Salvador Minuchin
He mapped and reshaped the hidden structure of families.
Founder of structural family therapy, treating symptoms as products of a family’s organization and reshaping its boundaries and hierarchies.
techniques
The family is the matrix of identity.
Who they were
Salvador Minuchin was an Argentine-American psychiatrist and a major figure in family therapy. After medical training in Argentina and child-psychiatry work in New York, he developed structural family therapy with disadvantaged families at the Wiltwyck School. As director of the Philadelphia Child Guidance Center he refined the model and trained a generation of therapists, authoring Families and Family Therapy.
Terms they cared about
Ideas worth knowing
Their techniques
How the work was done
Their big idea
Structural Family Theory
Symptoms are held in place by family boundaries, hierarchies and coalitions.
The approach they founded
Structural Family Therapy
Treats family symptoms by reshaping boundaries, hierarchies, and the coalitions that keep them in place.
Questions in their spirit
What they’d ask you
Sit with one. Answer online, or in the app.
Carry the idea forward
Minuchin — What they’d ask you
Psipas asks you one small, honest question at a time — and builds the picture from your answers.