Families and Family Therapy
ISBN: 9780674041127
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Harvard University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Psychology;

No other book in the field so fully combines vivid clinical examples, specific details of technique, and mature perspectives on both effectively functioning families and those seeking therapy. The views and strategies of a master clinician are presented here in such clear and precise form that readers can proceed directly from the book with comparisons and modifications to suit their own styles and working situations.

Salvador Minuchin presents six chapter-length transcripts of actual family sessions--two devoted to ordinary families who are meeting their problems with relative success; four concerned with families seeking help. Accompanying each transcript is the author's running interpretation of what is taking place, laying particular stress on the therapist's tactics and maneuvers.

These lively sessions are interpreted in a brilliant theoretical analysis of why families develop problems and what it takes to set them right. The author constructs a model of an effectively functioning family and defines the boundaries around its different subsystems, whether parental, spouse, or sibling. He discusses ways in which families adapt to stress from within and without, as they seek to survive and grow.

Dr. Minuchin describes methods of diagnosing or "mapping" problems of the troubled family and determining appropriate therapeutic goals and strategies. Different situations, such as the extended family, the family with a parental child, and the family in transition through death or divorce, are examined. Finally, the author explores the dynamics of change, examining the variety of restructuring operations that can be employed to challenge a family and to change its basic patterns.


Salvador Minuchin was born in San Salvador de Jujuy, Argentina on October 13, 1921. He received a medical degree from the National University of Córdoba in Argentina and then enlisted in the Israeli Army during the 1948 war for independence. He studied child psychiatry in the United States. He returned to Israel to treat Holocaust orphans and children displaced by wars, then came back to New York to train in psychoanalysis at the William Alanson White Institute.

He went on to work as a child psychiatrist at the Wiltwyck School for delinquent boys in the Hudson Valley, where he developed his theory of structural family therapy. He co-wrote several books including Families of the Slums, Family Healing: Tales of Hope and Renewal from Family Therapy, and Institutionalizing Madness: Families, Therapy and Society. In the mid-1960s, he was the director of psychiatry at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, director of the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic, and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. He retired as the clinic's director in 1975 and served as director emeritus and head of training until 1983.

He moved to New York to establish the Family Studies Institute (now the Minuchin Center for the Family), a nonprofit training center for therapists. He also joined the faculty of the New York University School of Medicine as a research professor. He retired in 1996. He died from heart disease on October 30, 2017 at the age of 96.

(Bowker Author Biography)

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