Counseling 420
A Really Great Class
That will not only change
your mind
about how to counsel,
but will make you a better person, too!!
 

The Field of Family Counseling
AAMFC –
AAMFT -
AFTA -
IAMFC –
APA –
ACSW -

Credentials
AAMFT Clinical Member, Approved Supervisor
LMFT – State License
ALMFT – State provisional License given to approved programs, NEIU’s is one.

Major Journals
AAMFT – JMFT
IAMFC – The Family Journal
The Family Therapy Networker
JST –
Journal of Feminist Family Therapy
International Journal of Family Therapy
Family Process
Major Difference between Individual Model and Family Systems Models
An individual model sees problems as residing within an individual, i.e., psychopathology.
A Family Systems model sees problems as being imbedded within, and created by a family structure, i.e., intergenerational or present day context.
Introduction - Meta Theories
Carl Pepper, 1950’s
Formistic
Mechanistic
Organismic
Contextualistic
Introduction - Meta Theories
Formistic –
Follows from Phrenology, or the study of bumps on your head.  Also, is akin to ectomorph and endomorph study.  Posits that human beings fall into categories that we can know and make assumptions about.  Like what today???
Introduction - Meta Theories
Mechanistic
Theories that use this as a template believe that human beings are like machines. Left over from the days of Newtonian Physics, and the belief that the whole world is a machine that can be reduced to it’s parts, thus understood and fixed.
Introduction - Meta Theories
Organismic
Mostly from the ideas of persons in the 1940’s and 50’s.
Suggests that humans grow and evolve.  Carl Rogers
The Nobel Prize winner, Pergogine discovered that small systems when presented with a stressor would either evolve to the next higher level or would parish!!!

Introduction - Meta Theories
Contextualistic
The belief that all of human behavior can be understood within context. As the context changes, so does the usefulness of the explanation.  Examples are:
Gary, Native Americans, Systemic vs. Individual view of human beings
Paradigm Shifts
Kuhn,
All science is ever evolving in explanations for it’s unified or overall theory.
Physics –
Normal Science –
New Explanations
Tendencies for those in power to maintain Normal Science
New Science – Becomes Normal Science

A System is: 
A series of inter-related, interdependent, interconnected parts whose, whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts. Holen - one smaller piece of the system has all the information needed to reconstruct the larger part system