While iconic popular images celebrated family life during the 1950s and 1960s, American families were simultaneously regarded as potentially menacing sources of social disruption. The history of family therapy makes the complicated power of the family at midcentury vividly apparent. Clinicians developed a new approach to psychotherapy that claimed to locate the cause and treatment of mental illness in observable patterns of family interaction and communication rather than ...

Sixty years ago, a group of prominent psychoanalysts, developmentalists, pediatricians, and educators at the Yale Child Study Center joined together with the purpose of formulating a general psychoanalytic theory of children’s early development. The group’s members composed detailed narratives about their work with the study’s children, interviewed families regularly and visited them in their homes, and over the course of a decade met monthly for discussion. The contributors to this volume...