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Some psychiatric patients (most notably, young adult schizophrenics) seem unable to get better because of the pressures their families exert on them. This common clinical observation gave rise, some fifteen years ago, to attempts to treat families as a whole. The number of clinicians treating families has since multiplied (there were several thousand at the last government count, with training programs at a dozen major city teaching hospitals), and they would describe themselves as the Family Therapy movement. There are two main schools within family therapy. One derives from psychoanalysis, and is interested in how the inner lives of family members interlock. The other school, more controversial though increasingly influential, is interested in families as 'systems.'The instructions of a systems-minded supervisor to a beginning family therapist might run like this:
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