| During the 1950s and 1960s, a series of clinicians developed a new therapeutic approach to mental illness which located the source of pathology and the potential for cure in the cyclical patterns of family interactions, rather than the biological or psychological characteristics of an individual. Family therapy thereby refigured "the family" into the primary unit of psychopathology and treatment. This dissertation analyzes how it became possible and what it meant for family therapists to approach the family as a therapeutic subject. It situates the emergence of family therapy in the postwar confluence of psychoanalysts' dominance of the psychiatric profession, the prominence of a therapeutic, psychological ethos, and renewed concerns about the state of the American family. Symptomatic of the simultaneously pessimistic and optimistic outlook of the postwar period, anxieties about the American family were coupled with confidence in expert intervention. As newly-anointed experts on the family, family therapists such as Nathan Ackerman, Gregory Bateson, Murray Bowen, Don Jackson, and Salvador Minuchin had expansive aims for their new field, from treating severe pathologies such as schizophrenia to ameliorating criminological problems such as juvenile delinquency.; Family therapists and researchers developed a heterogeneous array of theories and practices which engaged with contemporary visions of family life and changing understandings of pathology. Their interdisciplinary borrowings from non-clinical fie particularly cybernetics, sociology and anthropology, contributed to their characterization of the family as a system, their appropriations of the concept of culture, and their emphasis on observation and visuality in their research practices and pedagogical techniques. In their use of one-way mirrors, therapy films, and session transcripts, they attended to what happened in the space between people, rather than within individual psyches. This contrast between intersubjective and intrapsychic approaches was indicative of important, though contested, differences between family therapy and psychoanalysis. More broadly, family therapists theorized a pivotal role for the family in the relationship between social order and individual disorder, such that therapeutically intervening in the family had implications for both societal and personal well-being. |
