Abstract
Family therapy represents an emphasis on wholeness and focusing on examining persons and their behavior in context, in contrast to a reductionist approach that seeks to reduce the client’s problmes to personal, individual, and internal conflicts or deficiencies. Family therapy moves the focus, as one pioneer in the field(Jay Haley) has put it, from concentrating on what is inside the person’s head to what is a child has a problem, or is a problem — family therapy examines the context and how the context and the child are interrelated.
[Family therapy is] any psychotherapeutic endeavor that explicitly focuses on altering the interaction between or among family members and seeks to improve the functioning of the family as a unit, or its subsystems and/or the functioning of individual members of the family.
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Nichols, W.C. (1999). Family Systems Therapy. In: Russ, S.W., Ollendick, T.H. (eds) Handbook of Psychotherapies with Children and Families. Issues in Clinical Child Psychology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4755-6_8
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