Framo's Theory Of Family Therapy

Register to read the introduction… This was 1957; the family structure was primarily nuclear. At this point, as a practicing psychoanalytic therapist for 6 years, he questioned the disproportionate emphasis on diagnosis versus therapeutic management of symptoms. He was helping to research schizophrenic patients, but was recurrently interrupted in the sessions by their families’ interjections. He and his colleagues made a decision to include the families rather than be constantly interrupted. The benefits of this inclusion evidenced the importance of relationship context in understanding their patients’ behavior.
Fraenkel becomes excited by systems therapy in 1984 when he also realized the importance of behavior in the context of the family system (Fraenkel, 2005). His baptism came from discovery of the dynamic family systems literature that accumulated in the years since predecessors like Framo opened the door. Fraenkel was a graduate student at the time and recounts his doubts about the tenets of psychoanalysis. He admired the simplicity of asking his patient why he was doing the things he was doing? …show more content…
The major contrast between these articles and these men lies in their perception of their place in the history of MFT. Framo very much claims his place as a creator of the theory (Framo, 1996). He announces the importance of respecting history to the present cohesion and collective understanding. He bemoans the current practitioners who are forgetting their founders and marginalizing the early work in the field in favor of the next big idea. Ironically, the journal he criticizes as not prototypical of the field, The Family Therapy Networker, is the journal in which Fraenkel publishes his reflections (Framo,