The Family Day Unit at the Maryborough Hospital, London, carries out an intensive treatment programme for highly dysfunctional families. Up to ten families attend the Unit five days per week from nine a.m. to three p.m. They stay for a period of at least three months and not longer than fifteen months. Normally some twenty to thirty patients, adults and children, attend every day. This paper gives the reasons for setting up this Family Day Unit. The aims and structure of the Unit are described, the treatment method outlined and some preliminary results are discussed.
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.
This article describes the process of an evolving research project. Initially conceived as a study investigating outcome measures and their sensitivity to change after a course of family therapy, the project soon changed its focus. As unexpected results were recorded, the clinical research team became destabilized and the individual team members responded by making their own "sense" of the data, reflecting their respective clinical and scientific positions. As clinicians and researchers began to challenge each other's belief systems, the project entered a new stage. The interactions within the team became of increasing interest and themselves objects of research. The recursive nature of re-search was demonstrated, and the act of writing this report completed the circle, as the various authors tried to achieve a balance between reporting the content and the process of this project.
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