1. Discuss the two major paths in psychology. There are two categories of psychology - research and counseling/therapy. Research involves writing books and journal articles. Researchers rarely counsel. The other side are counselors who discover something and then write about it, without doing a lot of research. The two groups rarely meet, interact, or discuss their respective findings. This class is more concerned with the counseling path.

2. What is Family Counseling/Therapy? Family therapy and family counseling will be treated as the same in this class. System theory is the philosophy behind marriage and family therapy. The definition of a system is that it is an entity maintained by the critical interaction of its parts. It can involve small things like the atom or large things like the cosmos. It can even include the telephone because all these things have interacting parts. They maintain themselves by inputs and outputs. They take in and give out. A system can have embedded subsystems. In any school system, a subsystem can be a specific department. A system for family therapy means that the counselor is working with more than one person. An open system and a closed system can exist, and most families are somewhere in between.

Circular causality is a different approach to a problem. Most counseling uses a linear approach, but this approach to system therapy does not. In this system, every action feeds back on itself. "B" may affect "C" and "A". This counseling looks at how the actions of one or a few individuals affect the whole. Christians sometime reject this approach because it makes it difficult to blame one person. But responsibility is what gets emphasized with this branch of courseling. Each person must take responsibility for their own actions. Blame and guilt are deemphasized (a key point), and responsibility is emphasized. With circular causality, counselors try to interrupt the circles, or loops, rather than the lines. Americans tend to see things in linear fashion, with a beginning, middle, and end, but circular causality has no beginning or end.

3. How did therapy get started? Therapy got started with Sigmund Freud. He began much of what is known about psychotherapy, and some of his principles are still very important. He believed that counseling must be done one on one. He believed that the family created the problem in the first place. So, he wanted the family as far from the patient as possible. He wanted to fix the individual, not the group. He was very linear, not circular. He believed in the Tabula Rosa which meant that the therapist was like a blank slate that would take in from the patient. The client would transfer his or her problems onto the therapist, and the therapist would then find the right solution (called neutral counseling). But it is very hard for a counselor to remain neutral, almost impossible. Freud was probably wrong with this belief, but he was creating his approach out of nothing. He was the first of his kind.

Freud opposed counseling in the home. He believed in finding a neutral spot so that he could be more effective. However, he did not always do this. He also thought the counselor was the expert, not the client. He did not trust most of his patients and their ability to know who they were. Some of his techniques were free association, dream interpretation, hypnosis, and transference. He used these to try to get to the root of the problem. He also encouraged building and maintaining trust with his clients. He promoted confidentiality.

4. Discuss the historical events in Family Counseling. Why did Freudian theory change more towards family counseling? The first factor was the Child Guidance Movement, which was a part of social work and sociology, not psychology. During the late 1890s and early 1900s, families moved from rural settings into the cities, and kids were hanging in gangs and getting into trouble. Laws were passed to make the kids go to school, plus workers came into the homes to work with the families that were having trouble adapting to the Industrial Age. This in-home movement led to social workers, and over time, psychologists have gotten a lot of good information from sociology and social workers. Social workers have not always gotten the credit due them.

The second historical event that led to change were the pastors. In the 1910s and 1920s, Schroeder wrote to pastors about how to do marriage counseling to families in their church. He was seeing a lot of families in his own church with problems. He saw young people getting into marriage and not knowing anything about it. He discovered that not all counseling had be done one on one, and this was very radical and very important to the whole change process.

				Tom of Bethany

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