I have mounted Stuart Lieberman's book, Transgenerational Family Therapy on the WWW for anyone to read. You can take your own copy but may not quote from the work without observing the usual guidance about reasonable length. You may reproduce as much of the book as necessary for teaching or other non-profit-making purposes provided:
a) you don't change it
b) you give it it's proper reference and acknowledge Stuart as its author
c) you acknowledge my mounting of it!
Mounting it came about on the trigger of co-editing an issue of the AFT newsletter, Context with Barbara Warner on the theme of transgenerational FT. I wrote about mounting TGFT as follows.
We can’t cope with information without focusing and I see schools in systemic work as different, often complementary, foci. There are the strategic foci on problem, resource and solution. There are the perceptual foci on the structural, the interpersonal and intrapersonal; there is passion focus, cognition focus, behaviour focus and there is narrative focus. The transgenerational theme clearly has a structure focus and it has a historical focus. Fitting with this historical focus, I have mounted Stuart Lieberman’s classic book Transgenerational Family Therapy (Lieberman, 1979) on the web for free access. I was working in an eating disorder service when I first read the book, alongside Paradox and Counterparadox (Selvini Palazzoli, Boscolo, Cecchin, et al., 1978) and Psychosomatic Families (Minuchin, Rosman & Baker, 1978). I made heavy weather of Psychosomatic Families, found TGFT very reassuring and helpful in many ways while Paradox and Counterparadox was extraordinary; it inspired respect and belief but it also left me thinking that I wasn’t that kind of therapist because (a) I didn’t want to work with systems defined by being families, and (b) I didn’t have the charismatic confidence all three books breathed. I concentrated on individual psychodynamic work and group analytic training. When I thought more about systemic work some six years ago, Stuart was withdrawing from the Prudence Skynner Clinic and I joined to become its main psychiatric input. By then overt charismatic authority was out of fashion in systemic theory. We talked of putting the book on the web as it was out of print and Stuart had decided not to rewrite it. That came to nothing through pressure of other work but this issue of Context seemed the right time to get the job done. Rereading the book it’s easy to see how TGFT may have been seen as problem- or past-focused. There is much that Stuart no longer sees as relevant and there are threads about gender and sexuality that look very dated now. A problem focus is there, quite unlike the resource-focused genograms and solution-focused narratives in the reflecting teams in Prudence Skynner’s ‘Friday team’ in the 1990s. However, the book presents interesting case material, focusing on the interactive process; this is no ‘fixing’ therapy. The introductory chapter is one of the best summaries of the development of family therapy in Britain and its relationship with group analysis and the chapter linking TGFT to psychodynamic theory looks ahead of its time now. The final chapter exploring the personal development of family therapists also looks very topical. Above all, the book was a formative event in family therapy: there is history in the book and it made history.
The book is mounted as HTML for simple browsing: start with the contents or the acknowledgements or at chapter one!
The book is also available in Word97 format using a main file (TGFT.doc). If you call the files for the separate chapters from that you get the numbering of figures right. All the word files can be downloaded in one zip file or you can pick up the files one by one.
Any comments or problems -- contact me Chris Evans