginia) the stock image of the “sexy blonde” in America, with earth mother overtones. And she is warm. She genuinely likes her patients and her sympathy is not cloying or overdone. (Hoffman, 2002, p. 4)
While the men at MRI were fascinated by and engaged in the application of systems theory and cybernetics to family practice, Virginia continued to blend the reframing and positive orientation of MRI’s developing model with her own humanistic orientation. Lynn would often watch through one-way windows as Virginia would weave her magic with families. The men at MRI never fully appreciated what Virginia was able to do: “One psychiatrist I spoke to told me that they felt about Satir as they would about a little girl who ran out of the house without any clothes on” (Hoffman, 2002, p. 6).
Virginia would later depart MRI, and for a while she became the first director of training at the Esalen Institute
