Virginia Satir: biography of this pioneer of family therapy

Virginia Satir (1916-1988) is recognized as one of the pioneering psychologists in family therapy. Her 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 her main contributions to clinical intervention with a family approach.

• Related article: "History of Psychology: main authors and theories"

Brief biography of Virginia Satir

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 older sister of five children.

In 1929, when she was 13 years old, her family moved to the city of Milwaukee, so that Virginia could start school. The same year she began the great depression, with which at a very early age Virginia began to work while she continued with her studies. Once this is done,

she began her college training at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, formerly known as Milwaukee State Teachers College.

Meanwhile, she worked in the Works Projects Administration (WPA), a program generated to compensate for the consequences of the Great Depression in the United States, which mostly employed adult men in a situation of poverty. By the second half of the 1930s, the WPA was also employing women and young people in carrying out public projects. Likewise, she Virginia worked for a time as a babysitter. Eventually he majored in education she and she, already as a professional, she served as an educator.

In the summer of 1937, Virginia began courses at Northwestern University in Chicago, an activity that she continued to do for a couple of summers more. He later studied in the department of social services administration at the University of Chicago, where he completed his graduate studies in 1948. She eventually trained as a social worker, a profession that she practiced from 1951 until the beginning of her own therapeutic model.

• You may be interested: "Virginia Satir's Family Therapy: Its Goals and Uses"

Beginnings and influences of family therapy

After completing 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.

She thought that individual studies of psychology were essential, however, she did not they could stay there, as this did not offer the necessary explanations or alternatives enough. For Satir, it was important to look at the first system that sustains the individual, and this was the family.

In other words, Virginia Satir argued that the “obvious problem” (the one that is verbalized in therapy or that which was easily observable) was almost never the real problem; rather, it was only a “presentation”. In other words, it was a superficial conflict that had been generated by the interaction of the individual and the family with the underlying problem.

From there, she proposed to carry out particular analyzes (which would consider the case of each subject according to her family environment), and not general (that would explain the experience of a subject based on the coincidences that he had with other subjects far from his context). All of it introduced important novelties 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 American psychotherapists were already very recognized, founded a research institute on mental functioning, called 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 from the interventions and research carried out at the Mental Research Institute, that the foundations of the systemic tradition in family psychotherapy were consolidated.

Satir's humanistic perspective

The 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 for this, one 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 with the rest of society.

This translates into the constant establishment of interpersonal connections, since once Once the networks between the members of a family have been consolidated, they are extrapolated to other members of the family. society. Thus, "heal" family networks, could generate better people and better links 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:

• Increase self esteem.
• Enhance decision-making.
• Assume personal responsibilities.
• Achieve self-consistency.

Outstanding works

Some of Virginia Satir's main works are Self-esteem of 2001; In intimate contact, from 1976; Changing with relatives, from 1976; Y All your faces, from 1978, among many others. The same way received various recognitions from different universities and psychotherapy associations worldwide.