This book could not have been published at a better time: it appears when family therapy faces what may be its greatest challenges, and it of-fers useful guidelines for how these challenges can be met. With this book, Medical Association have done the field a great service. Family therapy is at least as useful today as in any time in its history. Families continue to play a dominant role in creating the secure attach-ments that are the foundation of satisfying adult relationships, in incul-cating and maintaining prosocial values and behavior in children, and in promoting a quality of life that buffers against stress and illness.Yet despite the best efforts of groups like the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, and Division 43 of the American Psychological Association, family therapy has declined in importance as an emphasis in training programs and appears with diminishing fre-quency in clinical settings. The halcyon period for family therapy was the 1960s through the 1980s, but since then it has suffered because of the combined influence of a number of external and internal factors. Among the external factors are: - Disproportionately deep cuts in mental health service funding as communities attempted to cope with declining revenues; - The growing reluctance of insurance companies to reimburse for couple and family service; - Increased interest in pharmacotherapy; - Increased understanding of the role of neurobiology in the etiol-ogy of behavior; - Rapid changes in the composition of the nuclear family that make it difficult to put forth a common notion of the family; and - A dramatic shift toward materialistic values and the pursuit of self-interest (as typified by the spate of televised "survivor" shows) that has contributed to an erosion of interest in the cooperative spirit typified by well-functioning families. While nominal interest in families persists, resources and commit-ment to improve them have been evaporating rapidly. But the family therapy enterprise itself has contributed to its own decline, expedited by internal factors such as: - The long-term emphasis upon the personalities of family thera-pists who portrayed family therapy as more of an art than a science; - Fractious conflicts between the emerging "schools" of family therapy; - Oversimplification of each school's beliefs compounded by the as-sertion that there are necessary and sufficient conditions to ex-plain and change family behavior; - A reluctance to replace case reports with more difficult but more convincing group studies of therapeutic outcome; and - A failure to adapt to the more pragmatic, time-limited forms of practice that are currently in demand.