individual experiences and perspectives.Be concerned with trans-generational meanings, rules, cultural, and gender perspectives within the system, and even the community and larger systems affecting the family.Intervene in ways designed to help Ann cope.Intervene in ways designed to help change the transactions and familial patterns that maintain the depression in Ann’s contexts.
Systemic [counselors] do not deny the importance of the individual in the family system, but they believe an individual’s systemic affiliations and interactions have more power in the person’s life than a single counselor could ever hope to have. (Corey, 2017, p. 405)
Finally, I want to reemphasize that practice with couples and families is not merely a set of interventions used with couples or family members. It is a way of thinking about and understanding human process that is applied even when family practitioners choose to see individual clients (individuals are sometimes called monads in family literature). In most texts, working with coupled relationships (or dyads) is addressed as part of the various family models discussed. Couples are certainly subsystems within most families, but the emphasis in couples work is most often related to intimacy and the dyadic relationship.2 Family counseling, in contrast, must address multiple relationships as well as multiple systems and subsystems. Furthermore, family practice often works with the loss or diffusion of intimacy involved in triadic relationships. Becvar and Becvar (2013) suggested that “family therapy” is really a misnomer: They prefer the term “relationship therapy” (p. 11). I agree with the use of this language, but I believe that the relationship work that is needed in families is often quite different from the relational work in couples counseling. In this book, we focus on couples and families in all of their forms. I believe it is in the multigenerational contexts of couple and family life that we can see the effects of structure, rules, boundaries or their lack, and the positive and negative influences of triads.
Notes
1 1 I especially like the series of videotapes produced by Jon Carlson and Diane Kjos (1998a) under the title Family Therapy With the Experts. You can purchase these as DVDs and many more outside of this series at www.psychotherapy.net/video/family-therapy-series. Also, many of the master family therapists are on videotapes produced by the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy.
2 2 For an excellent resource on couples therapy, see Sperry and Peluso (2019).
CHAPTER 2
Genograms of Couples and Family Counseling
At the end of this chapter, you will find multiple genograms related to the field of couples and family counseling. Like most genograms that do not come from actual interviews with an actual family, these genograms are imperfect. Some important people have been left out; some of the relationships and connections are imprecise. I have been developing this conceptualization for years, and even here I am still working on it—and I hope you will work on it with me. In this chapter, I want to use these genograms to tell you some of the stories of our profession. These stories too will be incomplete and greatly limited in scale. I am really more interested in giving you a feel for how the profession has developed and the people who have been a part of that process. There are some excellent historical chronologies already in print (see Becvar & Becvar, 2013, pp. 15–59; Nichols & Davis, 2017, pp. 8–26), and you may want to refer to them for a chronological date-to-event description of the history of family counseling.
The first of the four genograms (Figure A2.1, p. 53) is a relational diagram of some of the independent pioneers of family counseling. The second genogram (Figure A2.2, p. 54) is another relational diagram of the structural, strategic, solution-focused, and solution-oriented models that dominated the 1970s, 1980s, and early part of the 1990s. The third genogram (Figure A2.3, p. 55) delineates the models we associate with postmodernism and social constructionism, and here I have included feminist family counseling, although I know many feminists who incorporate models other than those associated with social constructionism. The last genogram (Figure A2.4, p. 56) brings together the cognitive behavioral approaches to counseling with the most accepted approaches to effective parenting and the most prominent couples counseling models. In a sense, these are the models, together with solution-focused therapy, that emphasize evidence-based practice. Let us start with the first genogram.
The History of Family Counseling I: Systemic Pioneers and Their Offspring
Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Their Followers
Like with most fields associated with psychotherapy, it is hard not to start with Sigmund Freud, who brought the discipline of psychology into the modern era. Freud was not without colleagues. Indeed, many prominent psychologists and individual therapists in Europe met with Freud regularly. Some, like Freud, lived in Vienna, and starting in 1906, they often attended Wednesday evening meetings at Freud’s home, which would later be called meetings of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (Nunberg & Federn, 1962, 1967, 1974). Although Freud (1909/1957a) once coached a father on how to work with his son in a case referred to as Little Hans, Freud himself did not engage in family counseling, nor did he apply what we would now call a systemic approach. He was focused on individuals and the intrapsychic.
One of his contemporaries, however, was Alfred Adler, and Adler both thought systemically (using such concepts as the family constellation, family atmosphere, and birth order) and actually engaged in family counseling sessions in open, community settings. One of Adler’s students and later his colleague was Rudolf Dreikurs, who immigrated to the United States before the fall of Germany to the Nazis. After Adler’s death in 1937, it was Dreikurs who systematized the Adlerian family counseling process and who developed the child-rearing models that would become the foundation for most of the current parenting programs used in the United States. Still, this family model went mostly underground until the 1950s, and many, if not most, family counseling and therapy textbooks tend to dismiss Adlerian family practice, and Dreikurs’s work in particular, as child guidance work (Becvar & Becvar, 2013; I. Goldenberg et al., 2017; Nichols & Davis, 2020).
By the 1940s, most psychiatrists and many other psychotherapists were trained in psychoanalysis. Many of the early Freudians (Erik Erikson, W. R. D. Fairbairn, Edith Jacobson, Melanie Klein, Heinz Kohut, and Margaret Mahler, to name a few) expanded Freud’s original drive/structural psychology into increasingly precise theories of development with an emphasis on early attachment to mothers (object relations), which would presage the current emphasis on attachment theory and parenting (see Pickert, 2012). Of all the neo-Freudians, Harry Stack Sullivan (1996) placed the strongest emphasis on interpersonal relations in psychotherapy and laid the foundation for what we would come to understand as a participant observer (or second-order cybernetic) model.
Two psychoanalytically trained therapists, Nathan Ackerman and Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, had an enormous impact on the early development of family counseling and therapy in the United States. Nathan Ackerman (1958, 1966) began his career at Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. Though psychoanalytically trained, Ackerman (1937) published one of America’s first articles on family therapy in the Bulletin of the Kansas Mental Hygiene Society, declaring the family to be a social-emotional unit and focusing on work with nonpsychotic children who nonetheless
