The Family Crucible: The Intense Experience of Family Therapy

The Family Crucible is a work dedicated to promoting and explaining the purposes and benefits of family therapy. Family therapy began as a practice in the 1960s and gained wider popularity in the 1970s and beyond. Whitaker and Napier were part of the original movement that helped the field gain traction and legitimacy. They challenged traditional therapies that focus on the individual, believing that all mental health crises can be traced back to the family.

Napier and Whitaker argue that family issues are never the fault of one individual, and a core goal of family therapy is to help all family members realize the roles they play in the conflicts that arise. This means that all family members must be prepared to challenge themselves. As Napier admits, the relationship between the family and the therapist is usually adversarial at first. Over their years together, the family has unconsciously built a system governing their relationships, and by entering therapy they have tacitly admitted that “their model for living has at least temporarily failed” (80). Family structures must be altered, and this process is often as unconscious and unpredictable as the processes that formed these structures in the first place. Families will test therapists to see if they are truly up to the challenge of family therapy: “They simply had to know that we could withstand the stress if they dared open it up” (11). They will attempt to escape the obligations of therapy at first, as the Brices did by not including Don in the first session. The therapist’s job is not to relent in their approach and to stand firm, because doing so tells each family member that they, too, can stand firm. Therapists have to earn the respect of the entire family, rather than just one individual, and they work to change the chain of dependency and maladapted behavior that sometimes spans generations. Family therapists “identify the different steps in the family’s dance” (17), point them out, and challenge the family to try something different. One example of this is when Napier suggests that Carolyn and David sit together, causing the first “symbolic shift in the family structure” (29).

Family therapy presents challenges for therapists as well. Napier comments on these challenges frequently throughout the book, explaining how he struggles to find a balance between warmth and firmness and how he sometimes feels used by the family as they speak to each other through him. Family therapists also become deeply involved in the families they work with, which means that extra attention must be paid to personal biases and emotions. Family therapy is, to Napier, “merely one wave in this new tide of consciousness of the interconnectedness of life” (42). He believes it is foolish to isolate problems or people, because problems and people never exist in isolation; they are products of everything around them. Family therapy emphasizes action, rather than brooding over the past or overanalyzing experiences. It may eventually involve extended family or other important figures in the family’s life, and some family therapists may work with a dozen or more patients of the same unit. Napier insists that the Brice family experienced massive growth and change not because of therapy itself, but because “the collective—and creative—unconscious life of the family did all this, and this intuitive-unconscious group process, in collaboration finally with the therapists, is the real curative agent in family therapy” (145).