Susan Smiled: On Explanation in Family Therapy

The contemporary psychotherapist is exposed to a variety of conceptual models and paradigms. These are usually presented as opposing truths in different doctrinal schools, but actually they are all valid from one point of view or another. And, accordingly, they are all tactically useful at some point or another. I thought it was important to say this, but I did not want to write a dry, academic paper on the subject. So I will tell a clinical story that weaves the threads into a fabric.     

A Developmental, Conceptual Premise for Family Therapy

The article describes an hypothesis about the staging of the development of the family system for use in diagnostic understanding and treatment planning with families.     

Bilateral Art: Integrating Art Therapy,Family Therapy,and Neuroscience

This paper describes the systemic use of a neurologically-based art therapy modality—bilateral art—that engages both dominant and non-dominant hands in the process of creating images in response to opposing cognitions or feelings. It describes both neuroscience and family therapy perspectives that argue for the use of bilateral art. A specific protocol for bilateral art therapy is provided along with a case study demonstrating integration of the protocol into the systemic treatment of a young family. Carole M. McNamee, PhD, is Research Professor and Clinical Associate, Director of the Arts in Healthcare Project, The Family Therapy Center, Department of Human Development, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA 24061 (cmcnamee@vt.edu).     

International Family Therapy: A View from Kyoto, Japan

"International family therapy" is an emergent field within (or overarching) the field of family therapy. At this stage, it can be described as the collecting and sharing of experiences by family therapists from different countries. Recent publications (7) gather information principally from Western cultures in which systemic family therapy has grown over the past thirty years. Japan is of particular interest to Western practitioners because it is a highly successful, post-industrial culture that differs markedly from the West. Familiar family therapy interventions often work for unfamiliar reasons, and different goals are often needed in order to respond to apparently similar family problems. An expanded sense of choice around strategies for family life and family therapy that such diversity implies is the primary contribution that this maturing, international family therapy movement can make to family therapy.     

Searching for Family Therapy in the Rockies: Family Therapists Meet A Paleontologist

Family therapists use concepts germane to other academic disciplines. We recount four notions--context, explanatory metaphors, language conventions, and persistently refining knowledge--that family therapists and paleontologists each utilize. Revisiting family therapy's foundational concepts through the lens of another discipline reminds us of our theoretical beginnings, highlights those professional adaptations that we have made over the years, and offers us an opportunity to reinvigorate and expand our central organizing principles.     

Material, Myth, and Magic: A Cultural Approach to Family Therapy

This paper presents a model for a therapeutic approach to the cultural systems of families. Using anthropologically derived concepts of material and ideational planes of culture, magic, and ritualistic intervention, the inducement of culture change in frozen familial systems is framed in dialectical terms. Four brief case studies are presented describing the systems engaged, the material-ideational rituals employed, and the cultural transformations induced. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of some of the theoretical and practical implications of this cultural approach to the family in therapy.     

Illness, Family Theory, and Family Therapy: I.Conceptual Issues

This article examines and clarifies controversies about the concept of illness in the field of family therapy. We contend that illness, as traditionally understood in all cultures, is a relational, transactional concept that is highly congruent with core principles of present-day family theories. Family therapists need not buy into a biotechnical, reductionistic reframing of illness as disease. Rather, it is more appropriate to conceptualize and work with illness as a narrative placed in a biopsychosocial context. Such a narrative includes how shared responsibility for coping and for finding solutions can take place, without becoming involved in disputes about causal models.     

A Family Therapy Narrative

The evolution of the field of family therapy since its inception in the 1950s is traced in this article. Major contributory forces as well as key pioneers in the first generation and leaders in successive generations are highlighted. This is followed by an elucidation of the conceptual foundations and basic principles undergirding almost all of the main theoretical schools. Expansion in this now vast field is underscored through attention to the proliferation of the number of books and journals addressing family therapy/psychology topics as well as mention of the internationalization of the field. A typology of extant theoretical models is also presented. The article closes with a discussion of contemporary issues and trends.     

A Didactic Course for Family Therapy Trainees

This paper describes the rationale, procedures, and reading materials used in a didactic course included in a training program for family therapists.     

Family Therapy and Drug Abuse: A National Survey

The following report describes the results of a national study of the role of family therapy in the drug abuse field. Characteristics of agencies that work with families are described, as well as the demographic characteristics and psychological problems of the clients most apt to be treated in family therapy. The study also looks at the role and structure of family therapy in the ecological system of the treatment institutions. A profile of the family therapists who are responsible for providing services to families is presented. An attempt was made to assess agencies' level of development with regard to family therapy by using an instrument, The Progress Index for Family Therapy Programs. Generally, findings indicated that there is considerable variation in expertise. More extensive training in family therapy techniques was of major concern, particularly among clinics with a heroin addict population.