An Integrative Approach to Family Therapy

Abstract

One of the recent developments in the field of psychiatry is a renewed interest in Family Therapy. Although various kinds of family interventions have been used in different forms from the beginning of history, it was only during the beginning of this century that systematic efforts were made to understand and treat the family as a unit. The first efforts to work with the family were made by sociologists and social workers. When Nathan Ackerman published his paper on The Unity of the Family in 19381, he was considered as a “heretic” who dared to break some of the taboos of traditional psychotherapy by seeing the family together. Since then there have been many developments in the field of Family Therapy. Today Family Therapy is not considered as a second class treatment and assigned only to the non-medical members of the psychiatric team, as used to happen until recently. Most of the major medical schools have established training programs for their psychiatric residents who are encouraged to use Family Therapy as one of their modalities of treatment2. Many of the training programs in Child Psychiatry are teaching Family Therapy and started establishing Family Therapy Clinics dissolving, in this way, the myth of incompatibility between Family Therapy and Child Psychiatry3.