Family Centered Practice : The Interactional Dance Beyond the Family System by John V. Compher - used book

The 20th century has seen the emergence of some totally new domains of scientific endeavour. One such area is behavioural studies, and the birth of the family therapy movement as a separate and recognized discipline. Scientists and therapists abandoned reductionist, atomistic, mechanistic ways of thinking and turned to the study of connected patterns of events in the lives of their clients. Ecosystemic family therapists collect data from group work which consists of descriptions of patterns of events in the fields of their clients' lives that contain and explain the distress that brought their clients to them. The therapist and the family tell stories together, and invent interventions designed to create endings for these stories in which the desired therapeutic results are achieved. They have to include elements from the physical, cultural and socio-economic surroundings in which families live, and move about in their clients' communities. The author is an ecosystemic thinker who has been working in the human service system. He presents scientific data in the form of stories that describe his work as a therapist in front-line community services. He then does an ecosystenmic critique of those stories in such a way as to expose dysfunctions that can damage clients. Finally, he illustrates opportunities and methods for resolving many of these difficulties in practice.