This paper describes several disagreements among approaches to family therapy and proposes two conceptual shifts providing a more integrative perspective. The first shift focuses on the implications of different ways therapists orient themselves to the developing structures of the therapy system and to the disabled structures of the client system. The second shift reconsiders theoretical approaches in terms of the types of distance they require of the therapist and the types of information these distances provide and ignore. Finally, the paper also discusses a means for classifying the different types of goals therapists establish for their clients, emphasizing that these goals must be consistent with the clients' views of themselves and the world.
Wallerstein and Kelly (1980) identified age as the best predictor of how children initially react to their parents' divorces. They found that preschoolers react differently from early elementary school-aged children and that older elementary school-aged children and adolescents react differently from both younger groups. T:hey interpreted these findings within a psychodynamic framework, but acknowledged that children's levels of cognitive development also shape their reactions; most of the preschoolers, for example, egocentrically assumed that [:hey were responsible for the divorce. This chapter provides the cognitive (complement to the findings of Wallerstein and Kelly by describing the ways children in each of these age groups make sense of their parents' divorces.
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