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Blog
Toxic, narcissistic, borderline: what therapy speak does to your relationships
Narcissistic, borderline, toxic, gaslighting: the words of mental health have left the consulting room and flooded our conversations. Julien Besse shows, from social constructionism to Fincham and Bradbury’s work on attributions in couples, how these labels close the debate, relieve us of our share and replace a relational reading with a judgement about the person.
6 Sept 2026
Blog
Systemic therapy: its origins, its present and its future. Interview with Jay Haley
Interviewed in 1998 by Marcelo Rodríguez Ceberio and Juan Luis Linares for the Argentine journal Perspectivas Sistémicas, Jay Haley, a pioneer of strategic therapy, looks back on his years with Gregory Bateson and Milton Erickson, on power, emotion and change in psychotherapy, and on what he imagined the therapy of the coming millennium would be. English translation of the interview republished by Red Sistémica.
5 Sept 2026
Blog
Silence in therapy: a polysemic presence
From Heidegger to Palo Alto, silence is not an absence but a message. Defensive, strategic, reflective or shared: its forms, its therapeutic functions and its risks when we forget to metacommunicate it.
20 Jul 2026
Blog
Six books to slip into your bag this summer (when you're a therapist)
What should a therapist read this summer? Six books, three territories: the clinic, with Pierre Bordaberry on moving out of the victim position, Frédérique Allimann in dialogue with Guy Ausloos, and a collective volume edited by Vincent de Gaulejac on therapy's place in society. Our times, with Serge Tisseron and his machines that care for us. And literature, with Camus and John Williams's magnificent Stoner.
18 Jul 2026
Blog
What if the shortest path to change ran through a joyful detour?
Humour in therapy is not a gimmick but a clinical skill: it loosens the loops, reframes without wounding and reopens the field of possibilities. With its ethical safeguards and a concrete toolbox.
16 Jul 2026
Blog
When intuition comes before strategy. The first flash of meaning
From Bergson to von Foerster, intuition is not the enemy of rigour but its immediate side. How it works concretely in the clinical interview, and why it calls for a reflexive stance.
13 Jul 2026
Blog
Rebuilding trust after infidelity: the 5 behaviours that repair
Infidelity does not necessarily doom a couple — but surviving it owes nothing to chance or to the mere passage of time. Drawing on my experience as a couple therapist, this article details the five behaviours that make it possible to restore trust after a betrayal.
11 Jul 2026
Blog
Changing… but at which level?
First order, second order, paradigmatic revolution: three logical levels of change, and why intensifying old recipes stops working once the context has shifted.
8 Jul 2026
Blog
Relearning couplehood after exile and violence
Every Monday morning, at the Maison d'Ella, the systemic psychologist Ivy Daure receives exiled women who have survived genital cutting, forced marriage, repeated rape. The most troubling thing is not what they have fled, but what lies in wait for them here: forming a couple again according to the same grammar of violence. This article looks back at her work of relearning the relationship, between an anchoring group, cards from the game Amour Monstre and seemingly anecdotal criteria for choosing a partner, like that of the woman who declared she wanted “a man who eats spicy food”.
4 Jul 2026
Blog
Crisis: a catalyst of transformation in human systems
In systemic terms, a crisis is not a malfunction to be corrected but an effort by the system not to founder. From the Denver Project to Falicov’s transcultural reading: a typology of crises and what each asks of the practitioner.
3 Jul 2026
Blog
Towards an ecology of cognitive vigilance: restoring the conditions for nuanced thinking in care systems
Having described how human systems manufacture rigid beliefs, this article proposes a durable organisation of vigilance: seven structural, relational and institutional conditions — regulated spaces for speech, plurality of perspectives, clinical slowness, tolerance of uncertainty, distinguishing facts from interpretations, circulation of narratives, a culture of nuance. An ecology, not a technique.
1 Jul 2026
Blog
Strategy: the invisible art of systemic change
In systemic work, strategy is not a plan you unroll but a way of reading and intervening in the system. Neither force nor flight: the Greek mētis, the art of the detour that opens ways out where everything seems closed.
28 Jun 2026
Blog
What will tomorrow's therapy look like?
What if the therapy of tomorrow no longer played out behind the closed doors of the consulting room? In the age of AI and great societal upheavals, six trends trace one underlying movement: a “sex recession” that questions meaning more than frequency, a parental burnout exhausting entire families, an artificial intelligence turned silent co-therapist, care spreading beyond the consulting room, psychological concepts wielded as weapons within the couple, and a return of communal healing.
