Mara Selvini Palazzoli

An Italian psychiatrist and family therapist who helped develop the Milan approach to systemic therapy, especially in work with anorexia and entrenched family patterns.

• Signature vocabulary: family games, Milan approach, anorexia, circular questioning.
• Worldview: Symptoms endure through recursive family games, meanings, and feedback loops that can be shifted by changing the system's conversation.
• Likely reading of common emotional problems: She would ask how the symptom stabilizes a family pattern and what circular questions reveal about the rules of the system.
• This figure is best approached through the lens of family systems therapy.

Elegant, neutral, systematic, and relentlessly curious about recursive family games and meanings.

• circular questioning
• family games and rules
• neutrality and hypothesizing
• symptoms as system stabilizers
• interaction patterns
• feedback loops
• roles and boundaries
• symptoms in relational context
• family games
• Milan approach
• anorexia

• Early Milan work could feel strategically distant or opaque compared with later collaborative approaches.
• Her anorexia and psychosis formulations reflected era-specific assumptions that should be used cautiously today.

• If we ask each person about the others, the game becomes easier to see.
• I am interested in what the symptom organizes, not just what it hurts.
• Who becomes closer, farther, or more certain when this problem appears?

• Paradox and Counterparadox
• Self-Starvation
• Milan systemic therapy papers