Family Therapy

Becvar, D.S. & Becvar, R.J. (1993). Family therapy: A systemic integration (2nd ed.) Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

After this comparison, one of the approaches discussed in these chapters is addressed in terms of my personal preference for it, its benefits and limitations, and those clients who might be best suited for the approach.

Chapter 9 presents an discussion of the communication approaches to family therapy which can be conceptualized as family therapy which focuses on the nature of the communication within the general family system and its subsystems with an emphasis on redundant, illogical, and confused, communication patterns. Moving a family from dysfunction to functionality involves helping family members to become more open and frank in their communication.

Chapter 10 discusses the strategic approach to family therapy, an approach which emphasizes cognitions, conceptual frameworks, assumptions, and probablistic responses. Coherence in cognitions is equated with normalcy by strategic therapists.

Whereas the communication approach has a model of what constitutes the functional family, the strategic approach does not. It considers itself to be fundamentally relativistic and value-neutral.

The communication approach, presented in Chapter 9, focuses on the meanings of what peo

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ructing a normalcy construct. Also, neither approach is concerned with the etiology of the presenting problem, only with changing it so that it no longer is considered a problem by the family. There are other ways in which the two therapeutic approaches are alike. Both tend to be very directive on the part of the therapist. Also, both approach family therapy by focusing on the symptom, clearing defining the problem, and setting goals. However, despite the foregoing similarities, the therapeutic approaches greatly differ in terms of what they consider the proper unit of therapeutic focus. Whereas the behavioral methods eschew most internalities and prefer to focus on the behavior, the strategic method tends to focus on the non-observable state of human cognitions. In other words, there is a perceptual component to strategic family therapy that is not present in many of the behavioral approaches. Also, the strategic approach contains a great deal of theory regarding normalcy, conceptions and cognitions. The behavioral approaches do not, their primarily theoretical focus being that of empiricism. Evaluation Of the family therapy approaches discussed in Chapters 9, 10, and 11 of the Becvar text, I prefer the behavioral
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