The author describes the rise of family therapy in the past 20 years. The necessity is emphasized to evole the usage of a language which will make sociological and psychological conceptions comparable and contiguous. Psychoanalytic theory and practice has groven out to an impressive body of knowledge about the intrapsychic structure of human personality. Psychoanalysis did also elaborate the study of social relations and objectrelations, but this study should be extended with the study of behaviour patterns in the here ond now situation of the family.
It is unfortunate that the terminology in family therapy is of ten derived from terminology in individual therapy.
This leads to confusion of terminology and contributes to a split between individual therapists and family therapists.
The author stresses the tact that a number of individual therapies proceed unsuccesfully because the family system has not been taken into treatment. It seems to be of importance to use the black-box model as a starting point in family therapy.
The family should then be treated as a system with an interaction of variables. Because family therapy aims to treat the family as a system, it is unadvisable to manage in the sense of psychotherapy of one of the members of a family in the presence of the other members of the family.
The author underlines the responsibility of the family therapists towards each member of the family to be treated.
He describes how family therapy can be an important contribution to mental health care in the Netherlands.