Week 11: Carl Whitaker

Randy Wong writes: The people in the photo are Carl Whitaker, me, George Zee (who was a Jesuit priest from Hong Kong), and Carl’s wife Muriel. I would have been 24 years old when the photo was taken (half a lifetime ago) and this was taken at the end of the workshop that Carl and Muriel offered at the Haven. Carl was a very well known family therapist who valued co-therapy (working with another therapist) and he would agree to work with a client only if the client’s whole family was involved in the therapy, as he believed that the individual could not be understood or helped if he/she were removed from his/her family system. This was a very intellectually stimulating period of The Haven as it was also around this time that James Bugental (a well known humanistic psychotherapist) and Irv and Miriam Polster (very well known gestalt therapists) offered workshops at The Haven. I had the privilege of attending all three of those workshops.