1. Discuss the historical events in Family Counseling. The third historical event were social workers. They went into homes and worked directly with troubled families. They gave tests, worked with abuse situations, and treated the whole family. Their efforts provided much of the early groundwork for family therapy.

The fourth event was the death of Sigmund Freud in the 1940s. After he died, a lot of his impact died, too, and many new types of counseling got started. His death was a positive event for family counseling. Behavoral therapy did not really get started until the 1960s.

The fifth event were families and the studying of hospitalized patients. Psychotic people were automatically hospitalized, and counselors were trying to do psychoanalytic research. They found that the families of hospitalized patients needed counseling, too. Psychoanalytic therapy was not heplful to them. So, they started trying new things like psychodrama to act out situations, and this was very helpful.

The sixth event were small groups in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Counselors started seeing neurotic, depressed, and anxious patients in small groups, and they found this to be very effective. They also observed that the tendancy among group members was to treat other group members like family. So, the conclusion was that it was okay to work with more than one person, and of course, that was good for family therapy.

The seventh event was World War II, specifically sea otters and Cybernetics. Wars help counseling and psychology because the people in battle can be studied for post-traumatic stress disorder. Counselors were able to go into homes and work with families, and they found this approach to be very effective. Sea otters were also helpful to counselors. They were used to plant explosive devices on enemy ships, and counselors had to learn their communication patterns. Sea otters were found to have patterns similar to people, and this was helpful in family therapy. The Cybernetic Group was the one that developed the information processing and level of communications effort. They studied the flow and the ebb of the communication patterns.

The eighth event were the sexologists, which was a byproduct of Hitler’s work. He wanted the perfect race, so his counselors studied family relationships and all sorts of family-related issues like sex, intimacy, and inter-family relationships.

The ninth event was the devlopment of the Humanistic Existential Philosophy. This philosophy believed in the basic goodness of humanity and that that goodness could be tapped if the person were in the right situation and/or environment. This theory says that all people have positives that need to be drawn out. Carl Rogers was involved with this school of thought, and at one time, he had been training for the ministry. He knew that we were created in the image of God. But of course, one can carry the idea of human goodness to an unhealthy extreme. We are not gods.

The tenth event was Gestalt Therapy. Gestalt means "whole", and it focuses on treating the whole person. As a form of therapy, it is very open to trying new things. It is active, not passive. The counselor watches everything about the patient, every movement, to gain some kind of insight. They look for body language to understand the physical, emotional, and cognitive person. This is the therapy that lets patients hit each other with sticks to express their emotions. Some of this has carried over into family counseling. The counselor also looks for use of the word "I" to see if the patient takes ownership of their statements. "Should" is another word that does not show ownership. Words like "will" or "want" are considered to be better.

The eleventh event was schizophrenia. This is very similar to the issue of psychotics in hospitals. Counseling these people led to much in family therapy. Many of these counselors started bringing in members of the family to interact with the schizophrenic. Nearly all marriage and family counselors started with these kinds of patients. They were very bad off, so counselors worked a lot with them. This was a tough group to help.

				Tom of Bethany

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