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FAMILY THERAPY SAVES THE PLANET: MESSIANIC TENDENCIES IN THE FAMILY SYSTEMS LITERATURE
Author(s) -
Johnson Scott
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
journal of marital and family therapy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.868
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1752-0606
pISSN - 0194-472X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1752-0606.2001.tb01132.x
Subject(s) - family therapy , field (mathematics) , psychoanalysis , psychology , psychotherapist , work (physics) , epistemology , sociology , philosophy , engineering , mathematics , pure mathematics , mechanical engineering
It is not unusual occasionally to hear individual family therapists describe their work as an effort to “save the world.” The messianic notion that family therapy should be the world's salvation is not simply a fancy of individual clinicians, but is deeply imbedded in several of our field's most fundamental theories. This article explores messianic arguments in the work of some of family therapy's most important thinkers, including von Bertalanffy, Bateson, and Keeney, and then discusses the implications that these arguments have for the clinical and theoretical development of our field.