The training takes place during a 4-year process, i.e. 512 hours, plus 200 hours of personal work for students who have gone through and completed an end-of-training course, taken during two additional weekends of training. Professor Makke and Yesser Al Haj provide the training. Trainers belonging to the IEFSH - Alain Marteaux, Nadia Ramsis, Geneviève Platteau (2008-2015), and Jacques Pluymakers (2008-2015) - regularly host intensive week-long sessions in Beirut.
Other sessions may be held in Belgium and are taught by Professors Mony Elkaïm and Edith Goldbeter.
The seminars are theoretical-practical. In the last year, a memory work is required to study the illustration of a clinical situation (individual, couple or family, institutional) by indicating what the training has modified in the clinical practice and on a personal and professional level for the student.
Training program
The personal evolution of the students is at the heart of the training so that they can optimally use their own resources and resonances in the clinical situations encountered in the Lebanese and Arab human systems.
Nonverbal language, a universal language, is central in training, plays an important role in the learning of circular reading and in systemic intervention.
Small "reading and analysis of texts" preparation groups are formed to think about the writings and to present the theory in various forms.
This method allows students to integrate and appropriate theoretical knowledge regardless of the sources.
Year I
- Integration of global systemic thinking
- Theory of normal, pathological and paradoxical communication
- Reading and nonverbal intervention
- The prestigious universities of family therapy (Palo Alto and other schools): Theories and models
- Work on siblings: status, roles and functions
- Introduction to the genogram
- Simulations, family role-playing, systemic reading and reframing
- First family interviews, circular reading
- Work on the approaches of Mony Elkaïm, Carl Whitaker, and Edith Goldbeter
- Constructivism: Cybernetics I and II
Year II
- Work on the candidate's family of origin (sculptures, genograms, role-playing)
- The institutional systemic approach: formal program and implicit rule concepts; systemic reading of large systems (inter-institutional). Use of the landscape genogram in relation to the institutional position of the candidate
- Systemic theories of other authors and practical exercises (S. Minuchin, M. Andolfi, G. Ausloos, M. Selvini etc.)
- Prestigious universities: the structural approach, school of Rome and Milan (second part).
- Strategic Brief Therapies (Haley)
- The analytical-systemic model of Professor Abbas Makke
Year III
Couple therapy: theories and practical exercises (Ph. Caillé, J. Lemaire, R. Neuburger, M. Elkaïm)
- Floating objects: use of media in therapy, theory, and practice (Ph. Caillé, Y. Rey)
- Sculptures in time (L. Onnis), phenomenological and mythical sculptures (Ph. Caillé)
- The model of Professor Mony Elkaïm and the concept of resonances
Year IV
- Supervision: Candidates present clinical situations which are analyzed in groups and staged with proposals for intervention models
- Evolution of Family of origin work: process and resources (starting sculptures)
Year V (optional)
Memory work: Preparation in subgroups, writing, presentation, and discussions of work, rewriting, etc.