Lecture 1

Question 1

What is theory of problem?

Answer 1

How one views the problem and conceptualizes the case

Question 2

What is theory of change?

Answer 2

What needs to happen for positive change to occur

Question 3

What is individual therapy?

Answer 3

• Provides the focus to help people face their fears and learn to become more fully themselves
• Dominant forces
  
  • Internalized family influences and intrapsychic dynamics

Question 4

What is family therapy?

Answer 4

• 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)

Question 5

What theory did Ludwig von Bertalanffy develop?

Answer 5

• General systems theory
  
  • Overall interesting in systems in general

Question 6

What did Gregory Bateson do?

Answer 6

• Developed the idea that family systems seek homeostasis
• He took Ludwig and applied it to families

Question 7

What did Paul Watzlawick do?

Answer 7

• Studied communications
  
  • Believed we cannot not communicate

Question 8

What did Virginia Satir believe?

Answer 8

• The presenting problem is rarely the real problem
• How people cope with the problem can create the problem

Question 9

What did Murray Bowen believe?

Answer 9

• Forces of togetherness and individuality are experienced in a family system
• Multi-generational messages/dynamics

Question 10

Carl Whitaker

Answer 10

• One of the first to experiment with family therapy
• His spontaneous, even outrageous, therapy pushed families towards flexibility

Question 11

What did Salvador Minuchin believe?

Answer 11

Family problems are resistant to change because they’re embedded in powerful but unseen structures

Question 12

What was Jay Haley interested in?

Answer 12

• He was interested in the function of a person’s symptoms within a family system
• Strategic family therapy
• Symptoms serve a purpose

Question 13

What makes up interpersonal context?

Answer 13

1. Individual Child
2. Microsystem
3. Exosystem
4. Macrosystem

Question 14

What makes up the microsystem?

Answer 14

• Family
• Siblings
• Close friends

Question 15

What makes up the exosystem?

Answer 15

• Extended family
• Work environment/colleagues
• School personnel
• Therapists/providers

Question 16

What makes up the macrosystem?

Answer 16

• Educational systems
• Religious systems
• Economic system/environment
• Culture
• Legal system
• Political atmosphere

Question 17

What is nonsummativity?

Answer 17

• 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

Question 18

What is a closed system?

Answer 18

The phenomena can be isolated from their environments and then reduced to their component parts

Question 19

What is an open system?

Answer 19

Organisms are constantly exchanging information with the environment and are both adapting and being acted upon

Question 20

What is linear causality?

Answer 20

• 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

Question 21

What is multiple/circular causality?

Answer 21

• 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

Question 22

What is equifinality?

Answer 22

• 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

Question 23

What is metacommunication?

Answer 23

• Examines the actual act of communication
• Communication about the communication

Question 24

What is the report function of communication?

Answer 24

• Explicit message
• The literal, face-value meaning of communication
• The surface level of meaning, in verbal communication, is what is actually being said

Question 25

What is the command function of communication?

Answer 25

• Implicit message
• Nonverbal cues that help the receiver encode the full meaning of the sender’s message

Question 26

What is content?

Answer 26

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}

Question 27

What is process?

Answer 27

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)}

Question 28

What is double bind communication?

Answer 28

• 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.}