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Maurizio Andolfi.
Child Psychiatrist and Family Therapist
Maurizio Andolfi is an Italian child psychiatrist and family therapist, and one of the most influential figures in the international development of systemic family therapy. Trained in New York and Philadelphia alongside the founders of the field, he went on to develop his own model, the multigenerational family therapy approach, which places the child as the guide to the family system and works with three generations in the room. He is Director of the Family Therapy Academy in Rome, President of the Silvano Andolfi Foundation and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Terapia Familiare, and has consulted with families and trained clinicians across five continents for more than four decades.
About Maurizio.
His formation brought him into direct contact with the pioneers of family therapy. He was a fellow in Social and Community Psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and Visiting Professor at Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia. He studied at the Ackerman Institute for the Family with Kitty LaPerrière and at the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic with Salvador Minuchin and Jay Haley. Of all his teachers, the one who marked him most deeply was Carl Whitaker, with whom he studied and later collaborated in international seminars over fifteen years.
He was Professor in the Department of Clinical Psychology at the University of Rome, and has held visiting fellowships at Edith Cowan University in Perth and James Cook University in Cairns. He founded the European Family Therapy Association, of which he was Vice-President, and directs the Family Therapy Academy in Rome, where the first year of specialist training is built entirely around each candidate's own family genogram.
His clinical contribution is condensed in the approach he introduced to the field as the bottom-up approach in multigenerational family therapy: rather than gathering family history from the oldest generation downwards, the therapist works upwards from the children, who have witnessed family life and can guide the clinician into its unfinished business. Alongside it, he has worked for decades on professional handicaps, a body of training work that traces a therapist's clinical difficulties back to their own family history and returns them as resources.
He is the author, co-author and editor of numerous works on family therapy. His books include Family Therapy: An Interactional Approach (1979), Behind the Family Mask (1983), The Myth of Atlas (1989), Please Help Me With This Family (1994), Teen Voices (2013, with Anna Mascellani), Multigenerational Family Therapy (2015) and, most recently, The Gift of Truth (2022). His work has been recognised with awards for outstanding contribution to family therapy from the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy in 1999 and from the Australian Association of Family Therapy in 2021, and with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Family Therapy Academy in 2016. He is an honorary member of the Asian Academy of Family Therapy and holds the Distinguished Talent qualification from the Australian Government, and an Andolfi family therapy centre has been founded in his honour in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
