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Psychoanalysts have recognized that parental influences are a crucial factor in the shaping of the drives and in the general development of a child's personality. In addition, the advent of siblings, particularly the timing, circumstances, parental reactions, and the newcomer's gender and temperament have been recognized as extremely significant influences on an individual's life, not to mention the impact of influential members of the extended family. Family therapists have emphasized the continuing effects of the family's psychological atmosphere on an individual's established intrapsychic structure and dynamics—although they would not state their position with reference to intrapsychic phenomena.
Family therapists postulate that the force of the family system creates and maintains pathology in the family through the collusive participation of all family members. Any effort toward change by an individual in the family is most likely doomed because of the greater force of the system; or, in the event that an individual does succeed in relinquishing his pathological role, someone else in the family will become symptomatic in order to stabilize the system in need of an identified patient. In short, the focus of family therapists is on the dynamics and structure of the interactional field as it manifests itself through the observable behavior of family members.
At times family therapy practitioners, and even researchers, have operated almost mechanically in accordance with certain prescriptions (e.g., to eliminate a child's symptom, treat the marriage problem), and on other occasions purely intuitively in reaction to momentary behavioral events. Meanwhile, a much more intellectual group of systems thinkers have explicated their ideas in physics, biology, and communication theories, and now