This special edition of the classic text includes a new introduction from Professor Arlene Vetere exploring its continuing influence on contemporary practice.
One of family therapy’s foundational texts, Families and Family Therapy is as relevant today as it has ever been. Examining the therapist’s role, Dr. Minuchin presents the views and strategies of a master clinician in a clear and practical form. Transcripts of actual family sessions—both with families meeting their problems fairly successfully and those seeking help—are accompanied by a running interpretation of what is taking place. The book constructs a model of an effectively functioning family and defining the boundaries around its different subsystems, whether parental, spouse, or sibling. It then explores the ways in which families adapt to stress from within and without, as they seek to survive and grow.
Combining vivid clinical examples, specific details of technique, and mature perspectives on both effectively functioning families and those seeking therapy, this is an important text for all those interesting in the theory and practice of family therapy.
This book can be used on courses such as Family Therapy, Family Interventions, Systemic Practice, and Systemic Counselling within departments of Psychology, Mental Health, and Counselling; and by undergraduate students on Social Work qualifying courses.
Biography
Salvador Minuchin is a renowned and influential child psychiatrist and family therapist, most famous for developing Structural Family Therapy, a method of psychotherapy which addresses problems in functioning within a family.
"When families seek help they are often struggling to know how best to be parents. Salvador Minuchin’s Families and Family Therapy is as relevant and effective today as it was when he first published it in 1979. Minuchin was the first family psychiatrist to present a way forward for family relationships to work effectively and proactively as distinct from diagnosing what does not work. Families and Family Therapy, used with appropriate cultural sensitivity, is essential reading for clinicians and educators in family therapy." – Banu Moloney, The Bouverie Family Centre, La Trobe University, Australia.
