Metaframeworks: Transcending the Models of Family Therapy

Introduction

The integrative metaframeworks model was created as a result of the collaboration of three marriage and family therapists: Douglas Breunlin, Richard Schwartz, and Betty Mac Kune-Karrer in 1992. The theoretical foundation and the clinical applications of the model were published in their book Metaframeworks: Transcending the Models of Family Therapy. The authors developed this model because of their motivation to try to help their marriage and family therapy students better understand the relationship across the family therapy models (Breunlin and Mac Kune-Karrer 2002; Breunlin et al. 1992; Pinsof et al. 2017). The authors argued that only one model does not provide all the answers on how to conceptualize a problem. In other words, therapists who only use a single model to address family issues have more difficulties seeing different perspectives of a problem (e.g., individual, family, and the larger context), preventing them from using more successful interventions and...