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Child psychotherapists and family therapists need to collaborate. Family therapy is now the major therapeutic approach in many child guidance clinics. Interventions are usually briefer and one therapist, if suitably supported, can treat the whole family. The economics of that are powerful and will not go away. Some children, however, do not respond to family therapy but do dramatically well in child psychotherapy. I refer a number of children for child psychotherapy for that reason. My own view is that family work provides a good launching pad for child psychotherapy. The child when released from scapegoating processes is freer to explore and develop in psychotherapy.
Family therapy is not a separate discipline in the UK. It is a skill added to other professional qualifications such as child psychiatry, social work, psychology or child psychology, etc. In my experience child psychotherapists also make excellent family therapists. The other disciplines using family therapy skills have a lot to learn from child psychotherapists about understanding children. Without this ability seeing families can become work with parents in front of the children. Each approach then needs the other.
In this paper I will present the concept of family scripts (Byng-Hall, 1985) which links intrapsychic and interpersonal phenomena and I will show how it was used with a family. Various family therapy interventions will be illustrated in this way.
Each member of the family has an “inner family” which helps to determine what goes on in the outer family; just as each member of the cast has a script for a play. Sitting with families one becomes aware of the same basic pattern of interaction, with minor variations, repeated over and over again like the rerun of one scene in a play. The advantage of the concept of script over object relations theory is that it addresses more readily the fact that everyone not only casts every member of the family in their inn