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.

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.