The Minuchin Center for the Family

Structural Family Therapy is a strength-based, outcome oriented treatment modality based on ecosystemic principles:

- Context organizes us. Our behaviors are a function of our relations with others.  The structural therapist focuses on what is taking place among people, rather than on individual psyches.

- The family is the primary context, the “matrix of identity” where we develop our selves as we interact with spouses, parents, children, and other family members.  The family is in constant transformation, adapting to an ever changing social environment.

- The family's structure consists of recurrent patterns of interaction that its members develop over time, as they accommodate to each other.

- A well functioning family is not defined by the absence of stress or conflict, but by how effectively it handles them as it responds to the developing needs of its members and the changing conditions in its  environment.   

- The job of the structural family therapist is to locate and mobilize underutilized strengths, helping the family outgrow constraining patterns of interaction that impede the actualization of its own resources.

>> The Evolution of Structural Family Therapy 

>> Basic Readings