Family Therapy into the 21st Century: Can we Work our Way out of the Epistemological Maze?

Abstract

Family therapy is a generic term used to describe a paradigm within the helping professions that encompasses a range of competing approaches which share a common view about the importance of family to maladaptive behaviours and disorders. The various family therapies have evolved rapidly over the last three decades, at a time when society has been attuned to innovation, and eager to try new products. Thus, they soon found a niche in the partial void created by the demise of some of the previously dominant psychological paradigms. While collectively the family therapies have been demonstrated to be generally efficacious as a treatment approach, the last two decades have witnessed an avalanche of theorising and conceptualising that has created an epistemological maze through which practitioners must find their way. In this paper we ask whether this trend is moving the family therapies too far away from the core issues involved in the helping professions.