There is a need experienced by most practitioners of family therapy to impose order and structure upon the considerable range of concepts currently used in the family process approach. This paper suggests a possible structure utilizing five phases which characteristically unfold during the treatment process. The structure provides a rationale so that seemingly divergent techniques of therapy may be seen to be appropriate to particular phases of therapy, rather than mutually contradictory or exclusive. The article further attempts to demonstrate that certain conceptual models and the techniques that arise from them, are called into play depending upon the nature of the family in treatment.

The events surrounding an act of great violence committed by an adolescent boy are discussed. Significance rests in the fact that both the victim and the offender were known to the author. It is suggested that in the genesis of this crime, three critical factors converged: an offender whose psychopathology was such that an impulsive act of sexual violence was possible, a victim whose helplessness, availability and symbolic appeal made him ripe for exploitation, and finally, a social network of significant others whose own preoccupations and losses led them to overlook the signals of impending violence. Here again as part of that network of significant others, the author is in a unique position to comment intimately on the nature of this environmental 'failure' and on its subsequent ramifications.