Family Therapy

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how family therapy is often helpful for dealing with problems that surface in response to a particular event or situation, such as divorce or remarriage. It looks at how there are numerous approaches to family therapy and, in particular, the approach of Salvador Minuchin. It explores how, as a result of working with underprivileged and dysfunctional families in New York and Philadelphia, he founded a theory that is now known as 'Structural Family Therapy'.

From the Paper:

"According to the Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology (2001): ?The goals of structural family therapy include strengthening parental leadership, clarifying boundaries, enhancing coping skills, and freeing family members from their entrenched positions within the family structure. Minuchin divided families' styles of interacting into two basic types-enmeshed and disengaged, considering behavior at either extreme as pathological, with most families falling somewhere on a continuum between the two. Minuchin believed that the functioning of family systems prevented individuals from becoming healthier emotionally, because the family system relied on its troubled member to play a particular role in order to function in its accustomed way."

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