Understanding the Family through the eyes of Structural Family Therapy

Fundamental processes of Structural family therapy include learning and believing in the concept of structure in families.

Structural Family therapy is a model that is mostly associated with its founder and propounder, Salvador Minuchin. It is one of the most researched models and has been successfully applied in difficult families like families with juvenile delinquents, families with someone suffering from an eating disorder, families with a chemically dependant member, families of low social economic status and families with an alcoholic.

Minuchin does not ascribe to the traditional mother/father and children family as the norm. He includes single parenting as well as blended and step families. For Minchin the healthy family builds a spouse subsystem in which each accommodates, nurtures and supports the uniqueness of the other. The model recognizes that families are organisms in a continuous process of change while trying to remain the same.

The model helps people see the patterns, processes and transactions of the family as a system. The model also helps a practitioner have a concrete concept of what should be happening in a family if it is to function properly. It also provides a map of what is wrong in a dysfunctional family.

Basic Concepts

Minuchin’s suggests that the life History of a family is a succession of experiments in living. He sees the family as an integrated whole of a system. The system also has sub-systems because its members belong to other agencies and organizations in the community which affect the family’s basic structure and pattern of organization.

The model focuses on the patterns of interaction within family members which gives clues as to the basic structure and organization of the system. Structure according to Minuchin, refers to the invisible set of functional demands that organizes the way the family interact. It could also be considered as the repetitive, organized and predictable modes of family behaviors that allows us to consider that a family has structure that allows it to function.

A family operates through repeated transactional patterns that regulate the behavior of family members. Such patterns describe how, when and to whom family members relate to. The structure of the family is governed by general systems of constraints, the “generic” constraint and the “ idiosyncratic”.

In the generic system, families have some sort of hierarchical structure according to which parents have greater authority over the children. A notion of the generic structure is the notion of the reciprocal and complementary functions discerned by labels applied to families indicating their roles and the functions. For example one parent will be over efficient while the other is inefficient; a super good child while another child is not as good.

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