The Undeclared War between Child and Family Therapy

McDermott, John Francis; Char, Walter F.

doi:10.1016/s0002-7138(09)61349-2

Cited by 67 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…As elsewhere in the book the audience has more pungency than the platform. Subtitled 'A Dialogue for Child Psychiatric Educators' this report of an infuriatingly philosophical symposium gives the lie to the repeated claims by participants that the 'undeclared war between child and family therapy' (McDermott and Char, 1974) is now over. The principal battle faced by family therapy tutors in American departments of child psychiatry is still with the analysts.…”

Section: Sue Walrond-skinnermentioning

confidence: 99%

Book reviews

1983

Journal of Family Therapy

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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.

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Section: Sue Walrond-skinnermentioning

confidence: 99%

Book reviews

1983

Journal of Family Therapy

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“…There has been a tendency to regard family psychiatry as a field of practice in itself and as the unifying vehicle for adult and child psychiatry [16]. Malone [17] and McDermott [18] appropriately point out that family diagnosis and therapy are techniques of value in both adult and child psychiatry and that they provide common conceptual and clinical grounds but do not in themselves erase the distinctions between the unique fields of clinical practice in adult and child psychiatry.…”

Section: Is General Psychiatry a Valid Concept?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Administrative issues in child and adult psychiatry training programs

Westman

1978

Child Psych Hum Dev

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Child psychiatry training programs have encountered a number of administrative problems resulting from efforts to recognize, without isolating or submerging, the unique aspects of child psychiatry within existing departments of psychiatry. This paper questions the validity of the concept of general psychiatry, which may be responsible for many of these administrative dilemmas. The thesis is advanced that adult and child psychiatry actually represent distinct fields of practice, however, training programs for each should be integrated within departments of psychiatry through both adult and child divisional administrative lines.

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“…In the early 1970s McDermott and Char (1974) argued that child psychiatrists and family therapists should come together, bringing their developmental and transactional perspectives to provide a fuller understanding of families. Their statement that 'better understanding of the unique and changing vulnerability of the child within the family and how this factor influences the family system, must replace the simplistic notion that the child is only expressing the family or parental illness through his symptoms' is still as relevant today as it was then.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Are family therapists listening to the young? A psychological perspective*

Dowling

1993

Journal of Family Therapy

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This paper sets out to examine the family therapist's relationship to young children from a psychological perspective. Earlier contributions to the literature regarding the involvement of children in family sessions are reviewed briefly. Aspects of attachment theory and Piaget's theory of cognitive development are considered in terms of their implications for family therapy. It is argued that family therapists should be mindful of parents' responsibilities for meeting their children's needs, particularly their need to experience predictability and to have a coherent story about their lives. The importance of exploring the effects of adult choices on the children is also emphasized.The aim of this paper is to examine family therapists' relationship to the young from a psychological perspective.In a previous paper, my late colleague Harvey Jones and I tried to address the issues for the family therapist in deciding when and whether to involve younger family members in sessions (Dowling and Jones, 1978). We examined briefly the main aims of family therapy and the attitudes of different clinicians to the involvement of children in the treatment process. We then presented some ideas about how to make use of what we saw as the very relevant contribution of children. We suggested that even very young children can not only send out valuable messages but also benefit from the sessions. We pointed out how children can act as reminders of pain, success andlor union within the family. They often contribute by bringing to the surface issues avoided by the grown-ups. For example, a 3-year-old shooting in the air while the parents were discussing in a very intellectualized manner the wife's extra-marital relationship, could be expressing aggression that the adults were avoiding. However, many family

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The Undeclared War between Child and Family Therapy

Cited by 67 publications

References 3 publications

Book reviews

Book reviews

Administrative issues in child and adult psychiatry training programs

Are family therapists listening to the young? A psychological perspective*

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