Family Counseling

Historical Overview

The field of family counseling evolved as families were changing, in particular after World War II. During that time, the divorce rates increased, and there were more demands on families as a system. In addition, people became more accepting of the idea of seeking help for family concerns. Counselors began to include family members to understand and treat individual psychological problems. During the 1950s, counselors and therapists sometimes observed that when an individual's problem got better, someone else in the family developed symptoms. A patient's condition might have deteriorated after he or she returned home from a hospital stay. Therefore, therapists started concluding that if individuals were treated in isolation from their families, it might be nonproductive. At that time, there was also research attempting to understand the factors that contributed to schizophrenia.

In the 1940s, general systems theory was developed by the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, who believed that the parts of a system are interrelated and that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The implication for family counseling was that one person's behavior is interconnected and interrelated to the behavior of all other family members.

Nathan Ackerman, the “father” of family therapy, was one of the first to work with the whole family. His work was during the late 1930s to early 1940s. In the 1940s, Gregory Bateson and his wife, Margaret Mead, began looking into patterns and organization in communication. Soon after that, Bateson was influenced by cybernetics, the study of how systems are controlled and how information is processed. Jay Haley and John Weakland also conducted research on the dynamics of schizophrenic communication. In 1959 the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, was founded. Bateson, Weakland, William Fry, Don Jackson, Jay Haley, and Virginia Satir made significant contributions to an understanding of how families and systems work. This is where concepts such as that of equilibrium, which is the tendency of families to resist change, and of repetitive patterns of interaction were developed. Haley was also influenced by [Page 204]Milton Erickson, a hypnotist in Phoenix who developed a treatment called Brief Therapy. Erickson believed that people could make rapid and effective changes if they tried something new.

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