Milestones and Breakthroughs in Family Psychotherapy

Guy Maruani

Description

How did we change our focus from the individual subject to the relations between people ? Why did the family become the tool of Psychotherapy, notwithstanding the psychiatric diagnosis of one member ?
‘Milestones and Breakthroughs in Family Psychotherapy’ tells the story of this conceptual evolution, which happened in the U.S. around the same people who invented the atomic bomb and the computer, while in Europe were invented the psychotropic drugs. Gregory Bateson and Paul Watzlawick were the most influential thinkers who led that shift from the Unconscious to the interaction.
Having practiced myself Psychoanalysis and Systemic Family Therapy during half a century I draw the lessons learned from those two approaches in diverse cases of mental troubles : how they support or contradict one another, what are the progress and the improvements which have been made and what cues for efficiency will help the psychotherapist…and anyone concerned.

Informations

• Publié par: guymaruani1945
• Publié le: 28 janvier 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 12
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Milestones and Breakthroughs in Family Psychotherapy

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Milestones and Breakthroughs in Family Psychotherapy

By Guy Maruani

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Milestones and Breakthroughs in Family Psychotherapy

By Guy Maruani

Copyright ©2019 by Guy Maruani

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To my families

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CONTENTS

Introduction………………………………………..p.9 Chapter One………………………………………p.11 How and when it started Chapter Two………………………………………p.41 Paul Watzlawick, the catalyst Chapter Three……………………………………..p.51 The paradoxes of acculturation Chapter Four………………………………………p.71 Family Therapy and Medicine Chapter Five……………………………………….p.95 Beyond and beyond the double-bind Bibliography………………………………..……p.105

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INTRODUCTION

We are a gregarious species and yet we are self-conscious individuals. At the time and place when and where were invented the atomic bomb and the comput- er, a few searchers in human science took advantage of that paradox to start a radically new approach to mental diseases and challenged psychiatry by assert- ing that schizophrenia was not a trouble of the mind but a trouble in communi- cation.

How this insight led to addressing the family as the origin of communication de- fects and as the tool to correct them, how it helps in reconsidering many fields of psychopathology, what advances it may still produce, those three questions are the scope of this book.

Knowing its history is often the best way to study a domain. I will trace back the philosophical and clinical sources which converged to create the practice of what is called family therapy and is actually a variant of psychotherapy i.e. a treatment by way of talk. A chapter is devoted to the main figure in this advent, namely my former mentor Paul Watzlawick, Austrian by birth but of Palo Alto (California) fame.

Schizophrenia, according to many, has burst in the industrial era. It is certain al- together that the modern world with its urban concentrations and its necessity of permanent acculturation is a powerful factor and we will examine how it im- pacts the family structures and whether it affects the psychosomatic balance of people.

It is not only theory for me, but the lessons of fifty years of hard –and some- times useful- work with families as a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst.

Guy Maruani, M.D., Ph. D. ,

Paris – Brussels, June 2018 - January 2019

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Milestones and Breakthroughs in Family Psychotherapy

C h a p t e r One…………………………………………………… …… How and when it started

It is not an easy task to decide when originated an idea and hence an approach. Ideas, alike people, are born in clusters - or shall I write, in families ? And, like people, they are born free and equal.

In the case of family psychotherapy, many insights and antecedents may be situated ( and we will do it ), but most of the observers of the field agree on a date of birth which constitutes a precise milestone, the publica- tion of an article in 1956 in the journal Behavioural Sci- ence.

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