You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book consists of eleven chapters and a glossary contributed altogether by twelve members of a workshop based in the Tavistock Clinic's Adolescent Department. A third of the book contains essentially theoretical discussion; the balance is clinical material described and examined in relation to that theoretical base. The result is inevitably somewhat uneven, but it contains enough of real interest for me to suggest that it should be examined, if rather as an anthropological study of a culture which seems deceptively similar to one's own, like having to remember that Americans are not English nor are Geordies from Norfolk.
The theoretical discussion is based on two main conceptual structures: object relations derived from Klein and group dynamics derived from Brian and Rice, both being demonstrated in developments in psychoanalytic practice. Although it is gratifying to find references to Freda Martin's paper on family therapy, there is however very little directly drawn from more teleological approaches; and the effort of translation, such as from the authors' understanding of ‘transference’ to my own as derived fromjungian approaches, is sometimes considerable.
Family therapy in the U.K. is itself still struggling to formulate its basic concepts and practice and to develop them, and this volume seeks to establish a place for a schema of family therapy theory distinct from the two so far most clearly distinguishable groupings within the common framework of systems theory: crudely, the behaviourists and the eclectics. The very title of the book indeed sets out its difference, being ‘psychotherapy with families’ rather than ‘family therapy’. British practitioners and writers seem to be struggling for a way of expressing the purposes and processes of therapy in typically straightforward, ordinary and comprehensible forms, much as they are seeking to do in the field of social work. In this attempt, we run the risk of oversimplifying vocabularies and constructs, but whe