ABSTRACT
The study of family development represents a working model that has allowed us to embark on a journey beyond the individual. The inter-personal dimension, and the context within which relationships are formed, constitutes our main observation point. In order to know the individual better we need to understand his family history and frame personal problems within the parameters of his affective and relational world. In fact, these familial and social components have long been underestimated, both theoretically as well as in clinical practice, in favour of an observational model that exclusively focused on the inner self and the individual manifestations of psychopathology. Both the psychoanalytic tradition and the medical/psychiatric model have described and evaluated the client mostly as a monad, isolated from his relational components, thus running the risk of splitting the family unit into small segments.
