Family Healing

Minuchin, family therapy pioneer and author of the classic text Families and Family Therapy , and Nichols ( No Place to Hide ), professor of psychiatry at Albany Medical College, provide an engrossing, lively account of Minuchin's work with families in crisis. His analyses and interventions reported here are dazzling: part science and part intuition, his portrayals of his clients are drawn with an artist's eye for detail. We observe him ferret out the roles family members lock themselves into as they interact in his office; we follow his thinking as he tests hypotheses and observes the effects of his interventions. A family's pain, he shows, may not lie in the apparent cause--the depressed father or the hyperactive child--but in the way all members relate. Including his own family history, Minuchin describes his approach so lucidly that readers will take a new look at their own families. (Nov.)