Book reviews

Abstract

This is an easy and a difficult book to review. It is easy because many of the chapters are reprints of papers which are old favourites and will be well known to the reader. It is difficult because it is really three books in one and they are not all of the same standard. The first 'book' entitled 'Theory Into Practice' is really a very welcome selection of seminal papers from Bowlby, Laing, Scott, and Skynner. It also includes what was perhaps the first of the 'second generation' papers by Byng-Hall on family myths and papers by Gore11 Barnes and Walrond-Skinner. While all the papers are interesting in their own right, their grouping as members of the same class in this section of the book seems less clear. They are not of the same logical type. Most of them are well known and little would be added by reviewing the detailed content aL this stage.The second section is entitled 'Application' and includes more recent papers by eleven authors of which five are relatively well known British family therapists. The first four chapters in this section, 'Family therapy in adolescent psychiatry' (Bruggen and Davies), 'Family admission decisions as a therapeutic tool' (Byng-Hall and Bruggen), 'Illness in the family' (Lask) and 'Mourning and the family' (Black) are good chapters, generally conceptually clear and pragmatic in their application of family therapy to different contexts. The last three chapters however, 'Focal family therapy' (Bentovim and Kinston), 'Repertory grid for assessing marital therapy' (Ryle and Lipshitz) and 'A model for assessing family relationships' (Lickorish) do not in my view truly belong in this section; they are three different therapeutic or conceptual approaches. This is not to detract from these chapters in their own right. The chapter on focal family therapy provides an interesting, clear, and useful framework. The use of the repertory grid as a research tool for measuring change is welcome if anything for its heroism. Many have flirted with it and ended up looking for something simpler.Lickorish's chapter is welcome if only in that it is one of the relatively rare contributions to the British family therapy literature from the prolific writings of the Institute of Family Psychiatry.