Augustus Y. Napier, Carl Whitaker
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 23
Average rating: 4.5 of 5
Family in Therapy 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.
Awesome book about family therapy. Am studying for Masters in Family Therapy so this is perfect vicarious way to look behind the scenes (inside the therapists heads) as they enter disjointed world of the subject family. They share what they are feeling, thinking and why they do what they do. An excellent example of whatworking with a co-counselor is supposed to be like. Dynamics of all the Relationships exposed in easy to follow honest terms.
Looking at the family as a whole, not the sum of parts 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.
I first read this gem many years ago, long before I became a therapist myself. What an eye opener! Even reading the first Chapter (it's all of 11 pages) is enough to get you thinking in a fresh way about family problems. It certainly worked that way for me.
The book really is about Carl Whitaker, M.D. Augustus Napier was his understudy. Whitaker worked within the idea of family-as-a-system without limiting himself too much with theory. This allowed his methods to evolve as he treated more and more families. And it allowed a book like this to be written: lucid because it makes so much sense, dramatic because so much happens in the family whose treatment it describes, hopeful because it shows how much impact family therapy can have.
It wasn't that he didn't know theory. It's that as person he was intuitive, following his gut time and again, and eventually coming out with some guidelines for other family therapists, such as: -The therapist doesn't control the content of a family session, but she or he does control who will be there (this is dramatically dealt with in the first few chapters), -The therapist can cause change by stirring things up and getting family members to look at problems freshly, and -The therapist's job is to re-vision the problem as a communication that is somehow functional.
Typical is Whitaker's view that often the "identified patient" in the family is a stand-in for some other problem that the family cannot face without the help of a therapist.
Since this great book was written family therapy went through a boom time, was very popular. Then it became integrated into what is often called multi-modal therapy, in which family members sometimes come in individually, sometimes in small groups (ie the parents one time, the children another), sometimes as a whole. Still, it is necessary to understand family systems in order to work this way.
People looking into therapy will find this a great explanation of family issues that otherwise may seem baffling. It might also be a motivator to treatment.
Therapists trained individually will find this a fine introduction to working with families. They will also benefit from reading other luminaries in this field.
Editorial Review:
This extraordinary book presents scenarios of one family's therapy experience and explains what underlies each encounter. You will discover the general patterns that are common to all families-stress, polarization and escalation, scapegoating, triangulation, blaming, and the diffusion of identity--and you will gain a vivid understanding of the intriguing field of family therapy.
