Richard Schwartz, PhD, is founding developer of Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy and the director of the IFS Institute. He began his career as a family therapist and an academic at the University of Illinois at Chicago. There, he discovered that family therapy alone did not achieve full symptom relief and, in asking patients why, he learned that they were plagued by what they called “parts.” These patients became his teachers as they described how their parts formed networks of inner relationship that resembled the families he had been working with.
Dr. Schwartz also found that as they focused on and, thereby, separated from their parts, they would shift into a state characterized by qualities like curiosity, calm, confidence, and compassion. He called that inner essence the Self and was amazed to find it even in severely diagnosed and traumatized patients. From these explorations, the Internal Family Systems model was born in the early 1980s.
IFS is now evidence-based and has become a widely-used form of psychotherapy, particularly with trauma. It provides a non-pathologizing, optimistic, and empowering perspective and a practical and effective set of techniques for working with individuals, couples, families, and more recently, corporations and classrooms.
In 2013, Schwartz left the Chicago area and now lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, where he is on the faculty of the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
What People are Saying About Richard Schwartz
“Schwartz makes the invisible visible in ways that are compelling, lucid, and clinically useful. He shows how the psyche is both systemic and accessible, and his model could well revolutionize family therapy.”
—Douglas H. Sprenkle, PhD, editor of the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy
“Each of us is lobbied by a clamor of disembodied inner voices. In his clinical work, Richard Schwartz engages with each of these voices....By applying family systems approaches to this interior assembly, Schwartz enables the client to comprehend and grapple effectively with many problems, even with such bedeviling maladies as bulimia and self-mutilation. ”
— Richard Chasin, MD, associate clinical professor of psychiatry, Harvard Medical School