The symbolic drawing of the family life space

Several innovative techniques have been developed in the last ten years for facilitating meaningful communication and interaction among family members. These techniques serve the purpose of highlighting relatively stable patterns of verbal and nonverbal communication among family members and bring to the surface various aspects of familial structure, thereby illuminating focal points for intervention. The purpose of the present article is to describe the technique of the Symbolic Drawing of the Family Life Space, to compare this technique with other techniques for facilitating communication and interaction among family members, and to illustrate the clinical use of this technique with case examples. In reviewing the literature, the authors extracted two types of symbolic and interactive procedures, which may be conveniently divided into those that tend to be task-centered and those that tend to be expressive modalities.