Familientherapie

In the field of family therapy besides the emphasis on the autonomy of the different schools (behavioral, psychodynamic, systemic), partly motivated by professional politics, a growing openness for concepts developed in other approaches can be observed. Approaches and results of attachment and affect theory and research find their way into the conceptualization of family processes and family therapy. Processes in the “self” of the therapist are taken into the discussion of therapeutic processes in systemic therapies. Furthermore, new fields of application of family therapy approaches have developed: parents-infant therapy and counseling, therapy of the elder, family medicine and coping with the consequences of the “human genome project”. New research on the empirical validation of relational dynamic concepts and on the evaluation of family therapies show a trend to see the claim for making treatments as short as possible in very relative terms. It is assumed that the family therapeutic approach will become more important in the future.