The interaction of family therapy and psychodynamic individual therapy in an inpatient setting

Although individual psychotherapy is an established treatment modality in psychoanalytically oriented hospitals, family therapy is a relative newcomer. When family therapy is introduced into such an inpatient setting, it raises issues which have not yet been widely discussed. On the one hand there is the question of how inpatient family therapy differs from outpatient family therapy, and what its special characteristics are. This question has only begun to be discussed. On the other hand there is the question of how family therapy relates to individual therapy that is being conducted simultaneously with a member of the same family. In general the individual psychotherapy literature tends to speak as if family therapy did not exist, and the family therapy literature speaks as if individual therapy should be abolished and supplanted by family therapy. Some authors have begun to try to build bridges between the two fields on the level of theory, but almost none have reported on the interaction between the two treatment modalities on a pragmatic level when they are conducted simultaneously (Kugel, 1974).