How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching Families | Page 36

instead of removing patients for individual treatment. His early work centered on the effects of patients'
therapy on the entire family, and he developed the concept of family homeostasis to describe how
families resist change and seek to maintain redundant patterns of behavior. Jackson also suggested that
family members react to schizophrenic members' symptoms in ways that serve to stabilize the family's
status quo and often result in inflexible ways of thinking and maintain the symptomatic behavior (Nichols &
Schwartz, 1998. Family Therapy: Concepts and Methods. 4th ed. Allyn & Bacon).
In 1958, Jackson established the Mental Research Institute and worked with Virginia Satir, Jules Riskin, Jay
Haley, John Weakland, Paul Watzlawick and Bateson. By 1963, Jackson's model of the family involved
several types of rules that defined the communication patterns and interactions among family members.
Jackson believed that family dysfunction was a result of a family's lack of rules for change, and that
the therapist's role was to make the rules explicit and to reconstruct rigid which maintained family
problems. In 1968, tragically Jackson died by his own hand at the age of 48.
Carl Whitaker
Carl Whitaker's creative and spontaneous thinking formed the basis of a bold and inventive approach to
family therapy. He believed that active and forceful personal involvement and caring of the therapist was
the best way to bring about changes in families and promote flexibility among family members. He relied
on his own personality and wisdom, rather than any fixed techniques, to stir things up in families and to help
family members open up and be more fully themselves (Nichols & Schwartz, 1998. Family Therapy:
Concepts and Methods. 4th ed. Allyn & Bacon). Whitaker's confrontive approach earned him the reputation
as the most irreverent among family therapy's iconoclasts.
Whitaker viewed the family as an integrated whole, not as a collection of discrete individuals, and felt
that a lack of emotional closeness and sharing among family members resulted in the symptoms and
interpersonal problems that led families to seek treatment. He equated familial togetherness and
cohesion with personal growth, and emphasized the importance of including extended family members,
especially the expressive and playful spontaneity of children, in treatment. A big, comfortable, lanternjawed man, Whitaker liked a crowd in the room when he did therapy. Whitaker also pioneered the use of co
therapists as a means of maintaining objectivity while using his highly provocative techniques to turn up the
emotional temperature of families (Nichols & Schwartz, 1998. Family Therapy: Concepts and Methods. 4th
ed. Allyn & Bacon).
Beginning in 1946, Whitaker served as Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Emory University,
where he focused on treating schizophrenics and their families. He also helped to develop some of the first
major professional meetings of family therapists with colleagues such as John Warkentin, Thomas Malone,
John Rosen, Bateson, and Jackson. In 1955, Whitaker left Emory to enter into private practice, and became
a professor of Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin in 1965 until his retirement in 1982. Whitaker died
in April 1995, leaving a heartfelt void in the field of family therapy.
Betty Carter
An ardent and articulate feminist, Betty Carter was instrumental in enriching and popularizing the concept
of the family life cycle and its value in assessing families. Carter entered the field of family therapy after
being trained as a social worker, and emphasized the importance of historical antecedents of family
problems and the multigenerational aspects of the life cycle that extended beyond the nuclear family.
Carter further expanded on the family life cycle concept by considering the stages of divorce and remarriage
(Nichols & Schwartz, 1998. Family Therapy: Concepts and Methods. 4th ed. Allyn & Bacon).
Carter's interest in family therapy was stimulated by taking part in a family therapy field placement at the
Ackerman Institute as part of her M.S.W. requirements at Hunter College. She quickly became an avid
student of the Bowenian model, and served on the staff of the Family Studies Section at Albert Einstein
College of Medicine and Bronx State Hospital with Phil Guerin and Monica McGoldrick. Carter left the
Center for Family Learning to become the founding director of the Family Institute of Westchester in 1977.
Carter served as Co director of the Women's Project in Family Therapy with Peggy Papp, Olga Silverstein,
and Marianne Walters, and has been an outspoken leader about the gender and ethnic inequalities that serve
to keep women in inflexible family roles.

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