ABSTRACT
There can be little doubt that family therapy has occupied a particularly central role in the history of eating disorders, with even the very earliest accounts of anorexia nervosa (AN) noting that clinical descriptions of AN would be “incomplete without reference to the patient’s home life” (Lasegue, 1873). Indeed, the development of family therapy over the last 40 years has seen many pioneering family therapists demonstrate a sustained interest in the family processes underpinning AN (Dare, 1985; Minuchin, Rosman, & Baker, 1978; Selvini-Palazzoli, 1974; White, 1987), with the easily quantifiable outcome measures (i.e. weight gain) meaning that for the first time family therapists had a straightforward method of indexing the efficacy of their work. As such, AN became something of a paradigm for family therapy, with many theoretical models of family therapy being developed and tested in the context of AN (Dare et al., 1990).
