Families and Family Therapy
Structural family therapy, with transcripts that still teach better than most training films.
The boundaries of a subsystem are the rules defining who participates, and how.
Minuchin sets out structural family therapy as a way of reading the family as an organism with its own architecture: subsystems, alliances, and the boundaries that govern who speaks to whom. The symptom carried by one member is treated as a signal about how the whole household is arranged, and the therapist's job is to change that arrangement rather than the person alone.
The method is shown, not asserted. Long transcripts of real sessions run alongside Minuchin's commentary on each move, so the reader watches him join a family, map its structure, raise tension, and hold a new configuration in place until it holds on its own. Chapters cover enmeshment and disengagement, the couple and sibling subsystems, families under stress, and the parentified child.
First published in 1974 by Harvard University Press, this Routledge second edition carries a new introduction by Arlene Vetere.
About the author
Salvador Minuchin
Salvador Minuchin (1921 to 2017) was an Argentine-born psychiatrist and family therapist. He founded structural family therapy, which reads a family as an organised system and works with its boundaries, subsystems, and patterns of authority rather than the individual alone. From 1965 to 1976 he directed the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic, where he refined this approach with families under strain. His book Families and Family Therapy (1974) set out the method and remains a standard reference for clinicians.
Details
- 1974
- English
- Routledge
- Routledge, 2nd edition, 2012
- 240
- 9780415665414