Family counselling initially was carried out on legal, medical, reproductive and social aspects of family life, children’s upbringing and education problems. Period of 1940ies and beginning of 1960ies was marked by establishing and unfolding of counselling services of psychological help to family couples. The period of 1930-1940 gave birth to a special practice of family counselling, shifting focus from psychical disorders of a person on the problems of communication between the spouses (Bowen, 1966). In 1950ies the term and practice of family therapy/counselling was established. Unlike psychoanalyses, where the intra-psychical processes were in the center of attention, family counselling was aimed at interpersonal optimization of family functioning as a single whole. In 1949 US social bodies have elaborated professional standards for carrying out of spouses and family counselling, while in 1963 in California fist rules and norms of family psychoanalysts’ licensing were introduced (Brammer, et al., 1993). An important source of family development psychotherapy and psychoanalyses became the interdisciplinary relations of psychology, psychiatry and practice of social work (M. Bowen, 1966). Family counselling represents relatively new compared to psychotherapy direction of psychological help to families.
One of the most significant factors for family counselling was reorientation of psychoanalyses on work with family in the form of spouse therapies and child-parent relationship practice. The beginning of system approaches to psychoanalyses for family counselling can be connected with works of Ackerman (1962); attachment theory of Bowlby (1986); and distribution of behavioral diagnostic methods and therapies on work with families (Satir, 1983). Due to significant success in family psychoanalyses and wild growth of demand for such services, the number of members in American Therapeutic Association in sphere of family and marriage relations has almost doubled from 1978 to 1986. Development of practice in family psychoanalyses provoked the development of scientific researches in family relations, what brought to foundation of a separate independent psychological discipline – the family psychology/psychoanalyses. Parallel to development of family psychotherapy and psychology an active establishment of sexology as a science has also taken place (Kinsey, 1953). Recent researches of family counselling distinguish three main stages in family psychoanalyses (Eidemiller & Justizkis, 2008). The first stage “psychiatric” represents a family as a unity of incoming individualities in need of elaborating the recommendations concerning optimization of the family life. On the second stage “psychodynamic/psychoanalytic”, the focus of the therapy becomes the inadequate behavior models formed in the childhood and carried over later by an individual to married life and parent – child relationships (Eidemiller & Justizkis, 2008). Finally, the third stage –”system psychotherapy”, which is characterized by synthesis of system approach and psychology of relations, pathologized by family heritage (Eidemiller & Justizkis, 2008). The leading principle of family psychotherapy, developed within this direction frame, becomes the principle of mutual acceptance of a psychoanalyst and a family.
