The definition of what family therapy really is remains somewhat elusive because the term can refer to a variety of different methods, procedures, and techniques. The family therapist must formulate new theoretical concepts and therapeutic techniques when confronted with phenomena not explained by individual theory; thus, the family therapy movement continues to experience healthy, developmental growth. This developing perspective has come to be labeled family psychology and represents “the scientific study of the family from a multifaceted perspective—its historical forms and variation, its structure and functioning across time, space, cultures, and generations, and its idiosyncratic and systems attributes” (F.W. Kaslow, 1987, p. 88).

A family therapist emphasizes the family system and the interactive processes that operate within that system to maintain the current patterns of behavior and communication. The practice of family therapy has expanded tremendously in the past 50 years and much has been written on the topic (Sayger, Homrich, & Horne, 2000). Family therapy seems to have had its beginnings serendipitously in many locations and under the direction of several individuals but is usually noted to have gained recognition as a profession in the 1950s. Some family therapy historians credit Freud with utilizing a family therapy approach and point out that in many cases, when the child was the identified patient, Freud chose to work with the child's parent (e.g., Little Hans). Others point to a manuscript published by John Bowlby in 1949, “The Study and Reduction of Group Tension in the Family, ” in which he discussed the use of conjoint interviews as an auxiliary to individual sessions at the Tavistock Child Guidance Clinic in London. John Bell, who became aware of Bowlby's work with families, incorporated this approach into his clinical practice and has been labeled by some historians the “father of family therapy.”

In the 1950s, Nathan Ackerman asserted that emotional problems could be generated by the immediate environment and by the dynamics of the psyche; thus, interviewing the entire family could be useful in circumventing an impasse with a difficult child. In 1958, Ackerman published The Psychodynamics of Family Life, which provided the first book on diagnosis and treatment of family relationships. For Ackerman, the parenting that a child received was closely related to the child's illness.

The clinical research of both Murray Bowen and Lyman Wynne followed on Theodore Lidz's research on the role of the family in the etiology and treatment of schizophrenic disorders. Bowen specialized in treating psychotic children and developed a family systems theory to explain his therapeutic approach. “Wynne was particularly intrigued by the parallel (and sometimes conflicting) needs of a child to develop a sense of personal identity and at the same time develop intimate relationships with others within the family” (I. Goldenberg & H. Goldenberg, 1983, p. 82). . .

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