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Brief History Of Marriage And Family Therapy

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Week 3 Assignment: Understanding MFT History and Concepts Brief History of Marriage and Family Therapy Marriage and Family Therapy, particularly the family aspect, has a long history. Some of the family aspect was touched on by such leaders in the field as Freud and Rogers. The focuses for these two theorists however, were based on the impact, particularly the negatives, on the family and didn’t delve into the treatment of the family as whole. This base work however led to the questions asked by the early pioneers interested in treating the family as a whole unit. The question that really set things off was, “‘To what extent would we have to reject and/or accept prevailing theoretical concepts and techniques from individual theories to succeed (Chabot, 2011)?’” Finding the answer to that question and others had theorists split into two different groups. The first group was made up of those who focused on the more individual theories and the second group consisted of those who focused more on the systemic approach. According to Chabot (2011) those theorists and practitioners include: 1950s. Nathan Ackerman (first group) who seemed to focus his therapy theories around Freud’s psychosexual stages. He believed that to be healthy, one had to express their emotions and their anger in particular. Those involved in the Bateson Project (second group), Gregory Bateson, Jay Haley, John Weakland, and Don Jackson focused on the communication process between family members. 1960s.

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