Obituary: Honoring and remembering—Dr. Evan Imber‐Black (May 19, 1944–May 29, 2024)

Dr. Evan Imber-Black (née Imber Coppersmith) was a brilliant and incisive thinker, professor, therapist, and word capturer who wrote, edited, and co-authored six books and over 75 book chapters, reviews, and articles, including ones for the popular press. She began teaching in 1977 at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. There, she created transformative doctoral and master's degree programs in family therapy and was deeply committed to mentoring students. Simultaneously, she was a consultant to multiple mental health agencies and public schools, helping them integrate family therapy into their services. Out of this work grew her first edited book, Families with a Handicapped Member (Imber Coppersmith, 1984) and her second book, Families and Larger Systems: A Therapist's Guide Through the Labyrinth (Imber-Black, 1999). In 1988, as well, she and Drs. Janine Roberts and Richard Whiting co-edited Rituals in Families and Family Therapy (Imber-Black et al., 1988). Three other books followed: Rituals for Our Times with Janine Roberts (Imber-Black & Roberts, 1992), Secrets in Families and Family Therapy (Imber-Black, 1993), and The Secret Life of Families (Imber-Black, 2009). Many of these books were translated into other languages. In 1982, Evan moved to Canada as an Associate Professor in the Family Therapy Program at the University of Calgary. There she continued to expand her intellectual and clinical interests in the work on rituals of the Milan team from Italy, who were closely connected with the Calgary program at the time. She was intrigued with the invariant prescription, and the odd days and even days ritual. Her interest in family secrets was also spurred on during her 4 years in Canada. Karl Tomm vividly remembers a lively conversation with Evan and Gianfranco Cecchin in the 1980s about enabling a shift in the therapeutic conversation from striving to disclose the content of a toxic family secret, to exploring the relational effects of keeping the secret (without any pressure to disclose it). Once its relational effects became more apparent, the struggle to maintain the secret often diminished. In her role as Training Coordinator for the Calgary program, Evan was extremely energetic, creative, and innovative. In addition to her many in-house learning activities such as seminars and live supervision for graduate students in Psychology, Social Work, and Nursing, as well as Psychiatric Residents and medical students, she initiated a series of summer Externship training programs for practicing professionals. These externships were so successful that they continued for many years after Evan left Calgary for New York. She also brought with her to Canada the innovative Participants' Conference that she had developed at the University of Massachusetts (and which continued in Amherst for years). In this gathering, one could only attend if one also presented. This reflected Evan's powerful egalitarian values in the arenas of larger systems and pervasive cultural and structural injustices such as sexism, racism, xenophobia, and antisemitism. Evan left Calgary in 1986 as Dr. Evan Imber-Black, as she had met her life partner: loving, caring, ever-thoughtful, Lascelles Black. Evan was a student in one of his photography classes. They moved to New York where she served for 10 years as Professor of Family Therapy and Psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine/Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. There she directed the Family and Group Studies Program, Psychosocial Medical Training, and founded the distinctive Urban Institute for Families, which trained front-line mental health workers in therapeutic and larger systems work. She also continued her private practice as a family therapist, and membership on numerous advisory and editorial boards of family therapy newsletters and journals. By this point in her career, given her expertise and myriad clinical interests, Evan was in high demand to present keynotes and give workshops across the United States, Canada, Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Many of these (for example workshops at the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists) were videotaped to share with others and continue to be easily found online. In 1997, Evan became senior faculty at the Ackerman Institute for the Family in Manhattan where she founded and administered the Center for Families and Health, and supervised postgraduate externs. As well, she was passionate about giving workshops at Ackerman to teach skills for writing manuscripts. As a younger scholar-practitioner, I read her and Janine Roberts's work on rituals, which intersected with my emerging multidisciplinary theory and techniques on the temporal (time) dimension in couples and families. I drew upon their ideas to devise ways to help couples establish important one-time moments to mark transitions (life cycle transitions, and commitments to not repeatedly weaponizing each other's past problem behaviors), as well as what I came to call “rhythms of relationships” – regularized times to connect and immerse in intimacy. (Peter Fraenkel, personal communication) Evan's impact on the field of family therapy was also about the quality of her writing: clear, concise, and without jargon, and her commitment to clinicians writing about their work. Her article on family themes with Peggy Papp (Papp & Imber-Black, 1996)—another brilliant, clear-thinking, and clear-writing colleague—remains one of the most