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Inside the Family: Toward a Theory of Family Process. D. Kantor & W Lehr. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 1975.
In the forward to Larry Constantine's book, Family Paradigms: The Practice of Theory in Family Therapy (1986), Carlfred Broderick stated, "one of the most germinal works in the field has been the now classic monograph of Kantor and Lehr, Inside the Family" (1975, p. vii). So renowned is this work that whenever articles, monographs, and books address the topic of family interaction and family systems, it is almost axiomatic that Inside the Family will be referenced. Given the vintage of this classic and its limited availability, it is worthwhile to briefly review the content of Inside the Family for its important contributions to provide the reader with some sense of the images, ideas, and constructs it introduced to the family field.
The guiding purposes of this work were the merging of general systems theory with a conceptual framework, the establishment of multiple typologies that identified distinctly different whole family processes, the description of a unified theory of family process around which family scholars could communicate, the identification of the basic components of family process, and the demonstration of how such components relate to one another. Two images provided the foundation for Inside the Family, the family as a spatial metaphor and the commonplace family going about its daily activities. Kantor and Lehr selectively discussed a number of systems concepts as applied to families. Family systems, they stated, are organizationally complex, open, adaptive, and information-processing systems guided by the spatial attribute of distance regulation. A central theme was the focus on family strategies. A family strategy is "a purposive pattern of moves toward a target or goal made by two or more people who are systematically bound in a social-biological arrangement" (p....