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DATE: December 23, 1986
EDITION: Volume VII, Number 1
Dear Colleagues,
Here is the third issue of the newsletter born at the 1986 Ortho Conference. It's more than a month late, thanks to the arrival October 31 of Jacob Eli Kliman-Trimble, born in Longview, Texas. Jodie and I met him in his second day of life, and he has been with us ever since. I went to Texas for the final adoption December 19. He is smart, good-looking, and a very easy baby. I find that the years have made it much easier for me to be a good parent, but they also make the sleep deprivation more of a challenge. This letter will be shorter than I would like, as well as late.
My apologies in particular to Anne Coppard, Donald Lugtig, and Mary Youngquist,each of whom offered to be faculty at Ortho in 1987, and each of whom has important work to present. As it happens, Ortho did not accept our institute this year. Citing limited space at the Washington conference site, they said that they had to "select those Institutes which received the most positive feedback." Although most of the evaluations of the 1986 Institute were in fact strongly positive, we remember that it was very sparsely attended. Julia Halevy has submitted a proposal to AAMFT to provide a similar Institute at their Fall, 1987 conference. I will try Ortho again next year. Let me raise the question as to how we can establish a more predictable way for network therapists to share their work and maintain face-to-face relationships over the years.
There is certainly plenty of work to share. Gunnar Forsberg tells me that his group is looking for a forum in North America to present their work when it is completed next year. Mount Tom continues to practice network therapy with chronic patients; Paul Schoenfeld has an institute which is disseminating network intervention techniques in central New England; Network Consultants in Boston is working on strategies to market network therapy to health maintenance organizations; Anne Coppard of COTA has a pilot study with one year followup, a videotape of a role play of an intervention (used for training), an update on their client population of chronic schizophrenics in Toronto; Donald Lugtig has prepared an ambitious proposal for a research/demonstration project developing network strategies to combat child abuse; Mary Youngquist is ready to report on network intervention in private practice; if you had written me about your work I could be sharing it with others in this letter.
I have had a chance to review a summary of Don's proposal; it's very exciting both for the scope of its plans for intervention in urban neighborhoods but also because it shows how productive the network concept has been for studying patterns of child abuse and neglect. Don's review of the literature shows that we have the capacity now to address extremely complex phenomena with a conceptual approach powerful enough to make many important distinctions. For example, Don notes the difference between an abusive family with a small, dense, neighborhood network which provides normative support for the abuse and an abusive family which is cut off from the neighborhood-based network because of the network's moral condemnation of the child abuse. Clearly, the two cases will reguire very different network intervention strategies. Don proposes interventions at a number of different levels, e.g. personal network, neighborhood network, child care network, cultural group, etc.
From where I'm sitting, it seems to me that Don's group in Winnipeg and Gunnar's group in Botkyrka can benefit from exchanging their experience developing network strategies to cope with child abuse and neglect. Certainly, I think that anyone serious about developing network strategies with this population should be in communication with Don and Gunnar. I have written to the publisher of the pamphlet on the work in Sweden; I haven't gotten a reply and will ask Gunnar to help get information on how to order copies of the pamphlet.
I mentioned the book NATWERKSTERAPI in my last letter. I have been making some inquiries about translating the book into English, hoping to get the table of contents and introduction translated and approach potential publishers to pick up to cost of translating the whole book. Estimates from professional translating services to translate the whole book ranged from $12 to $50 thousand; estimates for the table of contents and introduction ranged from $375 to $885. Is there anyone, perhaps from Sweden or from Minnesota, who can come up with a translation of the table of contents and introduction which would be less costly? Please let me know; I think that English-speaking network therapists will profit from having access to it.
Please note Mary Youngquist's new work address; she has recently become a partner in a group private practice, Minnesota Psychotherapy and Consultation Services, 2550 University Avenue West, Suite 229N, Saint Paul, Minnesota, 55114. Allan Linner's new address is Byvagen 26, 133 00 SALTSJOBADEN, Sweden.
I hope to be hearing from you, and will pass network intervention news along to the others. I would also be happy to circulate opinion pieces and brief reports. The mailing list for this newsletter includes everyone invited or participating in the 1986 Ortho Institute; it includes most, but not all, of the active pioneers in network intervention in North America. I welcome people's suggestions for new names on the list, and for directions for the newsletter. If any of you are in a position to arrange for a gathering of network interventionists outside the normal conference circuit, please let us all know.
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