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The idea of this book is to present an integrated model of family therapy, bringing together McMaster's structural and psychoanalytic concepts. The authors have called their model Problem-Centred Psychodynamic Family Therapy (abbreviated to PCPFT). The core of the approach described is the McMaster
model of family functioning developed by Nat Epstein and his colleagues. In this approach, unlike most others, there is a clear separation between assessment and therapy. There is an attempt at integrating structural and psychodynamic concepts.
Both authors trained at McMaster University, and try to explain why that model is not better known, particularly as it offers a clear scheme of assessing family functioning from problem-solving through communication and affective involvement to behaviour controls. They view therapists’ difficulties with this model as the therapists’ disavowal of their debts to psychoanalytic concepts. They see the second generation of family therapists as more able to take a broader look at different conceptual frameworks. The authors state that for PCPFT, the therapist must both describe the family's problems in transactional terms and develop explanatory hypotheses to account for these problems. In PCPFT, three sorts of explanatory principles are invoked:-
How is the symptom linked to the system?
How are the surface action and dysfunctional transactional processes linked with past events and relationships for the family?
Why now?
Posing these three questions is of course not unique to PCPFT, and is common to many types of family therapy. This book is a good example of the sequential integrated approach the authors advocate. They give an overview at the beginning of the book, followed by a chapter on the central concepts of the McMaster model of family functioning. After an account of the conceptual framework they follow with the perceptual, and then executive skills. A case study of one family is followed through the book, to illustrate various aspec