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From his long years of experience in working with family groups, Ackerman has attempted to communicate some of his concepts of family diagnosis and family therapy. Family diagnosis is the attempt to view an individual with his problems in the larger framework of his family group and to correlate the behavior and emotional integration of the individual with the behavior and emotional integration of his family. This will include awareness of the role of the family in the mental health of a person, the processes of personality integration into family and extra-family roles, the problems and consequences of adaptation to multiple roles with conflicting requirements and reasonable speculation regarding rehabilitation within a particular family group after mental illness. He states, “My central purpose is to evolve a conceptual pattern within which it is possible to define the relations between the emotional functioning of the individual and the psychosocial functioning of the family group.”
Family therapy is the involvement of several members of a family in various combinations in therapeutic sessions. As Ackerman puts it, “a systematic therapy of the family must encompass techniques directed at the multiple, interpenetrating relationships within the family and the process of adaptation of family to community, as well as techniques for psychotherapy of individual family members.” In his integrated therapeutic program he includes “a psychosocial evaluation for the family,” “the application of appropriate levels of social support and educational guidance, and a therapeutic approach to conflicted family relationships.” “Individual psychotherapy is auxiliary to and dependent upon an integrated therapeutic program for the family as a social unit.” To consider the individual out of context of his family makes it virtually impossible to predict the course of a mental illness, the possibility of recovery, and even the risk of relapse. The results of psychotherapy are very much de