History Of Family Therapy: Its Stages Of Development And Authors
Family therapy is an approach and therapeutic practice whose approach considers the family as a significant social unit. This has the consequence that treatment and intervention are not focused on the individual but on the family system as a whole.
This discipline has different applications and schools that have significantly impacted the work of psychology. Its history dates back to the 1950s in a constant dialogue between the most important currents of psychology and anthropology in the United States and Europe. We’ll see now a brief history of family therapy, as well as its main authors and schools
The 1950s in the United States were marked by important changes resulting from the Second World War. Among other things, social problems are beginning to be thought about from a reflective field that had been overshadowed by political conflicts. A holistic and systemic understanding of the individual and human groups emerges that quickly impacts the objectives and applications of psychology.
Although psychology had been developing from perspectives strongly focused on the individual (the most dominant were classical behaviorism and psychoanalysis); The rise of other disciplines such as sociology, anthropology and communication allowed an important exchange between individual approaches and social studies
It was these two growing currents, one with an individual approach (predominantly psychoanalytic) and the other with a social approach, together with some mixed approach proposals, which represented the first bases of family therapy between 1950 and 1960.
After its expansion, thousands of people were trained in systemic therapy, which reflected its growing professionalization, while expanding it. The latter in constant tension between finding the methodological purism of the systemic approach, or reforming the basic psychoanalytic concepts without necessarily abandoning them.
In this period, psychoanalytic therapy did not give visible results in the treatment of psychosis so the specialists had to look at other elements beyond the individual, and the first of them was precisely the family.
In this approach, one of the pioneers was Milton Erickson, who placed special emphasis on the study of communication beyond the psyche. In the same way, Representatives are Theodore Lidz, Lyman Wynne and Murray Bowen Another of them was Nathan Ackerman, who began working with families as a “complement to children’s therapy” from the same psychoanalytic approach. The latter founded the first family care service, the first family institute, and the main family therapy magazine of the time: Family Process.
Carl Whitaker and the Philadelphia Group are also known directed by Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, David Rubinstein, James Framo and Gerald Zuk. Harold Searles, who works with people diagnosed with schizophrenia, was also important in the development of this approach and, without focusing solely on the family, described the importance of the latter in the development of individual psychiatric manifestations.
From childhood to family
On the other hand, some specialists They were studying childhood pathologies a field of study that allowed the family’s experiences and tensions to be addressed as a form of auxiliary treatment.
One of them, John Bell, witnessed the work of the Englishman John Styherland in this area and soon reproduced them in the United States, finally publishing one of the pioneering books in North America: Family Group Therapy. For his part, Christian Midelfort published another of the first books on family therapy family therapyin the same decade.
Pioneers in anthropological approach
The second key approach to the development of systemic therapy was anthropological, and in fact, it began with concerns similar to those of psychoanalysis. Interested in understanding how different elements of language and communication are generated and distorted, ended up studying group relationships marked by psychosis
From there, different schools were developed that, without abandoning many of the psychoanalytic postulates, represent the most important bases of family therapy. We will see below what they are.
The Palo Alto Group
In constant dialogue with specialists at the University of Berkeley, this school was created based on the works of Gregory Bateson, an English biologist and anthropologist especially interested in communication. He is the most cited author in family therapy for transferring the general systems theory of fellow biologist Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy to anthropology and later psychotherapy.
The latter formed an important working group at the Menlo Park Veterans Psychiatric Hospital in California, where various psychologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts who were already working with group approaches joined. Together with Paul Watzlawick and other specialists, he developed different theories on communication and cybernetics.
Palo Alto is recognized as one of the most representative groups in the history of family therapy. Pioneers are William Fry, Don Jackson, Jay Haley, John Weakland and, some time later, Virginia Satir, who is recognized as one of the main founders of this discipline.
Among other things, Satir introduced an extra profession in the area of family therapy: social work. From there he developed a therapeutic model and led many seminars and professional training programs. He also published one of the first books on the subject.
The Strategic School and the Milan School
Later, Jay Haley founded the Strategic school and positioned himself as one of those interested in distinguishing the principles of the systemic approach from other currents of psychology and anthropology.
In the 1960s, Haley met Salvador Munich, who was developing the Structural School on the other side of the United States. This gives rise to the strategic-structural approach of group therapy which ends up uniting the Palo Alto proposals with the ecological orientations carried out on the North American east coast.
Also representative in this area, although equally psychoanalytic based, is the School of Milan. It was founded by Mara Selvini Palazzoli, who together with other psychoanalysts gradually changed the focus of study of the individual. towards working with families, their communication models and general systems theory
Approaches to the unifying project
After the success of family therapy, now also known as systemic therapy (not only in the United States but also in Europe), the unifying project of psychoanalytic, anthropological and mixed approaches was based especially on the analysis of the four dimensions that make up any system: genesis, function, process and structure
The Second Cybernetics approach joins the unifying project, which problematizes the role of those who observe the system in modifying it; an issue that had remained absent in the antecedents of therapy and that is strongly influenced by contemporary theories of quantum physics.
In the 80’s the paradigm of constructivism joins, whose influence proved to be greater than that of any other. Returning to both second cybernetics and general systems theory, the incorporation of constructivism proposes that family therapy is actually an active construction of the therapist together with the family, and it is precisely the latter that allows the professional to “intervene to modify.”
Thus, family therapy is understood as a therapeutic system in itself, and It is this system that constitutes the fundamental unit of the treatment From this, and towards the 90’s, new therapeutic approaches such as narrative techniques and psychoeducational approaches were included, while this discipline spread around the world.
