Annotated Bibliography:

Family Therapy – A View (with Andrew Ferber)

Andy Ferber and I had met at Zwerling’s Day Hospital in the Bronx in 1962 when he was a Fellow and I was a resident, and we shared an excitement about the new, developing field of family therapy, I think it was Andy’s idea that we work together to assemble our contacts in the field into some sort of conceptual organization, keeping our partnership alive during our three years of working in different places (1963-67). Andy had just been appointed head of the Family Studies Section at Einstein by Zwerling, the new director of Bronx Psychiatric Center, and I was doing military service at the NIMH under Lyman Wynne. Andy was an editor of the newly founded Family Process under the editorship of Jay Haley, and he knew everybody in the Washington-New York corridor. I was able to travel to California and interview the leaders there, and I had written a review of the work of the Houston Group’s work at Haley’s request. So when in 1967 I was hired to be the third member (with Marilyn Mendelsohn, then Marilyn Glickman) of the Family Studies Section, writing this paper was one of our first tasks while we waited for people at Einstein to ask us to teach them some family therapy.

The paper celebrates the joyful heterogeneity of family work in those years, the array of models to choose from, the relief we felt from the orthodoxy of psychoanalysis, which all of us had experienced as students and patients.