The Pathological Family

The Pathological Family examines how family therapy developed against the intellectual and cultural landscape of postwar America.

Deborah Weinstein is Assistant Director of the Pembroke Center at Brown University, where she also teaches in Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Weinsten has produced an invaluable history of family therapy's professional and intellectual origins and convincingly demonstrates why it was and remains a radical change to the orthodoxies of psychoanalysis.

Weinstein... convincingly documents the historical production of the notion of family post-WWII... the author makes her points through concrete examples that will resonate particularly with mental health and social science professionals but also with interested readers in general. She evokes the mutual influence of cliniciansresearchersand theorists who addressed what they saw as the role of family in the development of mental illness and delinquency. Readers will find descriptions of one-way window observationfilms of family interactionsand dynamics highlighted in family sessions. The book will be valuable to those interested in family development and social work as well as psychiatry and psychology. Summing up: Highly recommended.

Crista DeLuzio:

Surprisingly, Deborah Weinstein's The Pathological Family is the first to examine the interventionsof the newly emerging field of family therapy in relation to these developmentsand as such makes a significant contribution to the scholarly literature on theintellectual and cultural history of the postwar era.

Theresa E. Runstedtler, American University:

At first glanceDeborah Weinstein's study of family therapy traces a very familiar path. Mental health specialists leave the institutional treatment of severe mental illness for the more accessible and profitable needs of middle-class families. Weinsteinhowevertakes us through new and interesting territories along the way. She demonstrates both the distinctiveness of her subjects’ therapeutic approach and how that approach reflects important elements of postwar American society. Weinstein locates the genesis of family therapy in the same widespread postwar interest in systems that spurred the study of ecosystemscomputer scienceand urban planning.

Ellen Herman, University of Oregon, author of The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts and Kinship by Design: A History of Adoption in the Modern United States:

In The Pathological Family, Deborah Weinstein traces the origins and spread of family therapy, the brainchild of clinicians and researcher-theorists particularly concerned about schizophrenia and juvenile delinquency after World War II. The story of family therapy is novel. It departed from marriage counseling, child guidance, and other practices designed to promote the emotional welfare and mental health of adults and children. This carefully researched, well-written, and insightful book does two things at once. It illuminates the little known transformation of 'the family' itself into a locus of health, illness, and intervention. And it sheds new light on the dramatic therapeutic revolutions that have been so central to U.S. cultural history and the history of science and medicine during the second half of the twentieth century.

Elizabeth Lunbeck, Nelson TyroneJr. Professor of History and Professor of PsychiatryVanderbilt University, author of The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America:

The Pathological Family offers a spirited, wide-ranging, and often surprising account of how the clinicians got the American family into therapy, at once underwriting and challenging normative visions of proper family life. Deborah Weinstein's fascinating book—taking us into the laboratory and hospital ward, situating us as observers behind the one-way mirror and looking through the video camera's lens—is essential to understanding the cultural and political fortunes of the dysfunctional family under a half century of professional scrutiny.