Lecture 1 Flashcards
What is theory of problem?
How one views the problem and conceptualizes the case
What is theory of change?
What needs to happen for positive change to occur
What is individual therapy?
- Provides the focus to help people face their fears and learn to become more fully themselves
- Dominant forces
- Internalized family influences and intrapsychic dynamics
What is family therapy?
- Directed at changing the organization of the family
- When a family organization is transformed, every family member is altered
- Improvements lasting because the family environment has changed
- Dominant forces
- External world (family, culture, environment)
What theory did Ludwig von Bertalanffy develop?
- General systems theory
- Overall interesting in systems in general
What did Gregory Bateson do?
- Developed the idea that family systems seek homeostasis
- He took Ludwig and applied it to families
What did Paul Watzlawick do?
- Studied communications
- Believed we cannot not communicate
What did Virginia Satir believe?
- The presenting problem is rarely the real problem
- How people cope with the problem can create the problem
What did Murray Bowen believe?
- Forces of togetherness and individuality are experienced in a family system
- Multi-generational messages/dynamics
Carl Whitaker
- One of the first to experiment with family therapy
- His spontaneous, even outrageous, therapy pushed families towards flexibility
What did Salvador Minuchin believe?
Family problems are resistant to change because they’re embedded in powerful but unseen structures
What was Jay Haley interested in?
- He was interested in the function of a person’s symptoms within a family system
- Strategic family therapy
- Symptoms serve a purpose
What makes up interpersonal context?
- Individual Child
- Microsystem
- Exosystem
- Macrosystem
What makes up the microsystem?
- Family
- Siblings
- Close friends
What makes up the exosystem?
- Extended family
- Work environment/colleagues
- School personnel
- Therapists/providers
What makes up the macrosystem?
- Educational systems
- Religious systems
- Economic system/environment
- Culture
- Legal system
- Political atmosphere
What is nonsummativity?
- The phenomenon that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts
- We can’t just sun the individual parts, we need to look at how they relate to each other
What is a closed system?
The phenomena can be isolated from their environments and then reduced to their component parts
What is an open system?
Organisms are constantly exchanging information with the environment and are both adapting and being acted upon
What is linear causality?
- Having a schizophrenogenic mother (cold, rejecting, perfectionist, domineering while conversely being overprotective, encouraging dependence, both rigidly moral and seductive) would create a schizophrenic child
- Mothers caused schizophrenia
What is multiple/circular causality?
- Schizophrenia results from a combination of genetic predisposition and environmental stressors, which would include a variety of family or social problems.
- The level of functionality or adjustment can be increased by structured routines, medication, and social support
What is equifinality?
- The idea that there are many paths to the same outcome
- This is the reason some family therapy theories pay less attention to where problems come from and concentrate more on what keeps problems going
What is metacommunication?
- Examines the actual act of communication
- Communication about the communication
What is the report function of communication?
- Explicit message
- The literal, face-value meaning of communication
- The surface level of meaning, in verbal communication, is what is actually being said
What is the command function of communication?
- Implicit message
- Nonverbal cues that help the receiver encode the full meaning of the sender’s message
What is content?
What people say or talk about
Example: In therapy, it’s the content of a specific incident or what is being said about an incident
What is process?
How they say it or what they do
Example: In therapy, process could refer to the way family members communicate (tone of the voice, body language, who is being silent)
What is double bind communication?
- A person finds themselves in a communication matrix, where messages contradict each other
- The contradiction is not able to be communicated on and the person is not able to leave the field of interaction
Example: A mother telling her son he needs to grow up and move out, but then belittles them when they try to be responsible, and make it difficult for them to leave home.
