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The author presents clinical material to exemplify the need for family treatment
in the case of a very disturbed adolescent boy, in order to help resolve some of the impediments to individual therapy. The main thrust of the paper deals with the need of the family therapist, utilizing psychoanalytic concepts about preoedipal pathology, to offer a holding environment in which the feared primitive, destructive affects of the family members can be experienced and contained safely. Shapiro stresses that the therapist must resolve the countertransference difficulties that arise as he or she becomes "enmeshed" in the family.