Author Description

"This significant book explains why family psychology--an entirely different field from family therapy--provides a cutting-edge description of human behavior in context and as such represents the wave of the future in psychology. Supplies a comprehensive treatise on the value of family psychology to the field of psychology as a whole Provides a historical overview of family psychology and makes the important differentiation between family psychology and marriage and family therapy Examines the relationship between research and practice, cure and care, and the science and art of family psychology Documents how family psychology strives to view persons in context of their situation and the relationships within the family"-- "Looking through the Systemic Lens "I can't go back to yesterday because I was a different person then" (Carroll, 2009). In the 1950s a systemic psychology developed from general system theory (von Bertalanffy, 1951), a new and revolutionary epistemology that directly competed with the Platonic and Aristotelian paradigms that had defined much of Western thought for centuries. Systems psychology developed as a reaction to the dominance of the Aristotelian based medical model of psychology represented by psychoanalysis, cognitive behavioral and humanistic psychologies. The medical model was characterized as individualistic (a focus on intrapsychic phenomena), dualistic (mind body split), reductionistic (reducing phenomena down to discrete categories) and radically objective (accepting only objective data as scientifically valid). The systemic model on the other hand, was characterized as relational (pathology and health are relationship oriented), holistic (the whole is greater than the sum of its parts), ecological (there is a reciprocal relationship between the biopsychosocial elements of being human) and subjective (the ideographic must be considered alongside the nomothetic)"--