Family therapy's missing question,why the plight of the modern family?

The field of family therapy has developed rapidly over the last thirty years. The account of its emergence produced by family therapists neglects the socio-historical context and wider issues of social and family change. The contemporary practitioners need to understand this context, and in particular, the extent to which assorted unexamined, and perhaps unwanted, assumptions about the family and about social reality are embedded in family therapy. Hence the paper will explore some of these assumptions in the light of analysis of the technological and intellectual climate in which family therapy emerged, and of social changes affecting marriage and the family.