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Family Therapy
The earliest approaches to psychotherapy in the 20th Century focused on individual therapy, and the patient-therapist relationship as the best way to treat psychological problems. Patients were segregated from their families for therapy and treatment focused on their individual symptomatic behaviours.

The advent of family therapy ushered in a whole new way of understanding and explaining human behaviour. Family therapists shifted the focus of treatment in a way that allowed for social context, communication and relationship to have primary importance in therapy.

This way of working involves engaging with the whole family system as a functioning unit. While the individuals in the family are as important in family therapy as in individual therapy, family therapists also deal with the personal relations and interactions of the family members, both inside the family and in the therapeutic system which comprises the family, the therapist or therapists, and their broader community.