A Theoretical Study On The Family Psychology

Based on systems perspective, family psychology is a scientific study of emotion, thinking and behavior of individual, couple and family in their relationships and the broad environment of their living. The dissertation makes systematic theoretical study on family psychology, tries to analyze its historical background and roots; to clarify its theoretical development stages; to explore the characteristic of its research methods; to review its research findings on the nature of the family; and to evaluate its meaning and contributions after the discussion of involved theoretical dispute. Through the theoretical study family psychology's theory, the dissertation expects to give some suggestion to the construction of Chinese family psychology.The rise of family psychology is a product of era. The development of systems science, psychology and psychotherapy provide a base for its generation. The development of its theory has gone through two stages, at the first stage, its theory and practice is concentrated on the interactions of family members, and is relationship oriented; at the second stage, its theory and practice are influenced by feminism, multi-culturalism, constructivism, social constructionism and ecological systems theory, and takes on a multi-integrative characteristic. Adopting quantitative and qualitative methods, family psychology has made a systematic study on the component parts, structure, environment, control, development and function of family system.Although family psychology's thinking methods has been challenged by individualism and post-modernism, the systems perspective it advocates, such as taking psychology's object of study as a system, applying "incomplete reductionism" instead of "complete reductionism", and nonlinearity causality instead of linearity causality, will surely promote the methodological transform of psychology, and bring a revolution of thinking. We should use the achievements of western family psychology as a source of reference, to develop our Chinese family psychology.