The Development of Family Therapy

Abstract

Family therapy emerged, in the years following the Second World War, as a novel means of helping people with psychiatric, emotional and relationship problems. Previously, such people's problems had generally been under-stood as being theirs, rather than existing in their families or wider social environments. While their family environments often appeared problem-atic – whether they were considered cause or effect of the subjects' difficul-ties – the 'solution' favoured was often to remove the patient/client from their family and local environment to a different setting. This was sometimes a psychiatric hospital or institution far removed from the subject's home and family. The treatment of the individual sufferer, whether living at home or not, continued to be focused on the individual rather than the family group. Before the Second World War, and up to the 1950s, even the 1960s, psy-choanalysis reigned supreme. The work of Sigmund Freud and of such contemporaries of his as Carl Jung and Alfred Adler was highly regarded and influenced strongly the therapeutic approach of many practitioners. The pioneers of family therapy, on the other hand, rejected this approach. Instead, they advocated tackling the family and other environmental prob-lems in the setting where they operated. In its day, this was a somewhat revolutionary idea. Family therapy's early years Family therapy was but one of the several new therapeutic approaches that emerged during the 1950s. These included a variety of new drugs, especially a range of antipsychotics and antidepressants. Chlorpromazine was the first antipsychotic to become available. It was soon followed by many others, mostly related chemically and pharmacologically to it. It is no exaggeration to say that chlorpromazine and similar compounds revolutionized the treat-ment of schizophrenia, a condition which the early family therapists had struggled to understand and treat effectively.