Existential Family Therapy: Using the Concepts of Viktor Frankl

The approach to family therapy presented in this book has evolved primarily out of Dr. Jim Lantz's use of the existential approach of Viktor Frankl, the noted Viennese psychiatrist, and has been refined and evaluated over the past twenty years. This approach to family therapy focuses on the many problems and symptoms that result when a family does not discover, experience, and/or make use of the meanings and meaning potentials in family life. Existential Family Therapy shows that the function of the therapist is to help the family bring covered and clouded meanings and potential meanings into consciousness and then to help the family make use of what has been discovered in order to enrich family life.
This family treatment framework has great potential to help the family therapist expanded his or her ability to assist the family in its search for meaning. This book presents existential concepts in a way that helps them come alive for the psychotherapist engaged in the day-to-day practice of family therapy
Dr. Lantz presents rich clinical material on using existential family therapy with difficult-to-treat families such as Vietnam veteran families, migrating families, poor families, and urban-Appalachian families. The book is excellent reading for mental health practitioners who believe in the meaning opportunities to be found in daily family life and who wish to help families discover and actualize such meaning potentials as a primary part of the treatment process.

Jim Lantz, Ph.D., is an associate professor in clinical social work at Ohio State University.