Salvador minuchin structural family therapy

Family systems theory wikipedia

The eldest of three children born to the children of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Salvador Minuchin was born and raised in a closely knit small Jewish community in rural Argentina. His father had been a prosperous businessman until the Great Depression forced his family into poverty. In high school he decided he would help juvenile delinquents after hearing his psychology teacher discuss the philosopher Rousseau's ideas that delinquents are victims of society.

At age 18 he entered the university as a medical student. In , as a student, he became active in the leftist political movement opposing the dictator Juan Peron who had taken control of Argentina's universities. He was jailed for three months. Upon graduation in he began a residency in pediatrics and took a subspecialty in psychiatry. In , as Minuchin was opening a pediatric practice, the state of Israel was created and immediately plunged into war.

Family therapy theorists

He moved to Israel and joined its army where he treated young Jewish soldiers who had survived the holocaust. In he came to the Untied States to study psychiatry. He worked with psychotic children at Bellevue Hospital in New York City as a part-time psychiatric resident. Minuchin also worked at the Jewish Board of Guardians where he lived in its institutional housing with 20 disturbed children.

His training there was psychoanalytic, which did not seem compatible with his work with the children. In Minuchin married Patricia Pittluck, a psychologist, and emigrated to Israel. There he co-directed five residential institutions for disturbed children. Most of them were orphans of the holocaust and Jewish children from Asia and the Middle East.

Here he first began to work therapeutically with groups instead of individuals.