One Perspective on Karl Tomm's Current Approach to Systemic Practice

Karl Tomm occupies a pivotal position in the evolution of systemic family therapy. He played an important role in bringing the work of the original Milan systemic family therapy team to the attention of family therapists in North America, the UK and Ireland (Tomm, 1984a, 1984b). He then went on to extend and elaborate their w ork and also to integrate work from the narrative therapy tradition into systemic family therapy. The account of some aspects of his work presented in this chapter are based on a presentation he made over two days at the Mater Hospital in Dublin in April 1 997. The presentation and this account of Karl Tomm’s work clusters around four central themes.