Customer Reviews

Family Therapy: A Systemic Integration

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I am currently using this book as a MSW student. I find this book very difficult to follow and difficult to understand. I am also a family therapist who uses structural family therapy. The chapter in this bok confused me more than it helped me.

I am using this book for a Marriage and Family Therapy class. I found this book to be too difficult to understand and it took several readings to fully comprehend what they were trying to get across. Good concepts on Bowen but I would not recommend schools use this for an intro course. Its extremely frustrating.

As many have written, this text was extremely difficult to follow and its discussion on cybernetics was not especially relevant to the field. As a practicing therapist, this text did little to improve my understanding and did much to muddy the waters.

I agree with several of the other reviewers. This book isn't difficult but it is terribly written. Consider the following sentence on page three, "Thus, if you, and especially if your parents as well, were educated in Western society, you likely were immersed in a perspective derived from the thinking of John Locke, and those who followed him, about the appropriate rules for theory construction and methodology in the physical sciences." - Uh... come again?

The pretentiousness of this sort of poor academic writing betrays it as a kind of intellectual kitsch, analogous to bad art that declares itself "profound" or "moving" not by displaying its own intrinsic value but by borrowing these values from elsewhere.

It's not that this book is too difficult, it's just poorly written. The Nichols/Schwartz book is much better. This book was assigned for MFT Theory class, and I ended up throwing it away (literally) and getting the Nichols/Schwartz book. I probably read 150 books on my way to getting an MFT education, and this was the worst book in the entire curriculum. Sad that there are so few survey texts available on MFT theory.

I am currently getting my masters degree in marriage and family therapy and I must say that this is my favorite book so far after one year into my course. While I do agree that the chapters on cybernetics are a little confusing.... To say the least, the chapters on the actual theories explain things with exact precision. I use it as my main reference book and its quickly getting covered with highlighters. Many people are saying this book is too hard for introductory courses and it probably is. However, don't let their negative comments that revolve around introductory courses turn you off.... there is more to life than introductory courses!!! That being said, I think that a person with little knowledge in the field could get a lot of information out of this book if they read slowly and take it one theory at a time.

I felt that I learned a lot from this book. My problem with books like this is that they are textbooks and meant to help students of psychology or counseling. While this book is strong on the theoretical concepts of family therapy, it is not strong on practicality. Thus, this book is interesting, but not as helpful as it potentially could have been.

As a Marriage and Family Therapist, I found this book to provide a clear discussion of Marriage and Family Therapy models, and their roots in cybernetics. It is oriented for clinicians who practice from a systemic perspective. I had the 2nd edition in my training program in the 1990's and find myself yet referring to it for ideas about case conceptualization and questions about theory and practice.

We utilized the 7th edition book in my class, but the 4th edition was written as well as the 7th edition.

This is definitely a wonderful book to have for your personal library.

The technical explanations would be better served with examples. It's descriptions are difficult to conceptualize. However, it does categorize different systems approaches, pointing out some strategies of each.