Structural Family Therapy is a strength-based, outcome oriented treatment modality based on ecosystemic principles:

 - Context organizes us. Our behaviors are a function of our relations with others.  The structural therapist focuses on what is taking place among people, rather than on individual psyches.

 - The family is the primary context, the “matrix of identity” where we develop our selves as we interact with spouses, parents, children, and other family members.  The family is in constant transformation, adapting to an ever changing social environment.

 - The family's structure consists of recurrent patterns of interaction that its members develop over time, as they accommodate to each other.

 - A well functioning family is not defined by the absence of stress or conflict, but by how effectively it handles them as it responds to the developing needs of its members and the changing conditions in its  environment.   

 - The job of the structural family therapist is to locate and mobilize underutilized strengths, helping the family outgrow constraining patterns of interaction that impede the actualization of its own resources.

The evolution of SFT

1. The Wiltwyck School For Boys.

In the early 1960s, Salvador Minuchin gathered a team of therapists and researchers and set out to  transform the institutional setting of a correctional facility for young delinquents into a family-oriented treatment program.  

Families of the Slums (Minuchin et al., 1967)  recounts the experience, which started at the opposite end of the traditional psychodynamic approach –with a sociological analysis of the impact of social context on poor families.

The typical Wiltwyck client was the “urban, minority group member who is experiencing poverty, discrimination, fear, crowdedness, and street-living,” and his family tended to be underorganized.  

Because the style of interaction in these families was more concrete and action-oriented than abstract and verbal, the team adopted and developed alternative, “more doing than talking” techniques: role playing, “enactments”, home-based modalities of treatment, and other nontraditional forms.





2. The Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic

In 1967 Dr. Minuchin was appointed director of the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic, an outpatient and inpatient facility serving an urban population. 

He recruited Braulio Montalvo and Jay Haley to help train the clinic’s staff , as well as "lay therapists" –minority para-professionals with no formal degree– to work with families. 

The clinic’s association with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia also provided an opportunity to apply the vision of the family as the context for understanding and treating diabetes, asthma, and anorexia. 

Through the 1970s and early 1980s, the Clinic's Family Therapy Training Center attracted hundreds of practitioners from the country and abroad to its Externship program.

 3. Family Studies and the Minuchin Center for the Family

 In 1981 Salvador Minuchin left Philadelphia for New York and founded Family Studies, a training and consultation institute.  

 With the assistance of a small group of collaborators, he continued training family therapists and expanded the application of Structural Family Therapy to the understanding and transformation of the interaction between marginalized families and the agencies that serve them. 

 Upon Dr. Minuchin’s retirement, the institute was renamed The Minuchin Center For The Family and remains committed to the mission of empowering families and the agencies and practitioners who work in their behalf.