ABSTRACT
Families are social systems whose members have a common history and a complex course of change over time. In order to function well, they must take account of developmental changes in their members, cope with the expectations of their culture, and adapt to new realities. The describing the early stages of therapy with a family that fits the “typical” description: they came in with an identified patient, a simple definition of the problem, a request to cure their child, and a confession of despair and helplessness. Subsystems in a family are aggregates of particular members who are in close relationship with each other; by definition, they have implicit “boundaries” that exclude others. Siblings may have their own world, excluding parents; older siblings may exclude younger siblings; gender may create specific bonds, and so on. The consultant in this case is meeting for the first time with the Boyd family, and their therapist has agreed to be an observer.
