Therapy with families and family therapy

While keeping some connections with family-based social casework, and at the same time moving towards a family-orientated approach to individual difficulties, family therapy began in the USA in the 1950s and developed during the 1960s and 1970s on both sides of the Atlantic. A number of clinicians from the Tavistock Clinic, Great Ormond Street Hospital, and the Institute of Family Therapy in London recorded the development of their thinking and practice. Their initiatives included setting up a self-training programme that went on to offer formal family therapy training from the 1980s. In the United Kingdom in the 1970s and 1980s, multi-disciplinary child mental health teams came together to think about children and young people within their family context. In 1997, the Journal of Family Therapy devoted an entire edition to “Psychoanalysis and systemic approaches”. Some contributors to that edition were either qualified or becoming qualified in both family therapy and psychoanalysis.