Highlights From 60 Years of Practice, Research, and Teaching in Family Therapy

Abstract

In this article I summarize practical and theoretical highlights from my 60 years of clinical practice, research, and teaching in family therapy. My start in family therapy came through the backdoor of play therapy. However, once I realized that by accepting a child in play therapy, I would reinforce the family's negative attribution of the child as the “identified patient,” I changed my experimental, monitored play-therapy rooms into two family therapy rooms (L’Abate, 1998, 2009a). My most recent work is contained in this summary. This summary does not contain many other highlights but only those that remain in my memory more vividly than others. I shall start with practice prescriptions and then move on to selected models of Relational Competence Theory (RCT) and their applications (Cusinato & L’Abate, 2012; L’Abate, Cusinato, Maino, Colesso, & Scilletta, 2010).