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This volume is another omnibus collection. However, we are not offered the usual cookbook fare. All the essays are serious and depthful, written specifically for this book; some are further extensions of already formulated and by now well-assimilated theories of family therapy. One excellent chapter, by Framo, offers a summary of significant research in the field.
As regards their own orientation in family therapy, the editors rigorously differentiate their approach, which they perceive as intensive, from supportive family therapy. The “intensive” approach strives to achieve intrapsychic change, to resolve unconscious transference distortions among the family members, as well as those between family members and the therapist. Although “supportive” family therapy may hope to “clarify communication, change interaction patterns, and help the family to cope with concrete stress situations,” it is still considered of somewhat superficial status. Negative reverberations, emanating from family therapists relegated by the editors to the “supportive” position, have already emerged, as noted by Jay Haley's critical review of this volume in the September 1966 issue of Family Process.
Aside from these overly militant protestations as to who gets the accolade for being the best or most depthful family therapist, the book offers an excellent overview of the field of family treatment. Its chief limitations are in circumscribing many of the studies to the schizophrenic and his family, as though this form of pathology involves troubled families and other maladies do not.