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It seems to me that the members of the Academy have been exposed on numerous occasions to discussions and seminars on Family Therapy as far back as 1957. The influence of therapists so engaged has gradually spread but has not been powerful enough to bring about a serious investigation and consideration of some important contentions put forth by Jay Haley.
He assumes that to begin therapy by interviewing one person is to “begin with a handicap.” When it was thought that a therapeutic problem was a one-person phenomenon, such as the medical model of disease in the early part of the century, then it seemed reasonable to interview or treat only one person. Symptoms or problems were considered to be maladaptive and inappropriate. Since one person appeared to be maladaptive there was no reason to bring in anyone else. If a wife had anxiety attacks, these were not considered adaptive to her marriage, but were thought to be irrational. Therefore, her husband was not considered to be relevant except as a stress factor for the woman, who was the “real” problem.
We now recognize that interviewing one individual is only one way to intervene in a family. If a therapist interviews a man, woman, grandparent, or child and does not see the others in the family, he forms a coalition in the dark with the one interviewed and without knowing what kind of organization he is entering. I am sure that many of us have invited members of our patients' families to gain a greater understanding and to increase our potential for helping our individual patient. I suspect that many times not much was accomplished by this maneuver and we had to confront our impotence.
Indeed, we seem to be as impotent in dealing with other members of the family as Freud was in dealing with the parents of Dora about whom he knew a great deal. Freud's publication of a “Fragment of a Case of Hysteria” in 1905 has been described by teachers of family therapy as the first systematic and sophisticated observation of the fami