Introduction
Structural family therapy (SFT) is a method of psychotherapy developed by Salvador Minuchin which addresses problems in functioning within a family. Therapeutic interventions for troubled families often sound and appear unusual or abstract, such as Structural Family Therapy. This isn’t a name that instantly rolls off your tongue or a therapy you hear used frequently in the press or in movies, such as the more ubiquitous techniques of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.
But SFT is similar to other types of therapies categorized under the psychological framework of family systems therapy. These types of therapies view the family unit as a system that lives and operates within larger systems, such as a culture, the community, and organizations. This system – ideally – grows and changes over time. But sometimes a family gets stuck, often resulting from behavioral or mental health issues of one of its family members.
Rather than focus on the individual’s pathology, however, SFT considers problems in the family’s structure, a dysfunction in the way the family interacts or operates. SFT does not maintain that the family’s interactions, or “transactions” cause the pathology, but rather that the family’s transactions support or encourage the symptoms.
Transactions are simply patterns of how family members routinely interact with each other. For example, a mother’s transaction with her daughter could be controlling and overprotective, or an older brother’s transaction with a younger brother could be one of bullying and overpowering.
Goals
The goal of this model is to prevent sequences from repeating, by interrupting the family's covert hierarchical structure. This includes the distribution of power shifting to others to by changing the style of interaction. However, structural therapy is the opposite and works on altering the dysfunctional structure by