Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Models: Blending Gestalt and Family Therapies

Family therapy is primarily focused upon interpersonal or transactional issues. Its major contributions have been in the development of communication analysis, communication opening techniques, and in illuminating group responsibility in the creation of an identified patient. Work with individual or subsystem boundaries has received far less attention. Gestalt therapy is particularly well suited for short term work on intrapersonal and boundary issues (Hatcher and Himelstein, 1976). The focus of this paper is to show how the selective integration of the two approaches provides a significant, new dimension in the development of family therapy.