The pathological family
Subtitle: Cold War America and the rise of family therapy
By: Deborah Weinstein
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2013
Place of publication: Ithaca
Language: eng
Number of pages: 262
ISBN-13: 9780801451416; 9780801478215
Subjects: Families; History; Family psychotherapy; Cold War; Psychological aspects
Description: While iconic popular images celebrated family life during the 1950s and 1960s, American families were simultaneously regarded as potentially menacing sources of social disruption. The history of family therapy makes the complicated power of the family at midcentury vividly apparent. Clinicians developed a new approach to psychotherapy that claimed to locate the cause and treatment of mental illness in observable patterns of family interaction and communication rather than in individual psyches. Drawing on cybernetics, systems theory, and the social and behavioral sciences, they ambitiously aimed to cure schizophrenia and stop juvenile delinquency. With particular sensitivity to the importance of scientific observation and visual technologies such as one-way mirrors and training films in shaping the young field, this work examines how family therapy developed against the intellectual and cultural landscape of postwar America. As the author shows, the midcentury expansion of America's therapeutic culture and the postwar fixation on family life profoundly affected one another. Family therapists and other postwar commentators alike framed the promotion of democracy in the language of personality formation and psychological health forged in the crucible of the family. As therapists in this era shifted their clinical gaze to whole families, they nevertheless grappled in particular with the role played by mothers in the onset of their children's aberrant behavior. Although attitudes toward family therapy have shifted during intervening generations, the relations between family and therapeutic culture remain salient today. -- From publisher's website.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction : the power of the family; title: Personality factories; title: "Systems everywhere" : schizophrenia, cybernetics, and the double bind; title: The culture concept at work; title: Observational practices and natural habitats; title: Visions of family life.