Genograms: Assessment and Intervention, Third Edition

Monica McGoldrick
Randy Gerson, and Sueli Petry

Praise for Genograms

“Entertaining and instructive, Genograms is the ideal guide for introducing all those involved in family treatment – family therapists, doctors, nurses, social workers, counselors and trainees in these fields – to this essential assessment and intervention tool."
—Karnac Review

“This book continues to be the definitive work in the field. An  excellent, comprehensive, and beautifully written and illustrated  text, the third edition is a must-read....I thoroughly   enjoyed reading this superbly written updated text."
—Robert C. Like, MD, MS, Professor and Director, Center for Healthy Families and Cultural Diversity, UMDNJ–Robert Wood Johnson Medical School

“With searching insight and compassion, master clinician McGoldrick and her coauthors have done it again! By providing a crucial framework for understanding family experience in the context of history, and offering helpful questions to ask family members when constructing genograms, McGoldrick explores the power of stories to promote change. All in all, a delightfully wise, elegant, helpful, and practical clinical book."
—Maureen Leahey, RN, PhD, Manager, Calgary Health Region Outpatient Mental Health, Calgary, Alberta

“This theoretical exposition of an important approach to families is worthy of a place in the child psychiatry departmental library."
—Laurence Jerome, M.D., FRCPC, Canadian Child Psychiatry Review (on the second edition)

Overview—Contents—Excerpt

Widely used by both family therapists and all health care professionals, the genogram is a graphic way of organizing the mass of information gathered during a family assessment and finding patterns in the family system for more targeted treatment.

Now updated and expanded in its third edition, and featuring revised genograms for easier reading, reflecting the growing and widespread use of genograms for clinical intervention, this best-selling text provides a standard method for constructing a genogram, doing a genogram interview, and interpreting the results.

Genograms of famous families—Sigmund Freud, Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, the Kennedys, Jane Fonda and Ted Turner, Bill Clinton, Princess Diana, the Roosevelts, and Thomas Jefferson, to name a few—bring the text to life, and help to elucidate the principles of family systems theory and systemic interviewing, which form the basis of genogram work.

Once these principles have been explained, the authors go on to present the important clinical applications of genograms in both family therapy and family medicine. These applications include the effective assessment of patients’ risk for emotional problems such as anxiety or depression; structural patterns among families such as divorce and remarriage; relationship patterns such as enmeshment, conflicts, and cut-offs; recent and chronic life stressors such as pregnancy, acute illness, poverty, and racism; and family life cycle transitions and developmental crises, among other uses.

By providing a fascinating view into the richness of family dynamics, McGoldrick and her coauthors provide an invaluable guide to clinicians for accurately charting a family’s structure, making it easier to scan for potential problems and take proactive steps to utilize resources when necessary.

Color insert sample:

Contents

Preface

1. Genograms: Mapping Family Systems

2. Creating Genograms

3. The Genogram Interview

4. Tracking Family Patterns Through Time and Space

5. Interpreting Family Structure

6. Assessing Family Patterns and Functioning

7. Relational Patterns and Triangles

8. Tracking Individuals and Families Througt the Life Cycle

9. Clinical Uses of the Genogram

10. Family Play Genograms

11. Using Genograms for Family Research

Appendix

References

Bibliography by Topic

Biographical References

Excerpt

Genograms appeal to clinicians because they are tangible, graphic representations of complex family patterns. The need for such maps has reached such a point that the Salzburg Music Festival recently offered a kind of genogram to follow the family relationships of a Mozart opera. Had they known about genograms, of course, they could have done an even better graphic, such as the one we did for one of the most complicated opera plots ever, Il Trovatore . . . .

Genograms allow you to map the family structure clearly and to note and update the map of family patterns of relationships and functioning as they emerge. For a clinical record, the genogram provides an efficient summary, allowing a person unfamiliar with a case to grasp quickly a huge amount of information about a family and to scan for potential problems and resources. Whereas notes written in a chart or questionnaire may become lost in a record, genogram information is immediately recognizable and can be added to and corrected at each clinical visit as one learns more about a family. Genograms can be created for any moment in the family’s history, showing the ages and relationships of that moment to better understand family patterns as they evolve through time. Soon software will allow clinicians to track the family’s timeline or chronology—to follow the details of key developments in relationships, health, and so on over the entire life cycle of the family.

About the Authors

Monica McGoldrick, MA, MSW, Ph.D. (H.C.), is Cofounder and Director of the Multicultural Family Institute.

Randy Gerson, Ph.D., was Director of Atlanta College for Systemic Thinking until his death in 1995.

Sueli Petry , Ph.D., is an Associate Faculty Member of the Multicultural Family Institute and is in private practice.

ISBN 10: 0-393-70509-9
ISBN 13: 978-0-393-70509-6
2008 / 400 pages / 32-page color insert / paper