Sometimes the most crooked paths lead to the destination. That a student of Russian would revolutionize family therapy appeared in no career guide – but it is probably not a coincidence that someone who has learned to decipher a foreign language eventually begins to decipher the language of families.

Monica McGoldrick, born on July 23, 1943 as the daughter of Irish-American immigrants, took her bachelor's degree at Brown University in 1964, then studied Russian at Yale University, and finally switched – the decisive turning point – to social work at Smith College. It was as though she had been searching all along for the right foreign language.

What brought a Russian expert to family therapy is probably impossible to understand without her own family history. As the child of Irish immigrants, McGoldrick knew from direct experience the unspoken rules that can hold families together and tear them apart. Cultural imprinting, the experience of migration, loyalty conflicts between old and new homelands – all of this that a family tree does not show and a genogram must.

At Rutgers University, McGoldrick built the Multicultural Family Institute and set about something that, astonishingly, nobody had tried systematically before her: she developed a unified symbolic language for genograms. What sounds banal was in truth an enormous achievement – for inventing a language that everyone can understand requires knowing the limits of one's own perspective.

Square for male, circle for female, symbols crossed through for the deceased, different line types for the quality of relationships: close, distant, conflicted, enmeshed. What had previously been a tangle of individual notations that only their author could navigate became a readable language – a kind of musical notation for family dynamics.

But McGoldrick was wise enough to know that she could not shoulder the mammoth project alone. She needed a partner, and she found him in Randy Gerson – a brilliant young psychologist who not only thought in academic terms but also had a passion for technology and already dreamed of drawing genograms by computer. That this dream would only come true decades after his death belongs to the sadder turns of this story.

Together they set to work on a book that would change family therapy forever – though they would probably have considered that an exaggeration at the time.