Gender and Power in Families

The systems approach to the family is based on the assumptions that there is equality between men and women in the family, and that women and men are treated equally in clinical practice. The contributors to this book challenge these hidden assumptions, discussing the issues from both a conceptual and clinical viewpoint. They argue strongly that questions of gender and power should be central to family therapy training and practice.

Ann Miller is a consultant clinical psychologist and family therapist who has worked and taught at the Marlborough Family Service in London for most of her career. She was instrumental, with others, in setting up the University College London Diploma in Family Therapy, which provided a non-traditional pathway into the profession, and in creating the Marlborough Cultural Therapy Centre, successfully providing a therapeutic service since 1995 for black and minority ethnic individuals, children and families who would otherwise have not engaged with services. Rosine Jozef Perelberg, PhD, is a Fellow and Training Analyst of the British Psychoanalytic Society, Visiting Professor in the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College London, and Corresponding Member of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society. She edited 'Gender and Power in Families' (with Ann Miller); 'Psychoanalytic Understanding of Violence and Suicide'; 'Female Experience: Four Generations of British Women Psychoanalysts on Work with Women' (with Joan Raphael-Leff); 'Freud: A Modern Reader'; 'Time and Memory'; and 'Dreaming and Thinking'. She is the author of 'Time, Space and Phantasy' and 'Murdered Father, Dead Father: Revisiting the Oedipus Complex' (2015). In 2007 she was named one of the ten women of the year by the Brazilian National Council of Women.

Preface to the 2011 Edition -- Introduction I -- Introduction II -- Conceptual Frameworks -- A feminist perspective in family therapy -- Equality, asymmetry, and diversity: on conceptualizations of gender -- Strategies of Intervention -- Feminism and family therapy: can mixed marriages work? -- Feminism and strategic therapy: contradiction or complementarity? -- The struggle towards a feminist practice in family therapy: premisses -- The struggle towards a feminist practice in family therapy: practice -- Applications: Specific Clinical Issues -- The mother-daughter relationship and the distortion of reality in childhood sexual abuse -- Intelligence, achievement, and gender: the ramifications of a case-study -- Working with women in families -- What About Men? -- The place of men in a gender-sensitive therapy -- Masculinity and family work -- Applications: Wider Systems -- 'The little woman' and the world of work -- Why a group for women only? -- Psychotherapy, oppression and social action: gender, race, and class in black women's depression