Treatment of families in ho e setting is not a novel idea: practice dates back to roots of social work in early twentieth century.1 In begin ning, technique of reaching out with friendly visitors was modus operandi of social work.2 The status of home visit and emphasis on clients' social en vironments have lost ground as social work field was influenced by psychoanalysis and individual pathology theory. In areas of social work that traditionally have used least trained personnel, home visits con tinued to be relied on, but in other areas of social work, especially psychiatric social work, home visiting began to be seen as un professional and even as an invasion of clients' privacy.3 As psychiatry became en trenched in social service institutions, locus of treatment became office or hospital setting. Home visits were reported to be valuable to psychiatric clinician as a diagnostic and a therapeutic tool.4 In prac tice, however, few therapists actually made home visits, particularly not those who worked for large psychiatric clinics. Additionally, as psychiatry became more institutionalized it became less involved in and concerned with matters outside of inner sanctum of office, and its domain became inner world of id, ego, and super ego. This focus created a separation between realm of psychiatry and individuals' social environ ments. St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washing ton, D.C., sought to use home visits with schizophrenics to initiate therapy at hospi tal. Behrens noted that when social workers accompanied therapists on home visits, their presence was valued because of their experi ence dealing with reality situations.5 Therapists' unfamiliarity and discomfort with reality situations of clients result from psychiatry's segregation of people from their day-to-day social reality. Social work willing ly joined psychiatry and sought refuge within its institutional walls, leaving its clients and their realities outside. With emergence of family therapy and focus on individ uals as part of a larger set of family and social interactions rather than in isolation, a renewed effort to deal with family in its own social context might have been ex pected. Despite its historical roots, and its periodic resurgence, therapy in home has not received amount of direct application and close scrutiny it deserves.6 Minuchin argues that the importance of in dividual's context is recognized, but there Leonard J. Woods