Heute wäre Don D. Jackson, einer der wichtigsten Pioniere der Familientherapie, Psychiater und Gründer des Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, 90 Jahre alt geworden. Er starb viel zu früh, einen Tag nach seinem 48. Geburtstag, am 29.1.1968. Auf der„Don D. Jackson Memorial Conference“ hielt Nathan Ackerman eine Rede auf Jackson, in dem er die ebenso unorthodoxe wie unabhängige, aber auch ein bisschen einsame Position des Mavericks beschrieb, die Jackson innehatte:„If ever there was a maverick in psychiatry, Don was it. He was the near perfect epitome of all the complexities of a maverick. He had all the gifts, all the oddities, the strangenesses and the aloneness of a maverick. Wherever he went, he jolted his colleagues out of their comfort and complacency and they liked it. His scientific skepticism was his hallmark. Again and again, he asked,„How do you know?“;„Suppose we take the same problem, turn it inside out or upside down and re-examine it in a different way“. Yet he had no urge to rebel for the sake of rebelling. He entered the fray of scientific debate, armed with new observations, searching for new and more elegant syntheses. In the quest for truth, he was ever-ready to put new hypotheses to the test. In every sense, he was the living symbol of what Justice Douglas called„His majesty’s loyal opposition“. His very rebellion added to the strength, wisdom, and leadership of his elders. His soul was possessed; he had a mission and he pursued it to the end“ (Fam Proc 9, 1970, S. 117). Zum Gedenken an Don Jackson hier das Zitat des Tages von ihm, aus einem programmatischen Aufsatz„The Individual and the Larger Contexts“ aus dem Jahre 1967 (Fam Proc 6, s. 139):„We view symptoms, defenses, character structure, and personality as terms describing the individual’s typical interactions which occur in response to a particular interpersonal context, rather than as intra-psychic entities. Since the family is the most influential learning context, surely a more detailed study of family process will yield valuable clues to the etiology of such typical modes of interaction. Whether one thinks in terms of„role,“„tactics,“ or„behavior repertoire,“ it is obvious that the individual is shaped by, and in turn helps to shape, his family. This may not at first appear to be such a startlingly new approach but rather the most commonplace social psychology or, at best merely a shift of emphasis, an accentuation of ideas which are implicit in many of the great theories of contemporary behavioral science which refer to„interaction,“„relationships,“ etc. But it has been our experience, which I want to share with you, that when one begins to approach or even gather the data, it makes all the difference in the world exactly where the primary emphasis lies. One finds oneself almost immediately faced with certain conceptual watersheds, certain discontinuities between interactional data and individual theories“