Postmodern family therapy

Postmodern family therapy is one of the newer overarching frameworks for therapeutic practice. It marks a shift from cybernetic and mechanical metaphors to text-based constructions. Embracing postmodern concepts, family therapists created solution-focused brief therapy, narrative therapy, collaborative therapy, and other models built upon skepticism toward grand narratives, social construction of knowledge, and reflexivity and subjectivity. In these postmodern family approaches, therapists embrace clients as experts, focus on client strengths over deficits, and privilege collaborative dialogue over hierarchical interviewing. This postmodern turn has changed how therapists diagnose clients and conduct research and encouraged family therapists to embrace social justice and engage in social change. Emergent perspectives like metamodern and ultramodern suggesting postmodern and modern idea synthesis have led to new dialogical models in an ongoing family therapy evolution.