Marriage and Family Systems and Treatment

Catalog description

Family therapy has a revolutionary emphasis on systems thinking and the search for identifiable and recurrent family patterns to be explored in this course. Students would examine the history and development of marriage, couple, and family counseling, including foundational theories and principles of family development, the contemporary family, family subsystems, individual and interpersonal relationships, and grasping the influence of larger systems – race, social class, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation – on the functioning of the family and its individual members. Students would utilize systemic theories to describe problems and structure solutions by acquiring knowledge of the models of marital and family counseling. Students would examine the fundamentals of the family, including adopting a family relationship framework, family development, diversity in family functioning, systems theory and systemic thinking, and the development and practice of family therapy. The range of theories examined includes Psychodynamic models, transgenerational models, experiential models, structural models, strategic models, behavioral and cognitive-behavioral models, social construction models, and population-based family treatments.