Salvador Minuchin: Structural Family Therapy

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Salvador Minuchin was born in San Salvador, Argentina in 1921. His parents are Russian-Jewish immigrants and he has two younger siblings. When Salvador Minuchin was a child his family was forced into poverty due to the Great Depression (Miller, 2011). Minuchin is known for helping to establish Structural Family Therapy. In 1947, he got his degree in medicine and shortly after opened his own pediatrics practice. When Israel went to war during WWII, Salvador left his practice to join the Israeli army working as a Physician. When he came back from the army Minuchin went to the United States and studied Psychiatry, then he went back to Israel and focused on helping refugee children and being a part of creating programs for them. This made him become …show more content…
Minuchin believed that a person’s symptoms were caused by having a dysfunctional family system. Salvador would look for patterns, and try to figure out where the dysfunction was coming from, and then he would help the members in the family create a healthier relationship with each other, as well as establish better coping skills (Salvador Minuchin, 2016). Minuchin was also known for helping to create treatment procedures for Anorexia Nervosa. He believed that Anorexia Nervosa was a psychosomatic illness, meaning that it is really a psychological illness, but the body converts it into a physical symptom, and that the illness started within the family system. To treat it, Minuchin used Behavioral Therapy and structural family therapy collectively (Salvador Minuchin, …show more content…
A healthy family system is not emmeshed, they promote autonomy and independence. They are also not disengaged either, they still provide nurture and support to each other as well. A dysfunctional family would not have clear boundaries, and could be emmeshed or disengaged (Miller, 2011). A family that is emmeshed is when they are too close to each other, to the point where they can no longer have individuality or function alone because they are dependent on one another. A family system that is disengaged would be one that is too far apart, which can make it seem like they do not care about each other, and it encourages an extremely high level of individuality (Mackelprang & Salsgiver,

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