Structural Family Therapy

Term Paper # 64765

Psychology > Therapies

An overview of the background and uses of structural family therapy.

2,328 words () | 14 sources | APA | 2004 United States

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how structural therapy attempts to help families by dealing with problems that affect current interactions of family members. It looks at how the focus is on how families operate as a system and their structure within the system. Structural family therapists make hypotheses about the structure of the family and the nature of their problem. It also looks at how structural family therapists use several techniques to achieve their goals, such as diagnosing, joining, reframing, unbalancing, enactment, shaping, competence and others.

From the Paper:

"Structural Family Therapy was developed by Salvador Minuchin and colleagues during the 1960s, and emerged in the 1970s as one of the most widely used methods in family therapy. Its history is predicated on family systems theory, and as a result it has many of the inherent strengths and weaknesses associated with applying general systems theory to social behavior. Like most systems theorists, the structuralists are interested in how the components of a system interact, how balance or homeostasis in achieved, how family feedback mechanisms operate, and how dysfunctional communication patterns develop."