Family Therapy Essay

442 Words2 Pages
The development theory of family systems has developed and evolved throughout the past 100 years. The first approach to family therapy during the 1950’s was called revolutionary, it was not until the 1960’s and 1970’s that behavioral and humanistic as well as psychodynamic approaches led counseling and psychotherapy. The family therapy association began in the 1940’s. There is a growing overlap between the various models developed since the 1950s, the psychological frameworks that professionals employ, and ordinary people’s knowledge. Most people these days have powerful ideas and expectations about what therapy will be like as well as their own explanations about what is wrong and what should change. Early family therapy approaches (from…show more content…
It also became apparent that contrasting ways of working with families could produce equally impressive positive changes. Eventually this led to a shift in family therapy and more broadly in psych-ology and the social sciences to a postmodern (Papp 1980; Keeney 1983; Hoffman1993) or constructivist view of the world (the second phase in this book). Briefly this questions the possibility of an objective view of the world and suggests instead that our perceptions of reality are invariably diverse and contested. We can argue that there is a ‘real’ reality out there but we can only know it through our personal lenses. Consequently, this has led to a distinction being made in systemic and family therapy between approaches based on first-order cybernetics and those based on second-order cybernetics, which mirrors the shifts in beliefs from a modern to postmodern epistemology. Specifically this represents the move from initially applying an objective, positivist framework to families which believed that through observation and analysis we could come to accurately and reliably map their dynamics. It became increasingly evident that when different therapists and researchers viewed a family, their perceptions were frequently quite
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