Structural Family Therapy Theory And Technology And Its Fit With Chinese Culture Study

Family Therapy, as a new theory framework to explain the human behavior, represents a new psychological therapy approach. Structural Family Therapy believes that all the family problems root in the powerful and invisible family structure and individual's symptoms are completed understood only during the interactive mode of family. It is also considered that in order to eliminate the symptoms, therapists need to involve with the family and play the leading role in the family structure so as to reorganize it. As a school of family therapy, for it is simple, practical and also effective in terms of theory and techniques, structural family therapy holds an important position in the development of Family Therapy and advances the development of this field. Many studies have demonstrated that structural family therapy has the obvious effect on psychosomatic family and families with adolescents facing growth problems. A lot of concepts put forward by structural family therapy have become the common ones in the family therapy, for example family structure, boundary, alliance, subsystem, family hierarchy, individual autonomy, so have some technologies such as, joining and accommodation, enactment, marking boundaries, change pace, refraining, restructuring, which were even absorbed and utilized by other schools. Though Post-Modern theories have challenged family therapy, Structural family therapy still shows its strong vitality due to its openness. It keeps on integrating theories and techniques from other schools of Family Therapy and perfecting its theory system so as to adapt to the development of society, times and profession.Chinese social development makes people realize the significance of Family therapy. Although there are a lot of schools of family therapy, structural family therapy was considered suitable to the Chinese culture because of its important developmental foundation in China. Cases in China show that after the treatment of structural family therapy, the client's symptoms would relieve to a certain degree, which means structural family therapy can be effectively applied to the Chinese families. As a matter of fact, the value and the techniques of structural family therapy can be easily understood, accepted and recognized by most of the Chinese families and the effect of the treatment also meets people's expectation. However, therapists may encounter some resistance stemming from cultural conflicts when they use structural family therapy to treat the Chinese families, because the characteristics of Chinese family was unique compared with western family in terms of family concept, family structure, family relationship, family communication, family development as well as the relation between family and external circumstance. Another reason is that there are obvious differences between east and west in common family problem such as the problem of the family hierarchy, of the boundary of the spouse subsystem and the parental subsystem, of the communication in the family system. Therefore, just as our research shows, if we can solve the indigenous problem of applying structural family therapy in China, we can find a joining point of the two different cultures, then...