Rating: 
Summary: Sheds light on many common family problems
Review: Are you a parent having trouble understanding your kids? Are you having trouble understanding your parents? This book may not reflect your unique problems, but will shed light on problems encountered in many families from which you can draw conclusions about your own problems. Best of all it does it in an easy-to-read, almost novel-like approach without all the big word, professional type verbage found in many psychology texts. You'll see how each player in the family, even the one who seems most innocent, is working to manipulate things to their liking -- sometimes consciously, sometimes not.
Rating:
Summary: Sheds light on many common family problems
Review: Are you a parent having trouble understanding your kids? Are you having trouble understanding your parents? This book may not reflect your unique problems, but will shed light on problems encountered in many families from which you can draw conclusions about your own problems. Best of all it does it in an easy-to-read, almost novel-like approach without all the big word, professional type verbage found in many psychology texts. You'll see how each player in the family, even the one who seems most innocent, is working to manipulate things to their liking -- sometimes consciously, sometimes not.
Rating:
Summary: A Ministerial Must-Read!
Review: As a person preparing for a career in ministry, I found this resource to be incredibly insightful and certain to be useful in my work with kids and their families. Even if you're not a proponent of Family Systems Models, there is much to learn from this work--the narrative portions alone are invaluable.
Rating:
Summary: ExcellentWhether married
Review: Carl Whitaker is known as one of the founders of family therapy in America. He had a style that could be described as "innovative," "intense," and sometimes "irrational." Reading this book can help someone learn more about Whitaker's unique brand of family therapy, but more important than that it can help people learn about the process of family therapy and about their own family dynamics. The reader should be able to identify with at least one of the family members in the book and empathize with their situation. In so doing, the reader is able to do some of their own "therapy" without having to pay a family counselor. I often recommend this book to persons that I see in counseling and those that read it have come back with glowing reports.
Rating:
Summary: The Family Therapy Experience Written as a Novel
Review: Carl Whitaker is known as one of the founders of family therapy in America. He had a style that could be described as "innovative," "intense," and sometimes "irrational." Reading this book can help someone learn more about Whitaker's unique brand of family therapy, but more important than that it can help people learn about the process of family therapy and about their own family dynamics. The reader should be able to identify with at least one of the family members in the book and empathize with their situation. In so doing, the reader is able to do some of their own "therapy" without having to pay a family counselor. I often recommend this book to persons that I see in counseling and those that read it have come back with glowing reports.
Rating:
Summary: The Family Therapy Experience Written as a Novel
Review: Carl Whitaker is known as one of the founders of family therapy in America. He had a style that could be described as "innovative," "intense," and sometimes "irrational." Reading this book can help someone learn more about Whitaker's unique brand of family therapy, but more important than that it can help people learn about the process of family therapy and about their own family dynamics. The reader should be able to identify with at least one of the family members in the book and empathize with their situation. In so doing, the reader is able to do some of their own "therapy" without having to pay a family counselor. I often recommend this book to persons that I see in counseling and those that read it have come back with glowing reports.
Rating: 
Summary: it was a great book
Review: everyone had to read i
Rating:
Summary: Very pertinent
Review: First, let me say that I've never been a proponent of Therapy. This book, however, has made me re-think that stance. I'm recently divorced. I was very surprised how this book explained, in detail, the process I went through. It provided an insight into family and relationship dynamics that I had not considered at all. While obstensively, it documents a therapy process with a single family, the side notes, theory, and author's comments provide a fuller explanation of the dynamice of relationships that makes this book a "must read" if you are interested in why you do things and how you work within your relationships. I find myself wondering if I had read this before my divorce if there would have been a different outcome. I definitely would have looked at the entire process and relationship differently. I highly recommend this book for anyone wanting to get a better understanding of relationship dynamics, especially in a family setting.
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Summary: Wonderful view from a different perspective
Review: I read this book for a university abnormal psychology class, and it provided a welcome contrast to the way we viewed human behaviour for most of the semester. Typically, psychology classes at my college have focused on individual factors causing psychological distress, but of course, family systems therapy views problems within the family system. Napier describes in depth his therapy with one family from beginning to end, and supplements his explanations of the family systems model and his and Whitaker's therapy techniques with examples from other families they have had in therapy. The book actually reads like a novel, and Napier's explanations make the entire process seem clear and reasonable. Even if you don't agree with the family system model, by the time you finish reading this book, you will at least have a much better understanding of it.
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Summary: Growth in Family Interactions
Review: In the context of an absorbing story of one family's therapy, Augustus Napier, with his cotherapist, teacher, and the founder of the symbolic-experiential model of family therapy, Carl Whitaker, articulately presents many of the most provocative and cutting-edge concepts in family psychology making the book a user's guide for anyone in a family or interested in better understanding the phenomenal interactions and implications thereof. Whitaker's model, exemplified throughout the therapy, "is a multi-generational approach that addresses both individual and family relational patterns in the process of therapy. Oriented toward personal growth (rather than stability) and family connectedness, the therapist assumes a pivotal role in helping family members dislodge rigid and repetitive ways of interacting and substituting more spontaneous and flexible ways of accepting and dealing with their impulses" (Goldenberg & Goldenberg, 2000). The premise of the symbolic-experiental model is that "it is experience, not education, that changes families" (Keith and Whitaker, 1982). The engaging account of the Brice's therapy, alongside other personal antidotes and systematic explanations by Napier and Whitaker, provides a greater understanding of one's self (esp. learning how to experience oneself in a new way) and the implications of a systemic approach to all human interaction. Recommended with fervor!
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