ABSTRACT
Entering therapy is a stage in the sense that it marks a significant point in the family’s life, the point at which the family turns to an outside expert for help in its own internal affairs. Karl Tomm’s version of the Selvini Palazzoli School of family therapy argues that an essential constituent of their approach is to respect the family’s present functioning as a sensible way of coping with whatever they see as their dilemmas of living. One meaning of the term stage is an explicit identification of what is happening as a developmental process, and the development is partly of the patient, partly of the family of the patient, and partly of the therapy with the patient and the family. Psychoanalysis is conventionally described as having three aspects: it is a method of doing therapy, a body of thinking about people, and a way of collecting data about people.
