History of family therapy: its developmental stages and authors

This field of psychological intervention has changed a lot over time. Let's take a look at it.

Family therapy is an approach and a therapeutic practice whose approach considers the family as a significant social unit. The consequence of this is 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 had an important impact on the work of psychology. Its history dates back to the 50's in a constant dialogue between the most important currents of psychology and anthropology in the United States and Europe. The following is a brief history of family therapy a brief history of family therapy, as well as its main authors and schools..

History of family therapy

The decade of the 50's in the United States was marked by important changes derived from the Second World War. Among other things, social problems began to be thought of from a reflective field that had been overshadowed by political conflicts. A holistic and systemic understanding of the individual and human groups arises and groups, which rapidly impacted the objectives and applications of psychology.

Although psychology had been developing from perspectives strongly centered on the individual (the most dominant were classical behaviorism and psychoanalysis), the rise of other disciplines such as sociology, anthropology and communication allowed for an important exchange between individual and systemic approaches. an important interchange between individual approaches and social studies..

It was these two rising currents, one with an individual approach (predominantly psychoanalytic) and the other with a social approach, together with some mixed approach proposals, that represented the first foundations of family therapy between 1950 and 1960.

Following its expansion, thousands of people were trained in systemic therapy, reflecting its growing professionalization, while at the same time 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.

Pioneers of psychoanalytic approach.

In this period, the psychoanalytic approach to therapy did not give visible results in the treatment of psychosis.This meant that specialists had to look at other elements beyond the individual, and the first of these 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 sense, Theodore Lidz, Lyman Wynne and Murray Bowen are representative of this approach.. Another of them was Nathan Ackerman, who began working with families as a "complement to child therapy" from the same psychoanalytic approach. The latter founded the first family care service, the first family institute, and the leading family therapy journal of the time: Family Process.

Also known are Carl Whitaker and the Philadelphia Group led by Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, David Rubinstein, James Framo and Gerald Zuk. Also important in the development of this approach was Harold Searles, who works with people diagnosed with schizophrenia and, without focusing solely on the family, described the importance of the latter in the development of individual psychiatric manifestations.

From childhood to the family

On the other hand, some specialists were studying childhood pathologiesThe field of study that made it possible to attend to the experiences and tensions of the family 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 it in the United States, to finally publish one of the pioneering books in North America: Family Group Therapy. For his part, Christian Midelfort published another of the first books in family therapy The Family Therapyin the same decade.

Pioneers in anthropological approach

The second key approach to the development of systemic therapy was anthropological in nature, and in fact, began with concerns similar to those of psychoanalysis. Interested in understanding how different elements of language and communication are generated and distorted, they ended up studying group relations marked by psychosis..

From there, different schools developed which, without abandoning many of the psychoanalytic postulates, represent the most important bases of family therapy. We will now see what they are.

The Palo Alto group

In constant dialogue with the specialists of the University of Berkeley, this school was created on the basis of the work of Gregory Bateson, an English biologist and anthropologist particularly interested in communication. He is the most cited author in family therapy for transferring the general systems theory of the biologist Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy to anthropology and later to psychotherapy.

The latter formed an important working group at the Menlo Park Veterans' Psychiatric Hospital in California, which included various psychologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts who were already working with group approaches. 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 include William Fry, Don Jackson, Jay Haley, John Weakland, and, later, Virginia Satir. 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 conducted many seminars and professional training programs. He also published one of the first books on the subject.

The Strategic School and the School of Milan

Subsequently, Jay Haley founded the Strategic school and is positioned as one of those interested in distinguishing the principles of the systemic approach from the other currents of psychology and anthropology.

In the 1960's Haley met Salvador Munich, who was developing the Structural School on the other side of the United States. This gave rise to the strategic-structural approach to group therapy.This gave rise to the strategic-structural approach to group therapy, which ended up uniting the Palo Alto proposals with the ecological orientations developed on the East Coast of the United States.

Also representative in this area, although equally psychoanalytically based, is the Milan School. It was founded by Mara Selvini Palazzoli, who together with other psychoanalysts gradually shifted the focus of study from the individual to work with families, their communication models and general systems theory. to work 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 the 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 unifying project is joined by the Second Cybernetics approach, which problematizes the role of the system observer in the modification of the system; an issue that had remained absent in the background of therapy and which is strongly influenced by contemporary theories of quantum physics.

In the 80's the paradigm of constructivism, whose influence turned out to bewhose influence proved to be greater than that of any other. Taking up both the second cybernetics and the general theory of systems, the incorporation of constructivism proposes that family therapy is in fact 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 unity of the family. is this system that constitutes the fundamental unit of the treatment.. Since then, and towards the 90's, new therapeutic approaches such as narrative techniques and psychoeducational approaches were included, and at the same time this discipline spread around the world.

Bibliographical references:

• Bertrando, P. (2009). Seeing the family: theoretical visions, clinical work. Psicoperspectivas, VIII(1): 46-69.
• Pereira Tercero, R. (1994). Historical review of family therapy. Revista Psicopatología (Madrid), 14(1): 5-17.