Re-Visioning Family Therapy: Race, Culture and Gender in Clinical Practice
Edited by Monica McGoldrick
- Paperback:
- 444 pages
- Publisher:
- The Guilford Press (1998)
- Language:
- English
- ISBN:
- 1572308249
- Dimensions:
- 9.1 x 6.0 x 1.0 inches
- Weight:
- 1.4 pounds
- Price:
- $30.00
Exploring the ways that clients' lives and family therapy itself are constrained by larger forces of racial, cultural, sexual, and class-biased inequality, this groundbreaking volume expands the boundaries of the field and works toward truly inclusive clinical practice. Editor Monica McGoldrick, whose earlier volume Ethnicity and Family Therapy provides in-depth portraits of family systems of more than 40 ethnic groups—here takes up vital cultural issues that cut across all ethnicities.
With numerous lucid clinically oriented chapters from renowned contributors, Re-visioning Family Therapy offers compelling perspectives on society's more divisive issues and enhances the cultural competence of new and experienced therapists alike.
“This book delivers more than a new vision of family therapy. The contributors give us new practices, new theories, and new theories of practice which have revolutionary implications for all psychotherapies and thus for all clients who share their lives, cultures, and problems with us. This paradigm-shifting volume documents and illuminates how culture is not only a label for the 'other,' but a coat of many colors which gives meaning, feeling, and value to all our lives, and which, once we take the measure of its profundity, will explode our common-sense notions of identity, psyche, and psychotherapy.” Virginia Goldner, PhD, Senior Faculty, Ackerman Institute for the Family
Chapters situate family therapy within its current cultural and sociopolitical context, revealing the biases that underlie prevailing conceptions of family health and pathology; influence the process and perceived goals of therapy; and impede therapists' vision both of their clients and themselves. Helping readers recognize the impact of racism and other forms of discrimination, contributors offer concrete suggestions for improving family training and developing services that minority families may experience as more relevant to their lives. Integrating theoretical exposition, case vignettes, and evocative autobiographical narratives, the volume covers such topics as:
- The effects of societal discrimination on family relationships
- The clinical implications of the therapist's cultural background
- Approaches to understanding and dismantling White privilege
- 'Forgotten' American histories: race, sex, class, and family secrets
- The extended family in African American and immigrant cultures
- Therapy with intercultural, immigrant, and gay and lesbian families
- Connections between personal and societal transformations.
“Once again Monica McGoldrick succeeds in her efforts to lead us forward in our thinking about families and family therapy with written words that stretch even the most culturally aware and sensitive therapists. She has conscientiously brought the work of several distinguished authors together to have us broaden and 're-view' our thinking and practice with families through a cultural lens... I cannot think of a clinician, supervisor, educator, researcher, student, or therapist-in-training who would not find this volume useful in their practice of family therapy. Unlike other volumes in this area there was an energizing quality in the contents of this book which activated me to think and act, rather than just passively digest information about culturally diverse families.” Journal of Family Psychotherapy