Читать книгу Theory and Practice of Couples and Family Counseling - James Robert Bitter - Страница 44

At the end of this chapter, you will find multiple genograms related to the field of couples and family counseling. Like most genograms that do not come from actual interviews with an actual family, these genograms are imperfect. Some important people have been left out; some of the relationships and connections are imprecise. I have been developing this conceptualization for years, and even here I am still working on it—and I hope you will work on it with me. In this chapter, I want to use these genograms to tell you some of the stories of our profession. These stories too will be incomplete and greatly limited in scale. I am really more interested in giving you a feel for how the profession has developed and the people who have been a part of that process. There are some excellent historical chronologies already in print (see Becvar & Becvar, 2013, pp. 15–59; Nichols & Davis, 2017, pp. 8–26), and you may want to refer to them for a chronological date-to-event description of the history of family counseling.

The first of the four genograms (Figure A2.1, p. 53) is a relational diagram of some of the independent pioneers of family counseling. The second genogram (Figure A2.2, p. 54) is another relational diagram of the structural, strategic, solution-focused, and solution-oriented models that dominated the 1970s, 1980s, and early part of the 1990s. The third genogram (Figure A2.3, p. 55) delineates the models we associate with postmodernism and social constructionism, and here I have included feminist family counseling, although I know many feminists who incorporate models other than those associated with social constructionism. The last genogram (Figure A2.4, p. 56) brings together the cognitive behavioral approaches to counseling with the most accepted approaches to effective parenting and the most prominent couples counseling models. In a sense, these are the models, together with solution-focused therapy, that emphasize evidence-based practice. Let us start with the first genogram.