Re-Revisioning Family Therapy: 2nd Edition

Description

This groundbreaking practitioner guide and widely adopted text illuminates how racism, sexism and other forms of oppression constrain the lives of diverse clients—and family therapy itself. Leading thinkers and therapists provide powerful tools for expanding the boundaries of the field and working toward truly inclusive clinical practice. Highly readable and engaging, this book integrates theoretical exposition with case vignettes and evocative autobiographical narratives. It reveals the experiences, challenges, wisdom and struggles of people whose voices are not often heard in the mainstream literature, including racial minority, intercultural, poor, immigrant and LGBT families. Contributors discuss the impact of societal discrimination on family relaitonships, while at the same time exposing the biases that underlie prevailing conceptions of family health and pathology. Concrete suggestions are offered for tapping into clients’ cultural resources and conducting culturally competive assessment.

Review of this book:
McGoldrick and her colleagues have again pushed the boundaries of family therapy with this splendid, updated second edition. Here is a vision of family therapy that embraces the lived complexity of diversity, addressing the intersection of race, ethnicity, class, gender, national origin, religion, and spirituality and sexual orientation. The expanded section on therapists’ own cultural legacies and stories will stimulate self-reflection that is critical to developing cultural competence, while increased attention to training will aid students and teachers alike in grounding this vision in practice. I highly recommend this text as a complement to Ethnicity and Family Therapy, third edition.
–Francis G. Lu, MD.
Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco.

McGoldrick and Hardy lead a wise council of practitioners to construct a vision of family thatapy that is culturally and socially grounded. Rather than portraying individual cultural groups, the text addresses nuanced processes in understanding and working with difference in ways that broaden traditional conceptualizations and practices. This text will make a wonderful contribution to graduate courses addressing family treatment in all mental health related disciplines.
–Steven R. Lopez, PhD.
Department of Psychology, University of Southern California.