Discussion with Salvador Minuchin and Jeff Zeig about fundamentals of structural famiy therapy. Includes personal tribute to Patricia Minuchin and orientation to the Minuchin Archives.
A documentary with a series of interviews, sessions and clinics that explores the life of Dr. Salvador Minuchin,
his extensive work in family therapy and his development of style.
This is a blended family in formation in which they are still in a period where there are two subsystems, mother and children and new husband and wife. Joey, the IP, has serious asthma and epilepsy and has behavioral problems at school. Dr. Minuchin works in the direction of creating a new subsystem that includes the spouse of the mother as the father in the family.
Dr. Salvador Minuchin works with a step family seeking assistance with their daughter’s habitual lying. Dr. Minuchin initiates a challenge to the family certainty that the symptom was the daughter’s lying. The shift from daughters as a carrier of lying to the father’s control over the daughter will change through the session, moving to the parent’s control and then to the mother’s control.
In 1992, Dr. Salvador Minuchin was invited to consult with a team of mental health professionals involved in the treatment of a 9 year old boy who had been institutionalized for 2 years in psychiatric hospitals. In this video, Dr. Minuchin asserts that the identity of young children is directly connected to their belonging to a group of people, specifically their family, who have created the child’s sense of reality.
Dr. Minuchin consults with the family of a 12 year old boy, who had been institutionalized for regressive behaviors, including an overwhelming fear of ghosts. Dr. Minuchin recommends changes to the family’s organization, so that the child can return home and maintain age appropriate behaviors.
In this session, Dr. Minuchin consults with a family consisting of a mother, father, and a 15-year-old son who is in treatment for depression. The session focuses on shifting the family’s sense of belonging to allow son to begin to become more autonomous. The social worker of the son’s treatment unit sits in on the session.
This series of sessions showcases Dr. Minuchin’s involvement with children from a homeless family. Dr, Minuchin meets with the family with the goal to empower this family. The family treats Minuchin with a paradoxical combination of openness, suspicion, and passivity. This paradoxical posture is one that the family has learned to assume in response to the constant and uncontrolled entrance and exit of multiple helpers into their lives.
A session with Dr. Minuchin as he works with an Italian immigrant family with five children. The family began therapy as the daughter, 16, was diagnosed with anorexia two years previously and the symptoms were still present. From the first moments of the session, the mother’s undisputed power emerges, leading to a polemic between belonging and autonomy.