ABSTRACT
Any account of structural family therapy written from an English viewpoint will repeat ideas that have already been clearly and forcefully stated by clinicians at the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic, principally by Salvador Minuchin whose book ‘Families and Family Therapy’ (1977) stands as a classic text on this approach to work with the family. In the family therapy programme, a part of the Department for Children and Parents in the Tavistock Clinic, London, we are also indebted to Harry Aponte, now director of the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic, and to Marianne Walters, Director of Training, both of whom have spent time working with us during 1978 and 1979. Dr Minuchin also spent some months in London in the spring of 1979 and was generous in his teaching time. My first direct experience of his work was in 1972 when I visited Philadelphia having read ‘Families of the Slums’ (1967). I saw how much sense the approach outlined there made for many of the families we were seeing at Woodberry Down Child Guidance Clinic where, working with Robin Skynner, the team were developing a family group approach. I made a point of visiting Philadelphia and seeing as many of the training films as they could show me as well as doing some observations behind a one-way screen. This chapter then marks for me another step in the long process of integrating a structural approach into a psychodynamic orientation, some of the dilemmas of which I first outlined in an article published in ‘Social Work Today’ in 1973 (included in this book, chapter 5).
