2002/03/01 by C. Christian Beels · 1 citation
Psychology · #Counseling Practices and Supervision #Counseling, Therapy, and Family Dynamics #Educational and Psychological Assessments
paper · doi:10.1111/j.1545-5300.2002.40102000067.x
crossref issued 2002/03/01 · crossref published 2002/03/01 · crossref published-print 2002/03/01 · openalex publication_date 2002/03/01 · crossref published-online 2004/05/06 · crossref created 2004/05/06 · crossref deposited 2024/01/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref indexed 2026/07/28 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The official history of family therapy describes its beginnings as a daring technical and philosophical departure from traditional individual treatment in the 1960s, inspired especially by the "system thinking" of Gregory Bateson. This celebrated origin story needs to be supplemented with a longer and larger history of both practice and thought about the family, and that is the subject of this article. The longer history goes back to the founding of social work by Mary Richmond, of pragmatism by William James, and of the organic view of social systems intervention by John Dewey. Seen against this background, family therapy is, among other things, a consequence of the development of persistent elements of American professional culture, experience, and philosophy. The taking of this historical-anthropological view discloses also the origins of two other histories that have made their contribution to the development of family therapy: a science of observing communication processes that starts with Edward Sapir and leads to contemporary conversation analysis, and a history of mesmerism in the United States that culminates in Milton Erickson and his followers.