Good Critical Thinking On  inside Family Therapy (Critique) 

Inside Family Therapy: A case study in family healing 2nd ed. by Michael P. Nichols
Inside Family Therapy: A case study in family healing is a book which is about family psychology and its dimensions.Family is an important part of the society and the child’s mental health depends significantly upon it . It is basically a narrative dairy of a family therapist who worked with the Salazars and documented every stage and development inthe relationship between them from the courtship through the children’s’ departure from home. Family therapists are basically relational therapists because they do not study and monitor the people as individuals but they consider their relationships and how things work “between” them. Author of this book has provided detailed personal account from his perspective and discussed about ethnicity, gender and sexually of not just the individual’s but the family as a whole. His theory includes the family systems and their in-depth analysis.For Michael P. Nichols, family works as a system in which all members are integrated. Some form the core and some are just the part of it but are capable of influencing it. For him, the relationship between every member changes over time. The situations, culture, conflicts and ideologies etc. play a crucial role in the evolution of the nature and intensity of all the relationships within and outside the family. It is an incredible source of information and knowledge for the experts working in this domain of psychology and psychiatry.

However the book was also subjected to a lot of criticism.

The three key techniques which he has used are described below with the positive and negative critiques.
He did not focus on the individuals but the family as a whole. He emphasized on the overall relationship of the members in a given system. This might help in understanding the family and its functioning but since individuals are the units of the family they must be studied too for developing a better understanding.
He relied on his perspectives and perceptions but more than that he preferred those of the members of the family under study. This is the subtle way of having first hand and original information needed by any family therapist. This data doesn’t ever get wasted.
He interlinked a lot of aspects of human life e.g. ethnicity, sexuality, ideology etc. Family is a system which can’t be studied in isolation and these factors do have a considerable impact on human behavior. It is not limited to them just an individual but as a family member as well. But the therapist has to be really careful regarding the timeframes and extent of information he needs. There are chances that if he goes too much in the details he might lose the grip on actual point of focus.
Family therapists who consider kinship ties as an important factor for the families and their behavior might disagree with his approach and techniques. He did not focus much on these relationships which could be really important in family treatment when it comes to real life conditions and issues. They do play an important which most therapistsusually foresee or overlook. Anyhow, the book has got its own strong points and positive features. The therapists can pick the sections and parts they might think would help them solving a particular family problem they are dealing with.

References

Broderick, P., & Weston, C. (2009). Family Therapy with a Depressed Adolescent. Psychiatry , 32-37.