I have to agree with my professor, this book should be required reading for anyone thinking of working with families. Likewise, we cannot blame our parents for raising us poorly because they are the result of their parents parenting, and so on and so on.
We are merely the result of our parents teaching us to behave in certain ways. This is a deterministic perspective because it assumes that we cannot TRULY control our own behavior. Being family therapists, they blame all negative pattern cycles on an individual's past family experiences, from their family of origin. With that said, I don't completely agree with everything the authors say. Hopefully (ideally), you will finish being better suited to have a healthy relationship. If you take the time, I can almost guarantee that you will learn something about yourself and/or your family. It is well written and a fascinating read. I am a Psychology major so of course I loved the book: the insights into personal behavior and personality, the confounding effects of group interaction, and the well-placed intellectual side notes.
The author did a great job of taking a scholastic topic and illustrating it with artistic language and presenting it in such a way that is consumable by the average reader. Here and there, I found some helpful gems of wisdom that I felt continued to hold true, but mostly, I felt the book was outdated and rather bizarre. All in all, I didn't think it was a helpful guide or depiction of being a therapist. He never mentioned any of these things about the men. He talked about admiring a 15 year old girl's breasts, and discussed wrinkles and the weight of the older women. Also, I found the author to be quite sexist, which may be appropriate for the time, but was off-putting. That seems like an excellent way to get sued and lose a therapy license in my book.
Keeping that in mind was helpful as I went through the rest of the book, but I found myself struggling with almost every aspect of the author's approach to therapy, including the tone taken with the patients, the handling of sessions, and some extremely odd things that happened, such as a therapist wrestling a 10 year old boy to the ground and then sitting on him. As I worked through the first few chapters, I was struck by how unworkable the author's approach was in any therapeutic setting I've ever worked in, so I flipped to the copyright date and realized it was written in 1978. I read this book because I'm going to be teaching a family therapy course where this is required reading.
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