The Family Crucible

“If you have a troubled marriage, a troubled child, a troubled self, if you're in therapy or think that there's no help for your predicament, The Family Crucible will give you insights . . . that are remarkably fresh and helpful.”—New York Times Book Review The classic groundbreaking book on family therapy by acclaimed family psychology experts Augustus Y. Napier, Ph.D., and Carl Whitaker, M.D. This extraordinary book presents scenarios of one family's therapy experience and explains what underlies each encounter. You will discover the general patterns that are common to all family relationships—stress, polarization and escalation, scapegoating, triangulation, blaming, and the diffusion of identity—and you will gain a vivid understanding of the intriguing field of family counseling and communication. What really happens behind the closed doors of a therapist's office?- The Family as a System: Discover why the “problem patient” is often just a symptom of a larger family issue and how unspoken rules and hidden loyalties can dictate everyone's behavior.- Dysfunctional Dynamics: Identify destructive patterns like scapegoating, triangulation, and blaming in your own relationships and understand the powerful roles they play in keeping a family stuck.- The Therapeutic Process: Witness the “battle for structure” as a family in crisis tests their therapists, and see how a therapeutic team guides them through conflict toward connection.- A New Model for Marriage and Parenting: Move beyond blame and learn a new language for family relationships built on mutual understanding, clear communication, and authentic connection.

Augustus Y. Napier was born in Decatur, Georgia, in 1938 and graduated from Wesleyan University with a B.A. in English. After deciding to become a therapist through a personal therapy experience, he earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of North Carolina. During an internship in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he began to work with Dr. Whitaker as a student co-therapist, an experience which formed the basis of this book. Dr. Napier later served on the faculties of the Psychiatry Department and the Child and Family Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin. He now directs The Family Workshop, a family therapy training institute in Atlanta, Georgia, where he works frequently with his wife, Margaret, who is also a family therapist. A frequent consultant, he is the author of numerous papers and of The Fragile Bond, published by Harper & Row in 1988. The Napiers have three children.