02/20/2024
Here is a little piece I wrote for Umberta Telfner, from Rome. She asked me if I could write a bit of "gosip", as she called it, regarding my friend and mentor, the late, great, Lynn Hoffman -- see the film I made about her with Lars Meyer: All Manner of Poetic Disobedience: Lynn Hoffman and the Rhizome Century. This is for a website she is putting together which acknowledges all the influencial systemic thinkers and practitioners. So... this is what I wrote...
Christopher Iwestel Kinman Gossips
about Lynn Hoffman
What can I say about Lynn Hoffman.
Well… there are things we all know already. She was a leader in the early systemic awakening that transformed into family therapy. She was a genius in thought during a time when women were all-too-often considered light-minded and frivolous (we can also put the likes of Harlene Anderson, Virginia Satir, Umberta Telfner, Imelda McCarthy and Nollaig Byrn into this camp). She was a tremendous writer, who knew how to share systemic ideas from the nitty-gritty of the ground on which they were created and practiced. I don’t think anyone in the family therapy field, past or present, was able to write about the complex ideas that were influencing our field with the kind of clarity and accessibility she was able to convey.
And there is more of the obvious Lynn Hoffman. For one, she was very funny. She could weave a tale that would leave a whole room rolling with laughter. Here’s an example, a story she told about Satir. Lynn witnessed Satir as she was about to begin a family therapy session with a teenage boy and his parents. The father was a Christian minister. He and his wife sat in their chairs, eyes down, looking thoroughly dejected. It turned out that this young man had recently made two girls in his school pregnant. Satir, sitting at her desk writing some kind of note, without lifting her head said to the boy, “Well, we know something about you for sure – you have very good seed.” Whenever Lynn told this story to an audience, the group would break out into laughter, then Lynn would follow with, “Satir was so respectful… good seed… so respectful.” Lynn loved this story. And so do I.
There is still more to Lynn Hoffman. Some parts to her story shook people up a bit. She looked like she kept changing her models – though I don’t see it in quite that way. I don’t think Lynn liked the idea of models to begin with. Rather, using an idea that she found in Deleuze’s writings, she saw assemblages of ideas that were intimately linked to time and place. For example, Tom Andersen’s reflecting teams and reflective practices were intimately connected to the Norwegian lands, waters, and skies in which Andersen lived and worked. Another example was in my own work. She saw the ideas that I was discussing as tied to the lands, waters, people and histories that I was in relations with. I remember being told by an elder from Sts’ailes First Nation that the land and the people are one, one cannot be talked about without the other. No more Cartesian split separating our work and practice from the lands and waters, animals and plants, landscapes, seasons and weather with which we are connected. Lynn Hoffman believed this strongly. She didn’t adopt and then leave models; she just expanded her sense of the assemblages form which these ideas came from. And she always looked for new languages to talk about what we were doing.
Something else that is important to mention about Lynn Hoffman -- during her last days she no longer considered herself a family therapist. She had come to not believe in the idea that we can operate from a higher platform and act upon individuals or families (or other units of social or natural division) to help them make changes for the better. This very idea had become unpleasant for Hoffman. In the end she used, though in a somewhat tentative way (perhaps all language was tentative with Lynn), the language of “communal practices” to talk about the work she wanted to be connected with. In such practices there is no magician in charge of producing change, rather there is a coming-together, with a minimum of predetermined goals and agendas, and something beautiful, something wonderful, almost always comes to life in such contexts. But, in Hoffman’s world, we must not expect to know beforehand what such a coming-together will produce. There is always this “unbearable lightness of being” in her work (to reference the Czech writer, Milan Kindera), where we walk in with a certain blindness before us, what Harlene Anderson calls a “not-knowing.” Not a quality valued by the traditional Western mind.
One other thing you should know about Lynn Hoffman. Something that should leave you with a peaceful heart. Lynn Hoffman died in love. She fell in love late in life and found a partner who adored and admired her. His name was Eddie. They were a true love story. Just a few weeks after Lynn died, Eddie also died. I understand that after Lynn’s death, he stopped eating. He wasn’t unhappy, he was just ready to go.
There is much more that could be said regarding my dear friend, Lynn Hoffman. But let me just finish by saying that I miss her immensely. I long for our regular long, wandering phone conversations. I wish we could still have our yearly visits (I would either bring her out to the West Coast of Canada or I would join Lynn somewhere in the world). I still love this person, and there is a hole in my own soul that can never be filled, and I hope it can never be filled. Thank you for the opportunity to muse about this most wonderful friend.
Christopher Iwestel Kinman
