Counseling

Psychoanalytic Family Counseling

Psychoanalytic theory was the dominant psychological paradigm that influenced counseling and psychotherapy in the first part of the twentieth century (Hall, Lindzey, & Campbell, 1998); however, it was replaced first by behaviorism and later by cognitively-oriented paradigms. Nonetheless, psychoanalytic thought has persisted into the twenty-first century and is enjoying a bit of a comeback beginning in the last part of the 1990's (Hall et al., 1998).

Of course Sigmund Freud originated the psychodynamic approach, but his work centered mostly on the individual (Hall et al., 1998). An early basis for the psychoanalytic family approach was the Psycho-Analytic Study of the Family by Flugel (1921). These early propositions by Flugel adhered closely to classical psychoanalytic theory, but attempted to understand family influences on desires of the child. Later Henry Dicks published results of his work with married couples in the 1940s examining the parallel representation of internal...
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