New Paradigms for Treating Relationships

New Paradigms for Treating Relationships is a contemporary international perspective on the theory and practice of analytic couple and family therapy. It summarizes theory, sets it in context, and illustrates the concepts with clinical illustrations. This clearly written and engaging volume is essential for tracking couple and family therapists, psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, and teachers of psychotherapy, as well as students of psychoanalysis and philosophy.

Approaches to Family Therapy

Family therapy might broadly be thought of as any type of psychosocial intervention utilizing a conceptual framework that gives primary emphasis to the family system and that, in its therapeutic strategies, aims for an impact on the entire family structure. (55 pp.)

Multiple Impact Therapy

Multiple Impact Therapy is a team-family method for diagnosis, treatment planning, and for freeing natural growth processes in families to deal with mental health problems. Scheduled in half-day segments, the multiple interactions include: a brief team conference, a team-family conference, separate conferences concurrently between parts of the team with segments of the family (for example, by generation), overlapping sessions, and a reconvened team-family conference. (9 pp.)

Comprehensive Family Therapy

Comprehensive Family Therapy (CFT) aims at optimizing family function by remediating immaturity, correcting psychosocial pathology, and developing latent behavioral potential through integrated educational, reparental, and psychoanalytic procedures. (12 pp.)

Family Context Therapy

Family Context Therapy is based on the operational principle that families are modifiable through changing the environments within which they live. The environmental forces provide a complex dynamic for the functions of individuals and the total family. Creating changes in these forces to reduce pressures toward destructive functioning and to accentuate pressures toward family adjustment and accomplishment is the adopted task of the family context therapist. (11 pp.)

Family Crisis Therapy

Family Crisis Therapy is an active intervention technique to help a family (conjointly) resolve a crisis. The crisis is a state of increased tension, a suspension of long-term goals, and a revival of past conflicts. It is usually precipitated by stress and occurs in an individual or family that is especially susceptible. (11 pp.)

Structural Family Therapy

The body of theory and the interventive techniques labeled “family therapy” are concerned, fundamentally, with changing dysfunctional aspects of a family system. The goal of therapy is a more adequate family organization, one that will maximize the growth potential of each member of that family. (44 pp.)

Family Diagnosis and Clinical Process

Insofar as the family is an ever-changing phenomenon, the diagnosis changes as the family changes. Diagnosis serves as a guide to action. It provides a strategy for therapeutic intervention.(44 pp.)