Family Therapy

Family Therapy

Family therapy is psychotherapy that directly involves family members in addition to the identified patient, and/or explicitly attends to the interactions among family members (Pinsof and Wynne, 1995). Family therapy thus engages relational and com-municational processes of families and social networks as a pri-mary context for solving clinical problems or treating psychiatric disorders, even though one family member may be the sole bearer of distress or symptoms. By educating family members or alter-ing family patterns of relating or communicating, such clinical problems as depression, anxiety, marital conflict, or disruptive childhood behavior can be resolved or attenuated.

The different family therapy traditions can be usefully contrasted by comparing how each structures perceptual, cog-nitive, and executive processes when clinicians work with families – from each of these perspectives

·              What does a therapist look for?

·              What does a therapist think about?

·              What does a therapist do?

Different family therapy traditions are themselves best re-garded as different sets of ideas and interventions to be valued as potential tools within comprehensive, multimodality treat-ment programs. We will illustrate the range of perspectives and interventions available in the different traditions by examining, in turn, how psychodynamic, structural, strategic, cognitive– behavioral and postmodern family therapy traditions each might approach a clinical problem.