Virginia Satir: Biography Of This Pioneer Of Family Therapy
Virginia Satir (1916-1988) is recognized as one of the pioneering psychologists in family therapy His theory has had an important impact on systemic approach psychotherapy, and also on the humanistic tradition of clinical psychology.
We will see below a biography of Virginia Satir as well as some of its main contributions to clinical intervention with a family approach.
Virginia Satir was born on June 26, 1916 in the city of Neillsville in Wisconsin, United States. She is remembered as a self-taught woman, who even She learned to read and write with her own teaching resources from a very young age She grew up in a Catholic and scientific family, and was the eldest sister of five children.
In 1929, when she was 13 years old, the family moved to the city of Milwaukee, so that Virginia could begin school. The same year she began the Great Depression, so at a very early age Virginia began to work while she continued with her studies. Once this is finished, He began his university education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee formerly known as Milwaukee State Teachers College.
Meanwhile, he worked in the Works Projects Administration (WPA), a program created to compensate for the consequences of the Great Depression in the United States, which mostly employed adult men in poverty. By the second half of the 1930s, the WPA was also employing women and young people in carrying out public projects. Likewise, Virginia worked for a time as a nanny. He eventually specialized in education and, as a professional, she worked as an educator.
In the summer of 1937, Virginia began courses at Northwestern University in Chicago, an activity she continued for a couple more summers. She later studied at the Department of Social Services Administration at the University of Chicago, where she completed her graduate studies in 1948. She eventually trained as a social worker, a profession she practiced from 1951 until the beginnings of her own model. therapeutic.
Beginnings and influences of family therapy
Once she finished her studies, Virgina Satir began working in a private practice, and by 1955, she was already working at the Illinois Psychiatric Institute. Among her main claims, Satir defended the need to analyze not only the individual; but to carry out in-depth analyzes of family dynamics
He thought that psychology studies at an individual level were essential, however, they could not stop there, since this did not offer the necessary explanations or sufficient alternatives. For Satir, it was important to look at the first system that supports the individual, and this was the family.
In other words, Virginia Satir maintained that the “obvious problem” (the one that was verbalized in therapy or that which was easily observable) was almost never the real problem; but it was only a “presentation”. That is, it was a superficial conflict that had been generated by the interaction of the individual and the family with the underlying problem.
From there, he proposed carrying out particular analyzes (that considered the case of each subject according to his family environment), and not general ones (that explained the experience of a subject based on the coincidences he had with other subjects far from his context). All of this introduced important innovations in the area of clinical and educational psychology which finally laid the foundations for a new model of intervention or family therapy.
As a result, in the late 1950s, Satir and other well-known American psychotherapists founded a research institute on mental functioning, called the Mental Research Institute.
The headquarters was the city of Palo Alto, in California, and it quickly established itself as one of the most recognized institutions in psychological care at the family level. Among other things, it was based on the interventions and research carried out at the Mental Research Institute, which The bases of the systemic tradition in family psychotherapy were consolidated
Satir’s humanist perspective
Psychotherapeutic intervention, for Virginia Satir, had the main objective of achieving personal growth, that is, of allowing the human to become a complete being. And to do this, we had to look at the “microcosm” that the nuclear family represented.
In this, the mother figure, the father figure, and the son or daughter, had to build a joint human validation process ; which was later reflected in the approach of each person to the rest of society.
The above translates into the constant establishment of interpersonal connections, since once the networks between the members of a family are consolidated, they are extrapolated to other members of society. Thus, “healing” family networks, could generate better people and better connections on a large scale
The personal growth model
Virginia Satir’s theory was finally consolidated into a model of personal growth, which had important implications in psychotherapy. This model mainly pursued the following objectives:
Outstanding works
Some of Virginia Satir’s main works are Self-esteem of 2001; In intimate contact1976; Changing with family, 1976; and all your faces, from 1978, among many others. The same way received various recognitions from different universities and psychotherapy associations worldwide.
