Family therapy: critique from a feminist perspective

Family therapy is a powerful modality which, all too often, is used without awareness of its possible constricting, or even crippling, effects. Textbooks and articles about family therapy focus soley or mainly on the family system alone, thus obscuring the influence of school, workplace, neighborhood, peer group, class, race and sex. Theorists, who are predominantly male, have developed rigid and mechanical concepts which encourage formulations encompassing the family system alone. Power inequalities between men and women are ignored and socially programmed sex roles are reflected and reinforced by theory and practice. Thus family therapy may function to locate and contain, within the family, difficulties and distress derived from stresses outside the family. The negative effects of traditional sex roles on emotional growth, sexuality and the development of mutually gratifying male-female relationships are never dealt with. As a result, family therapy may contribute to men's straitjacketing and women's oppression. To fulfill its promise, family therapy research and teaching must move beyond shortsighted and narrowly conceptualized theories which could damage, rather than heal, families who are suffering.