to Milan were a great stimulus for us. Firstly, her presence made it
appear as an important moment in the story of family therapy; then
she began to offer appropriate words. I remember the moment when
she said, "What makes you different from other therapists is that
you always have a hypothesis". This idea was the basis for an article
we wrote in 1980, "Hypothesizing-Circularity -- Neutrality".

I believe Lynn was the one who invented the term "Milan
School". Later she was instrumental, together with Peggy Penn, in
organizing the ideas coming from that school in the book Milan
Systemic Family Therapy of which they were co-authors.

Of course, after that, Lynn moved on to other experiences and
other descriptions. I remember, during a conference somewhere in
England, when she and Harry Goolishian struggled to find a way
out of the idea that a system in some way creates a problem. "What
about a problem creating a system?" They said: "No, that is still
causal lineal.""What about a problem-determined system?""In
such a way you don't have to 'solve' any problem to 'dis-solve' the
system determined by the problem. At the end there is no 'problem',
there is no 'system', there is no 'therapy', there is something else
which it is better not to define otherwise you become an 'expert'."
Later on, she would begin to have a problem also with the word
"problem".

The issue of power and control began to be her preoccupation.
Then in 1985 Lynn began to address her energy to a formidable
challenge: can anyone do effective therapy without becoming an
instrument of social control, without participating and contributing,
often unknowingly, to the construction or the maintenance of a
dominant discourse of oppression?

The voices were coming from the feminist field, narrative
epistemology and postmodern thinkers, constructivism, construc-
tionism, and hermeneutics. The challenge is complicated by the fact
that any attempt to fight oppression in families or society at large
can become a source of oppression itself. Lynn is acutely aware of
this problem, and it is part of the fascination of this book to observe
how she uses her clinical and intellectual skills to avoid the trap of
using oppression to fight oppression.

Under her continuous irreverence towards an excessive loyalty
to any discovered truth there seems to remain a constant premise:
the premise that therapy cannot make a compromise with systems of

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