Quotes from MFT Leaders:
"Jackson was a great clinician, especially with schizophrenics and their family. I find myself today when I work with a family thinking of him. What he would say? What comment would he make? Don managed to have the idea that there's nothing wrong with the schizophrenic which is quite a feat. He accepted a lot of behavior from them as being communication instead of
physiological, which made a whale of a difference in the therapy he was doing."
Jay Haley,
Pioneer of Family Therapy and Founding Editor of Family Process.
"The most basic contribution Jackson made was to be among the first to see things in terms of what people are doing between each other in the present, rather than get stuck on the idea that behavior just depends on something that comes from the inside and has no relationship to the world people live in." Don
could communicate on two different levels, or two different tracks more or less at the same time. Like Milton Erickson, Don had a very quick grasp of where people he was talking to were at so he could effectively address it. He could talk to people in conflict and make both of them at the same time think he understood them and was right with them ... Because Jackson was a very
qualified psychiatrist, as well as very persuasive, things might have been very different in main stream psychiatry if he had not died so young. His death was particularly unfortunate because he might have been able to get through more than anyone else."
John Weakland,
Deceased. Formally Senior Research Associate, Mental Research Institute, and Co-Director, Brief Therapy Center, MRI
"Don was a genius. A very complex guy who had two dreams - to be an opera star and a great writer. With flawless clinical judgement Jackson pioneered the study of system theory, and Kinesics - He put very little faith in verbal [communication]."
William Lederer,
co-author with Don Jackson of the classic book Mirages of Marriage
"We would play tape segments of interviews to Don and invariably he would give the right diagnosis. He did not know the people. He did not know how old they were; if they had children; why they had come to MRI; nothing! All he had was the voices on the tape. These were little interchanges from 3 to 5 minutes maybe. Invariably Don wouldn't say some sort of global kind
of approximation like, "well, that sounds schizophrenic", ... no, no, no. He would say something specific like: "If they have a son he is probably a delinquent or a pre-delinquent. If they have a daughter she probably has psychosomatic problems." Can you imagine? I've never met anyone as capable as Don of being able to pick up, in the here and now, the
interaction and arrive at correct conclusions. Jackson was a trained psychoanalyst, who was supposed to take a complete history and then gradually work towards an understanding of the problem. But Don did it within minutes in the here and now. We would sit behind the mirror in awe. We'd ask, "Don please, how do you arrive at these conclusions?" And then the thing fell
flat. He would say something as deeply meaningful as, "Well, listen to the way the mother laughs at that point," and we never found out how he did it, but he did it. I remember an incident when we played three tapes of "normal" families to Jackson and for the first time he said, "I don't know, play it again." We played it for the second time and he
said, "I still don't know, to me they sound normal." There were many occasions when Don would begin to do therapy in the first ten minutes. He was the most incredible therapist I have ever had the pleasure of watching."
Paul Watzlawick,
Senior Research Associate, Mental Research Institute, and team member, Brief Therapy Center, MRI
"Don was a brilliant, penetrating, yet disciplined intelligence. He had a magnetic presence that left no one about him untouched. In Don's death we suffered a catastrophic, ill-timed loss. He was a shooting star that streaked across the sky of American Psychiatry and then faded out, all too soon."
Nathan Ackerman,
Deceased. Pioneer of Family Therapy & Director of the Family Institute, New York
"I have found your work illuminating. The conflict over "am I to be controlled by mother or to be in control of myself" that you articulate fits in most agreeably with my own ideas. Your whole thesis commends itself to me in no uncertain terms."
W. Ronald Fairbairn,
personal correspondence with Jackson, circa 1957. Deceased. Pioneer in Object Relations Theory
