ABSTRACT
Note that all the authors in this section, whether directly and forcefully or more indirectly but still persuasively, attempted to get the parents in this hypothetical case situation to work together more as a team. “Well, of course,” the reader may be thinking, “any family therapist would do that. Obviously these parents need to work together.” Well, as a reading of the rest of this book will verify,not every family therapist would work toward that goal. An MRI therapist might well encourage the parents to stop trying to agree, so as to interrupt the stuck solution behavior and free them up (Chapter 29); a therapist practicing the Internal Family Systems model would begin by working individually with the teen (Chapter 46). It is a tribute to the pervasiveness of the structural/strategic models in the field, however, that many family therapists would indeed think first of this essentially structural goal: to reorganize the parents into a more appropriately hierarchical team.
