Culture at work: Family therapy and the culture concept in post-World War II America
✍ Scribed by Deborah F. Weinstein
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2004
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 136 KB
- Volume
- 40
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0022-5061
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Abstract
During the 1950s and 1960s, the concept of culture had currency beyond the disciplinary boundaries of
anthropology and sociology. This article takes up a clinical example of the invocation of the culture concept by
examining how early family therapists such as Nathan Ackerman, Murray Bowen, and Don Jackson used culture as a
category of analysis during the formative years of their new field. The culture concept played an integral role
in the processes by which family therapists simultaneously defined the object of their research and treatment,
the family, and built their new field. Their varied uses of culture also contained tensions and contradictions,
most notably between universal and relativist views of family and psychopathology and between views of family
therapy as a conservative force for maintaining the nuclear family or a progressive force for overcoming social
inequality. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.