Yvonne Agazarian

Yvonne M. Agazarian (February 17, 1929 - October 9, 2017) was the principal architect of systems-centered therapy, based on a theory of Living Human Systems that she also developed. Agazarian taught, trained, and supervised systems-centered therapists internationally, was the founder of the Systems-Centered Training & Research Institute, and practiced in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Life Agazarian was born in London to a French mother and Armenian father, the youngest of six children. She attended a Jesuit boarding school, the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roehampton, from the ages of 7–17. After the end of the Second World War, she moved to Canada to study English and philosophy, supporting herself through work as a nurse in a mental hospital, and as a cook in a logging camp. It was there she became pregnant with her first son, Jack. After separating with her Canadian husband, she returned first to England, then in 1960 moved to Philadelphia, in order to better support her son, who was born blind.

While in Philadelphia, Agazarian completed a PhD in the field of group dynamics at Temple University, entitled A Theory of Verbal Behaviour and Information Transfer. It was at Temple where she first developed an interest in bridging the lack of common language between group dynamics and psychoanalysis. She qualified as a therapist at the Psychoanalytic Studies Institute in Philadelphia.

It was, however, the challenge presented in the following decade by health maintenance organizations and their stress on short-term therapy, that propelled her into devising systems-centered therapy, in order (she stated) to discover "how to think about short-term therapy in a way that maintained the integrity and values of our work".

The influences she credited on her work range from W. R. Bion and John Bowlby to Erwin Schrödinger and Ludwig von Bertalanffy, reflecting both her intellectual range and the trajectory of her movement from psychoanalysis through whole-group therapy to systems-centered therapy.

Awards and achievements

In 1997, the American Psychological Association awarded her Group Psychologist of the Year "for her involvement in research, publication, teaching and training. She exemplifies the finest in scholarship in the discipline of psychology. As a group psychologist, she has contributed to expanding our knowledge of the boundaries between clinical and social psychology with the investigation of living human systems and systems-centered group and individual therapy. Her considerable body of work illustrates the highest blend of creativity and learning".

Selected works The Visible and Invisible Group, with Richard Peters, 1981 Systems-Centered Therapy for Groups, 1997 Systems-centered practice: Selected papers on group psychotherapy, 2006