History of family therapy: its stages of development and authors

Family therapy is an approach and a therapeutic practice whose approach considers the family as a significant social unit. This has as a consequence that the treatment and intervention are not centered 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 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.

• Related article: "Family therapy: types and forms of application"

History of family therapy

The 1950s in the United States was marked by important changes derived from the Second World War. Among other things, social problems are beginning to be thought 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 goals and applications of psychology.

Although psychology had been developing from strongly individual-centered perspectives (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.

These two trends were on the rise, one focused on the individual (predominantly psychoanalytic) and the other focused on together with some proposals for a mixed approach, which represented the first bases of family therapy between 1950 and 1960.

After its expansion, thousands of people were trained in systemic therapy, reflecting its increasing professionalization as well as 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.

• You may be interested: "History of Psychology: main authors and theories"

Pioneers of psychoanalytic approach

In this period, psychoanalytic approach therapy did not give visible results in the treatment of psychosis, with which the specialists had to turn to see 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, Theodore Lidz, Lyman Wynne and Murray Bowen are representative. 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 magazine of the moment: Family Process.

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

From childhood to family

On the other hand, some specialists they were studying childhood pathologies, field of study that allowed addressing the experiences and tensions of the family as a form of auxiliary treatment.

One of them, John Bell, witnessed the works of the English John Styherland in this area and soon he reproduced them 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 on family therapy The family Therapy, in the same decade.

Pioneers in anthropological approach

The second key approach to the development of systemic therapy was anthropological in nature, and in fact, it began with concerns similar to those of the psychoanalytic. 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 what they are below.

The Palo Alto group

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

The latter formed an important task force at the Menlo Park Veterans Psychiatric Hospital in California, where different psychologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts who were already working with approaches group. Together with Paul Watzlawick and other specialists, she developed different theories about communication and cybernetics.

Palo Alto is recognized as one of the most representative groups in the history of family therapy. They are pioneers William Fry, Don Jackson, Jay Haley, John Weakland and, 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 School of Milan

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

Haley met Salvador Munich in the 1960s, 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 by joining the Palo Alto proposals with the ecological guidelines carried out on the North American east coast.

She is also representative in this area, albeit with an equally psychoanalytic basis, the School of Milan. It was founded by Mara Selvini Palazzoli, who along with other psychoanalysts gradually changed the focus of study of the individual towards working with families, their communication models and general systems theory.

Unifying project approaches

After the success of family therapy, now also known as systemic therapy (not only in the United States but also in Europe), the project unifying 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.

Joining the unifying project is the Second Cybernetics approach, which problematizes the role of those who observe the system in modifying it; question that had remained absent in the antecedents of the therapy and that is strongly influenced by the contemporary theories of quantum physics.

In the 80's the paradigm of constructivism joins, whose influence turned out to be greater than anyone else's. Returning to both second cybernetics and general systems theory, the incorporation of constructivism proposes that family therapy is in actually an active construction of a teraputa 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 treatment. From this, and towards the 90's, new therapeutic approaches such as the techniques narratives and psychoeducational approaches, while this discipline extends around the world.

Bibliographic references:

• Bertrando, P. (2009). See the family: theoretical views, clinical work. Psychoperspectives, VIII (1): 46-69.
• Pereira Tercero, R. (1994). Historical review of family therapy. Psychopathology Journal (Madrid), 14 (1): 5-17.