Study The Invisible Web: Gender Patterns In Family Relationships Drafted By Marianne Walters Available In PDF

I was unable to finish this book because I got a call from the secretary where I work informing me that

she had allowed me to check it out by mistake, but it's actually a reference book and needs to remain in the library.
I ended up skimming a lot of it although I suspect I might have done so anyway and stopping about halfway through, My review, therefore, may not be the most reliable description of the book,

If you're interested in feminist deconstruction of traditional systemsoriented therapy, this is a good text, For my purposes, though, the feminist agenda detracted,

This text was somewhat helpful to me in that it offered many case examples of couples therapy, often including actual session transcripts, illustrating master systemsoriented therapists at work.
I did wonder whether the sessions had been condensed or otherwise "doctored," because at times it felt like the clients were handing the therapists diagnostic material on a silver platter.
When I told this to Fran, she responded by saying that the authors are master therapists and someone who's really good can actually elicit all that relevant material, even in one session.
Unfortunately, because of the feminist bias, the case examples unilaterally illustrated situations where women needed to be empowered in their marriages and therapists approached the cases accordingly,

In contrast, both "The Fragile Bond" by Gus Napier and my limited experience suggest that the majority of couples who enter therapy actually have the opposite problem overfunctioning, dominant wives who need to be coached to step down and allow their husbands to assume more responsibility/involvement.
This makes sense intuitively, since couples therapy seems to be initiated by the wife in most cases with husbands reluctantly agreeing in order to please their wives indicative of a likely dynamic in the marriage.
As such, the cases described in the book were limited in their relevance to the couples I usually see,

I did like one thing I read about Peggy Papp has an interesting diagnostic exercise in which she asks each spouse to imagine the couple as two inanimate objects in some kind of interaction that symbolizes the relationship.
For example, a husband might say "I'm a nail and she's a hammer, " I thought this was kind of cute, and could lead to potentially rich therapeutic material in the session, Bringing new focus to the subject, THE INVISIBLE WEB investigates the family from a feminist perspective, Using the lens of gender, connections between mothers and daughters, fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, and husbands and wives are analyzed and given new meaning, The authors evaluate and redefine family transitions such as divorce, singleparent and femaleheaded households, and remarried couples who are attempting to integrate their respective children with exspouses and complicated networks of extended kin.
They also reexamine traditional and emerging roles for women in their early, middle, and later years, Written in an engaging format, each chapter features an in depth analysis of how gender shapes the relationship in question, This discussion is followed by fascinating vignettes of actual cases from each of the four authors, whose approaches reflect different orientations to therapy,

Based on the work of the Women's Project in Family Therapy which won theAFTA Award for Distinguished Contribution to Family Therapy, this groundbreaking work is an excellent text for courses in family therapy and women's studies, an invaluable guide for mental health practitioners, and an insightful read for anyone who wishes to explore the invisible web of gender patterns in families.

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