This paper contrasts the basic tenets of systemic thinking with some guiding principles of the psychodynamic approach, and outlines specific techniques which family therapists can use when seeing individuals. It is argued that a useful systemic framework can be maintained if the therapist aims to keep the therapy system ‘open’ for relevant others to join at any time.

Three techniques, sculpting, geneograms, and family drawing are considered within a systemic approach to therapy. Frequently, emphasis is laid on either the activity of the therapist or the behaviour of the family in treatment. We focus on ways in which the therapist draws on the clients' creativity, relying for this on a correct assessment of their ‘language’ or ‘idiom’. Certain assumptions are proposed, and case illustrations are used in their support. Our approach is that any material, or apparently no material, produced when using these techniques represents essential information which can be turned to therapeutic advantage by means of positive reframing. Although a framework within which to practise is viewed as essential, a ‘game‐plan’ will almost certainly result in sterility and impasses in therapy. Therapist flexibility, it is proposed, is a prerequisite for creativity. We prefer to label resistance to treatment as failure by the therapist to recognize the clients' needs.

The view presented in this paper is that frameworks are needed to help understand the nature of the organization and problems of severely underorganized families. Some basic propositions are suggested as a ‘rule of thumb’ diagnostic tool. Requirements for healthy development are outlined, against which the family context of many underorganized families is illustrated. It is proposed that the life‐cycle framework of such families is essentially ‘two generational’. This has implications for those offering help in these situations, and suggestions are made about appropriate treatment approaches.

This paper proposes that a stage in treatment common in all successful approaches to therapy is the precipitating of some degree of crisis, and that failure to provoke an element of crisis in terms of behaviour or beliefs in the family represents a ‘crisis’ for the therapist. Before considering the different approaches of three major schools of family therapy, it is first suggested that, at a more abstract level, ‘the patterns which connect’ (Bateson, 1979) the different schools provide a unifying framework to understand one of the aims of therapy. This is the intention to challenge established patterns to precipitate crisis. Three models of Family Therapy, Structural, Strategic, and Milan/Systemic, are outlined and their manner of precipitating crises described.