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Culture at work: Family therapy and the culture concept in post‐World War II America
Author(s) -
Weinstein Deborah F.
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
journal of the history of the behavioral sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.216
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1520-6696
pISSN - 0022-5061
DOI - 10.1002/jhbs.10187
Subject(s) - family therapy , invocation , sociology , cultural relativism , formative assessment , field (mathematics) , currency , epistemology , gender studies , psychoanalysis , psychology , psychotherapist , anthropology , pedagogy , political science , law , human rights , philosophy , mathematics , pure mathematics , monetary economics , economics
During the 1950s and 1960s, the concept of culture had currency beyond the disciplinary boundaries ofanthropology and sociology. This article takes up a clinical example of the invocation of the culture concept byexamining how early family therapists such as Nathan Ackerman, Murray Bowen, and Don Jackson used culture as acategory of analysis during the formative years of their new field. The culture concept played an integral rolein 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 familytherapy as a conservative force for maintaining the nuclear family or a progressive force for overcoming socialinequality. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.