ABSTRACT
The early development of family therapy was based on two theories; a theory of complex interaction, General Systems Theory (von Bertalanffy, 1962) and a theory about human communication (Watzlawick et al., 1967). The interplay between these ideas and the pragmatic benefits of treating patients or clients in the ‘natural setting’ of their families, meant that professional understanding and treatment of people’s problems was contextualised in ways which, in the West, they had not hitherto been. This shift in theory and practice fitted well with other prevailing ideas about destigmatising and deprofessionalising problems in living, which ‘psychiatric’ labelling had moved out of the domain of ordinary living and into the domain of ‘experts’. Family therapy proposed, in both its theory and practices, a view of the ‘patient’ as a family member, actively participating in the creation, expression and attempted solution of the family’s dilemmas in living together.