27 Jun 2026
Blog
Thinking complexity: following the threads of the real without breaking them
Recursiveness, dialogic, hologrammatic: Edgar Morin’s three principles for thinking without mutilating, and what they change concretely in the stance of a practitioner working with human systems.
23 Jun 2026
Blog
Therapists and AI: the next great fracture in psychological care
While therapists debate who has the right to treat, AI has already made itself at home in psychological care. AI will compete head-on with “impoverished therapy”, the kind that merely reformulates and validates. But it runs up against what lies at the heart of care: the otherness of an other who can contradict rather than flatter (where its complaisance creates a dangerous echo chamber), a responsibility that is actually assumed, and a way of thinking able to see systems rather than single causes.
20 Jun 2026
Blog
Equifinality: many paths towards the same becoming
The same final state can be reached by very different paths. Von Bertalanffy’s principle cracks our simplistic causal stories and calls for recognising the diversity of routes in clinical work, education and organisations.
17 Jun 2026
Blog
The therapy wars: who really has the right to treat?
In this article, I analyse the “therapy wars” pitting professionals with protected titles — psychologists, psychiatrists, psychotherapists — against practitioners trained outside the university, such as psychopractitioners or some private-school therapists. Through a systemic reading of the conflict, the article proposes moving beyond the logic of turf war to ask the real question: what minimum guarantees should we demand of anyone who accompanies psychological suffering?
13 Jun 2026
Blog
Circular causality: when the cause is also an effect
From Aristotle to second-order cybernetics, one idea runs through the centuries: in living systems, cause and effect sustain each other in a loop. What that changes for therapy, for sociology, and for the way we explain the world.
12 Jun 2026
Blog
When systems fall apart… and put themselves back together
Entropy and negentropy, chaos and order: what complexity science teaches anyone supporting families or organisations, and why a well-supported crisis becomes a fruitful moment rather than a catastrophe.
7 Jun 2026
Blog
The problem is not what we think: how to avoid clinging to the initial request in therapy
This article explores a frequent trap in therapeutic intervention: taking the problem as presented by the patient, the couple or the family as though it were already correctly defined. Drawing on the thinking of Yara Doumit and the Strategic Resolution Method, it shows that the problem is often a relational construction, fed by hypotheses, repeated attempted solutions and loops of confirmation. The clinical challenge is therefore not to resolve the initial request too quickly, but to shift the gaze in order to construct, with the system, a definition of the problem that is finally solvable.
6 Jun 2026
Blog
When human systems manufacture their own illusions
Families, couples, teams and care institutions spontaneously manufacture short, reassuring narratives to reduce uncertainty. When these narratives harden, they become “fake beliefs”: simple, emotionally charged, hard to revise. This article crosses systemic clinical work with research on disinformation to describe how such beliefs propagate, how institutions incubate them, and the therapist’s axes of intervention as an artisan of complexity.
3 Jun 2026
Blog
First- and second-order cybernetics: from puppeteer to dancer
Moving from first- to second-order cybernetics changes the practitioner’s place: they stop observing the system from outside and recognise that they are part of it. From diagnosis to co-construction, from expertise to resonance.
1 Jun 2026
Blog
Edgar Morin's great lesson for therapists
The death of Edgar Morin invites us to take the measure of the legacy of a body of thought that never ceased to fight the mutilating simplifications of intelligence. Through an immense body of work, from the sociology of mass culture to La Méthode, Morin proposed a complex thought founded on the art of connecting: connecting knowledges, levels of reality, the individual, society and the species, but also the contradictions that run through the living.
30 May 2026
Blog
Homeostasis: what holds us together, and what holds us back
Homeostasis describes a system’s capacity to maintain its internal balance despite disturbance. In families as in organisations, this force protects the group’s integrity while braking change. How to work with it rather than against it.
26 May 2026
Blog
The trap of non-judgement: when staying silent is no longer neutral
This article questions the myth of absolute non-judgement, often presented as a posture of wisdom or benevolence. It shows that there is an essential difference between not reducing a person to their acts and refusing to name what humiliates, dominates or produces injustice. From a systemic and ethical perspective, the text argues that the silence of witnesses, of institutions or sometimes of therapists can reinforce power relations and make injustice acceptable.
23 May 2026