On Family Therapy

The family, the source of our greates hope for happiness, sometimes turns out to be the source of our greatest dissapointment. In an era when "family values" are being touted without a clear and proper definition of what the term implies, Salvador Minuchin, author of the classic Families and Family Therapy (1974) and Family Healing (Free Press; 1992), offers his impression of family therapy's importance in the new presidential admministration, and its mandate for the '90s and beyond.

In family therapy, we look at groups that are not artificial - that are linked together, that have a history and a language in common. In that setting, the therapist is the only foreigner. In group therapy, the therapist still has the power of owning "knowledge"; he can control communication, when to introduce insight, etc. The family therapist is in a different territory. The people he's seeing enter into the room with alliances, stories that they know that you don't know, secrets, and silences.

On politics:

Politically, the significance of family therapy lies in the fact that at the Democratic Convention, Vice President Gore said that his family was in family therapy without fear or concern that such a statement reflects a deficit, that something is missing. Also that President Clinton could say his family was in family therapy without concern that it might put his position in jeopardy. That's a tremendous step, because saying that you are in individual therapy once brought the ghosts of individual problems, as it did Senator Eagleton in 1972. His career was finished.

But the fact that politicians can discuss being in family therapy now talks about a view of the family as resource, and family therapy as meaning the harnessing of family resources. So it became, paradoxically, a political plus instead of a minus. It brings the message that "we are a people who, in moments of need, harness family resources. We look for ways we can help each other." That's new.

On "family values":

Of course we need to talk about family values, but not in the way that the conservatives talk about them. They have selected a particular idea, a point in history that never existed, and said, "Family values are these, and they belong to American history." The truth is that families are continuously changing. So to talk about family values that way is bracketing the family outside of history and outside of society.

Family values need to include the surrounding of the family; they require putting the family in a social context. We cannot separate the two. The values that are found in the present orgy of greed and selfishness in American society is reflected in families in terms of diminution of responsibility towards others. This has contributed to the increase in the divorce rate, lack of support for children, etc.

I describe family values as responsibility toward others, increase of tolerance, compromise, support, flexibility. And essentially, the things that I call the silent song of life - the continuous process of mutual accommodation without which life is impossible. This is family values. And they will exist in different forms, in different social groups. If we want a society in which we have tolerance, let's look at differences as differences, not as better or worse.

On the foster-care system:

Seven or eight years ago there were 25,000 foster-care children in New York; now there are 50,000. That goes along with crack, AIDS, social conditions that difficulties for children. position of human-services organizations is to take the child out of an abusive family and put it in foster care. The way in which foster care is organized is to save the child, but it also creates a dichotomy, a polarity. It creates the good foster parent and the bad biological parent.

In the last three years, the new human-resources administration has moved toward family empowerment and family preservation, more toward kinship in foster care, so that - the child is taken from the mother and put with the grandmother, aunts, etc. Now, 50 percent of these 50,000 children are in kinship foster systems.

What we need to change is, first, the idea that the parents are bad; and then begin to work toward empowering the parents, to create entire families that help children instead of simply helping the children alone. This is a new way of looking at things, because we are saying the foster parents and the biological parents and the child are an artificial kinship system. The foster family needs to enter into a kind of partnership with the biological family, so that the child is not so much separated from the biological family. Because what happens is the child bonds with the foster family and then returns to a family that is by nature a strange family.

Slowly, I think, we are heading in that direction, and, by incorporating that way of thinking, we have developed a model of training foster parents that is at this point distributed all over the United States.

On the future of family therapy:

In 1992, Senator Gore invited 600 people - lawyers, social workers, psychiatrists, teachers - to a meeting in Nashville called "Family Empowerment." For this meeting he interviewed some families himself, dealing with the family in society, family ethics, the family and economical forces, etc. He was trying to organize forces that would move services to families in his state.

To me, this new administration is an opportunity for change. Hillary Clinton has been working with Marion Wright Edelman and the society for the defense of children, which is concerned with the welfare of poor children, the creation of daycare systems, etc. At any point when you begin to look at children of the poor, if you don't have blinders on, you will begin to look at the fact that families are a tremendous resource that is virtually unutilized. From a fiscal point of view, from a psychological point of view, from the point of view of what is best for the child, families are under-utilized. This is what we need to change, because utilizing the family is cheaper, it is faster, and it's more correct.

PHOTO: Salvador Minuchin (BONNIE WEST)