straightforward, accessible summaries of how to do integrative family and couple therapy. Evan deeply influenced family therapy with her incredible leadership, for example, as President of the American Family Therapy Academy (AFTA). AFTA legend has it that when she became President in 1995, she began her presidential address at the annual conference by quoting the first line of Helen Reddy's song I Am Woman: “I am woman hear me roar!” Relatedly, Evan at times strongly expressed irritation with any number of things going on in the U.S., the broader world, and the profession of family therapy. Her willingness to speak out about social injustices and organizational dysfunction was deeply impactful and again, a model for how one should comport oneself as a family systems thinker and therapist. As Henry Petroski, the acclaimed historian of inventions and engineering wrote, “It is not necessity that is the mother of invention—it's irritation.” Evan regularly used her deeply felt upset about inequities and institutional incompetence as energy to encourage colleagues to promote change. Evan was a model of critical thinking; of outspokenness about social injustice and small-to-large problems in our field, in our organizations, and in larger systems. Evan was also ground-breaking as editor of Family Process (FP). Over her tenure (2004–11), she extended the boundaries of the journal and the field by enlarging its inclusiveness (across topics, and the geographical location, age, and “race” and ethnicity of authors) and starting new initiatives, such as publishing essays in FP and creating the position of Associate Editor for International Scholarship to engage scholar clinicians worldwide. The journal gained in stature, both in article citations and attention as evidenced by downloads. For over a decade, she led a yearly Family Process writing group for young authors that she continued through the last year of her life despite her health challenges. Evan continued to call upon the field to attend to our social context, invited new voices, and cautioned us of our certainties in editorials and articles in Family Process such as: Toward a Contemporary Social Justice Agenda in Family Therapy Research and Practice (Imber-Black, 2011b), Learning from and Teaching the Next Generation (Imber-Black, 2011a), and Eschewing Certainties: Creating Family Therapists in the 21st Century (Imber-Black, 2014). From 2007 until her death, Evan Imber-Black served as a legendary leader and guide for the Marriage and Family Therapy program at Mercy University. Her students and colleagues there remember her for what she stood for—interconnectedness and interdependencies—and—what she stood against—social injustice. Her convictions showed up in practices of all forms—leadership, teaching, clinical, mentorship, and friendship. The Mercy students described Dr. Imber-Black (EIB as students loved to call her) “as a warm, caring person who held up families and systemic thinking.” Lorena Reynoso, one of her last students there, wrote, “Evan's warmth, security, and confidence comforted me…She inspired me to continue thriving in life, to be consistent with family rituals, and to learn more about myself—my habits, my triangles, and my vulnerabilities.” Dr. Saliha Bava, a postmodernist who taught with Evan, was struck by how Evan, committed to Bowenian and Structural family therapy while steeped in Milan circularity, always remained open to emerging systemic and political trends, which she engaged with her critical gaze. The difference in their approaches was “a difference that made a programmatic difference. She was a fierce leader who opened doors for all, connecting people, ideas, and institutions—affording all a way to be who they sought to become” (Saliha Bava, personal communication). Rituals were a way of being for Evan, who wove them into the fabric of Mercy's program to nurture connection and relationships. During the pandemic, Evan wrote about how people were pivoting toward connection while physically distancing (Imber-Black, 2020). She did not cease thinking and elaborating her ideas. For example, she had chapters on rituals in leading publications in later years: McGoldrick and Hardy's Re-visioning Family Therapy (Imber-Black, 2019a), Fiese's APA Handbook of Contemporary Family Psychology (Imber-Black, 2019b), Encyclopedia of Couple and Family Therapy (Imber-Black, 2018), and McGoldrick, Carter, and Garcia-Preto's The Expanded Family Life Cycle (Imber-Black, 2012, 2015). Closing rituals, often including food, were an end-of-semester tradition for the courses she taught and for the graduating classes she hosted at her home pre-pandemic. In a 2023 interview published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy, Evan stated, “You have to stay open to new thoughts … new ideas. Do not get so wedded to one way of working, because that will stop you. You are going to stop growing and you are going to lose interest!” (Amorin-Woods & Imber-Black, 2024, p. 107). Just as her legacy lives on, so does Dr. Imber-Black's voice. Take a listen to a July 2022 AAMFT Podcast hosting Dr. Imber-Black. It offers rich examples of how she clinically navigated secrets, rituals, and more (https://rss.com/podcasts/aamft/552706/). Dear Evan, your vibrant thinking and ideas, fierceness for justice, dedication to friendship, and cooking amazing meals for others, joy for living, lives on in all of us, and beyond. You are a force and continue to touch thousands upon thousands of lives. Our field will never be the same. We miss you so.

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