Psychoanalytic Family Therapy

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, focused on the mental processes of individuals [Page 1333]and worked in his clinical practice with individual patients. Over the years, however, psychoanalysts developed a deep interest in the interaction between infants and children and their caretakers and how these early interactions influenced later relationships, including the therapeutic relationship. (In this entry, the terms analytic and analysis are used interchangeably with psychoanalytic and psychoanalysis.) This increasingly relational perspective in psychoanalysis coincides with the relational and interactional perspective in family therapy, helping to make it possible for a clinical practice that originated in the treatment of the individual to be applied in the treatment of couples and families.

According to Michael Nichols and Richard Schwartz, from an analytic perspective, a family and ...