ABSTRACT
Many of the critics who asserted that family therapy rei®ed the family also argued that family therapy took the family out of its social context. This view has a number of aspects and has been developed by a number of very prominent family therapists themselves. Poster (1978) for instance, writing from a left wing perspective, believed that family therapists ignored the power of social contexts and assumed that the only system worth investigating was the family system. On the contrary he argued that class relations, poverty and structural inequality were more likely to be determinants of family problems than family dynamics. He argued that since structural factors were likely to cause any `dysfunctional' relationships, therapy was clearly going to fail.
