Marriage & Family Therapy Theories

This paper uses the families in Jostein Gaarder's (1996) novel, Sophie's World to examine several marriage and family therapy theories found in Diane R. Gehart and Amy R. Tuttle's (2003) Theory-Based Treatment Planning for Marriage and Family Therapists and theory-based treatment planning as outlined in Dorothy Stroh Becvar and Raphael J. Becvar's (2003) Family Therapy. While the novel focuses on providing an elementary introduction to the history of philosophy, the dual heroines of the book and their parallel families offer fascinating case studies of two marriages and two families in need of therapeutic help.

Sophie Amundsen is 14 years old, just about to turn 15. She is an only child, living in an isolated house on the edge of a suburb near the woods with her working mother. Her father, the captain of an oil tanker, spends much of his time at sea. Sophie is a latchkey child, walking home after school each day with her friend Joanna to a house usually inhabited only by her pets. Sophie turns out to be the fictional invention of the absent father of another girl, Hilde Moller Knag, who is just one day older and who also lives in an isolated house with a mother who is preoccupied with her work and a father who spends much of his time out of town. While neither case is of a family in real crisis, both could benefit from therapeutic attention.

Both families present interesting and similar case studies for a marriage and family therapist, and several different theoret

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description can fully capture a person's identity or life history" (p. 215). In this story, the fictionalized Sophie helps Hilde to understand herself better. Another useful therapeutic approach to this case is intergenerational family therapy, which relies on helping people to find balance between togetherness and individuality (Gehart, 2003, p. 152). The story begins by asking Sophie to answer what seems to be a very simple question, "Who are you?" (Gaarder, 1996, p. 2), encouraging her to understand her individual self and identity, as separate from her identity as a member of her family. Another important component in intergenerational family therapy is the idea of triangles, and both families consist of a natural triangulation. As Gehart and Tuttle (2003) note, "Triangulation becomes problematic when it is chronic and the original dyad never resumes communication to resolve its difficulties" (p. 153). In both families, and most significantly in Hilde's, the parents have more apparent interaction with the daughter than with one another, putting the daughter into the unnatural and problematic position of trying to resolve the distance within the marriage, the original dyad of the family. Hilde's mother seems to be more

Category: Psychology - M