Chapter 10: Clinical Behavior Therapy:

No abstract available for this article.     

Chapter 13: Group Therapy for Birth Parents of Children in Foster Care

Psychological impairments render many biological parents of children placed in treatment foster care incompetent to meet child-rearing tasks. Service agreements identify and address critical areas of dysfunctioning but do not engage parents in a broader inventory of their parental functioning and dysfuntioning. A group method provides mutual support, exploration, and a positive child-rearing model. A clinical assessment of parenting that highlights ongoing developmental needs of nurturance and empathy, limit setting, structure, role modeling, reality testing, and separation and individuation is used to promote progress. Parents gain insight into their own overall impairments, origin of impairments, and compensatory techniques. Parents recognize broader responsibility for parenthood enhancing reunification efforts.     

Multidimensional Family Therapy in Theory and in Practice

This article reviews the family therapy case of an adolescent substance abuser through the lens of multidimensional family therapy (MDFT). Initially, the adolescent presented with suicidal ideation, depression, academic difficulties, and behavior problems. The family experienced chronically high levels of conflict, which related to the mother's depression, the father's harsh discipline, and the adolescent's sister's frequent suicidal threats and outbursts. Family therapeutic interventions helped to decrease family conflict and improve the adolescent's grades and behavior. In particular, conjoint work with the parents had a stabilizing effect on the family system. As predicted by MDFT, this stabilizing effect was shown to place the adolescent on a healthier developmental trajectory. Limitations of the case and implications for future research are also presented.     

Disrupting Identity through Visible Therapy: A Feminist Post-structuralist Approach to Working with Women Who Have Experienced Child Sexual Abuse

This article draws on feminism and post-structuralism to theorize a narrative framework for developing and critiquing therapeutic practices with women who have experienced child sexual abuse. I argue that both objectivism and relativism provide poor guides for conducting therapy and that it is only through situating our knowledges precisely that more liberatory therapy practices may be developed. This approach, termed ‘visible therapy’, is used to directly and explicitly challenge normative constructions of women, child sexual abuse and therapy. I argue that it is necessary to explicate the embedded assumptions produced through practices of abuse, and which serve to construct children's experiences of that abuse, in order to ward against their reproduction within therapy relationships. I demonstrate that it is through situating and explicating the operations of power that the authenticity of experience and identity may be questioned and women's ongoing positioning as guilty victims may be challenged. Thus, I am concerned not with who women ‘really are’ but with how they come to know and be known through practices of both abuse and therapy. This, then, is about making the tactics of abuse and therapy visible. Problems are not located within individuals, but rather within the narratives which situate both past and current relationships but which, through reiteration, obscure their own social production. I conclude that it is only when categorical identity is no longer assumed that progressive therapy practices with women who have been sexually abused can be developed and maintained.     

Susannah Izzard and Nicola Barden,eds. Rethinking Gender and Therapy: The Changing Identities of Women.. Philadelphia: Open UP, 2001

Alice Walker, by Maria Lauret (New York: St. Martin's P, 2000).

Power, Race, and Gender in Academe: Strangers in the Tower?, edited by Shirley Geok‐Lin Lim and María Herrera‐Sobek (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2000).

Migrant Daughter: Coming of Age as a Mexican American Woman, by Frances Esquibel Tywoniak (Berkeley: U of California P, 2000).

Just Anger: Representing Women's Anger in Early Modern England, by Gwynne Kennedy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2000).

Spirited Lives: How Nuns Shaped Catholic Culture and American Life, 1836–1920, by Carol K. Coburn and Martha Smith (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1999).

States of Conflict: bender, Violence and Resistance, edited by Susie Jacobs, Ruth Jacobson and Jennifer Marchbank (London and New York: Zed Books, 2000).

The Hysteric's Guide to the Future Female Subject, by Juliet Flower MacCannell (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000).

The Sounds of Feminist Theory, by Ruth Salvaggio (Albany: State U of New York P, 1999).

Literary Feminisms, by Ruth Robbins (New York: St. Martin's P, 2000).

Women and Faith: Catholic Religious Life in Italy from Late Antiquity to the Present, edited by Lucetta Scaraffia and Gabriella Zarri (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999).

Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War, by Elizabeth Young (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999).

Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit, by Suzanne Smith (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999).

Swinging Single: Representing Sexuality in the 1960s, edited by Hilary Radner and Moya Luckett (Minneapolis and London: U of Minneapolis P, 1999).

Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives, by Cynthia Enloe (Berkeley: U of California P, 2000).     

Chapter 16: PATH:

Established in 1972 in Minnesota, the PATH program is relatively unique in being a foster parent membership organization in which foster parents elect a board of directors responsible for establishing agency policies. Seven charcteristics of the program are the central role of foster parents, individually developed treatment, goal orientation, close foster parent-social worker relationship, educational support, network of support relationships, and professional expectations.     

Chapter 3: Evaluation:

No abstract available for this article.     

Chapter 14: Foster Care:

Specialist foster family care may be the treatment of choice for emotionally disturbed or behaviorally unmanageable children. The child and family often need a break and breathing space from each other. The child and birth parents can be involved in a treatment group, and the foster parents will be seen regularly so they may be involved in supporting the treatment goals. Biological parents will benefit from observing the foster family as role models in parenting, and practitioners are able to examine and reinforce the coping and adapting skills of the children.     

Chapter 2: Understanding Nondelinquents:

No abstract available for this article.     

Chapter 21: Specialist Fostering:

Specialist foster family care has quietly developed in the last twenty years and consistently reflects features of families' services providing within their homes, receiving payment for services, and are the primary service providers with social workers and other staff providing back up supervision and consultation. Matters for consideration as this programming thrust develops include distinguishing models of service which define the problem as lying with the child who is assumed to require treatment contracted with models which take a more ecological approach, clarifying the roles of foster parents and social workers, specifying the role of birth parents in specialist foster family care programs, developing the relationship of specialist foster family care to permanency planning, and identifying possible future directions including more extensive use of this type of service for adults.     

Chapter 9: School Programs:

No abstract available for this article.     

Chapter 8: Probation Programs:

No abstract available for this article.     

Chapter 6: Behavioral Family Contracting:

No abstract available for this article.