18 Facts About Salvador Minuchin

Salvador Minuchin was a family therapist born and raised in San Salvador, Entre Rios, Argentina.

Salvador Minuchin developed structural family therapy, which addresses problems within a family by charting the relationships between family members, or between subsets of family.

Salvador Minuchin served as a physician in the Israeli army after obtaining his degree in medicine.

When his training with Ackerman was complete, Minuchin returned to Israel to assist displaced children as a child psychiatrist.

In 1962, once Salvador Minuchin had generated his theoretical formulations for family structure, he traveled to work with Jay Haley.

In 1965 Salvador Minuchin became the director of the Child Guidance Clinic in Philadelphia.

Salvador Minuchin stepped down from this position in 1976 to become the head of training at the center until 1981, when he left Philadelphia to practice and teach child psychiatry in New York.

Salvador Minuchin died on October 30,2017, in Boca Raton, Florida.

Salvador Minuchin once wrote of Haley as his most important teacher, a man who was "forever pushing the envelope, testing the limits of new ideas" to challenge Salvador Minuchin and himself.

Salvador Minuchin characterizes their relationship as similar to the friendship between Spock and Captain Kirk from the television show Star Trek in that Jay Haley was highly intellectual, while Salvador Minuchin was extremely pragmatic.

Salvador Minuchin made several important contributions to the field of family therapy during his career, the most important of which was the development of structural family therapy.

When Salvador Minuchin first began to work as a family therapist, he wrote about enmeshed and disengaged families, which became an important component of structural family therapy.

Salvador Minuchin suggested that most families try to solve their problems through first-order changes and that in order for a family's structure to significantly change and become healthy again, second-order changes are necessary.

In 1978 Salvador Minuchin helped write Psychosomatic Families: Anorexia Nervosa in Context, which details a clinical model for the causes and treatment of anorexia nervosa based on an integration of medical research and previously successful psychological interventions.

Salvador Minuchin argued that both narrative therapy and solution-focused therapy bring unique and useful methods to the practice of family therapy, such as emphasizing alternative personal narratives to cope with problems.

In other words, Salvador Minuchin felt that postmodern therapy displaced the family and created a paradigm for therapy that was not representative of the psychological experience of a family.

Salvador Minuchin suggests that family therapy should be used to alleviate stress of pain within a family, not to remove the influence of overarching cultural narratives.

When Salvador Minuchin moved to New York in 1981, he established the Family Studies Institute, where he could teach family therapists and interface directly with the foster care system through consultation services.