ABSTRACT
Within the variety of family organizational forms existing today, each family constructs its unique world, with its own rules, rituals, and internal alliances, negotiating its external boundaries with the outside world and its internal boundaries among its own members (Minuchin, 1974). The family, from a structural perspective, is a self-contained system; changes in one part of the system produce corresponding changes in another part. Members “dance” to patterned steps and movements, ever in synchrony, if not in harmony with the others. In this world of transactional forces, if a family has a need to have one member “psychologically ill,” and the sick person gets better (perhaps through the “intrusion” of an outsider, such as a psychotherapist), then the family finds another member to be the “sick” one.
