Complex trauma describes that category of severe, chronic interpersonal trauma usually originating in the formative years of a child. In the adult, this can result in global dissociative difficulties across areas of cognitive, affective, somatic, and behavioral functions. Targeting this field of traumatic pathology, this article reviews the contributions and developments within one broad approach: psychodynamic theory and practice. Brief descriptions of aspects of analytical, Jungian, relational, object relations, and attachment therapeutic approaches are given, along with understandings of pathology and the formulation of therapeutic goals. Major practices within client sessions are canvassed and the issues of researching treatment outcomes are discussed.

In relation to family of origin work in the training of family therapist, the authors discuss the appropriate age of trainees, the interface between personal and academic segments of the course, and potential risks and benefits involved. Two of the authors, Barry Mason and Paul Gibney, participated in a panel discussion on this topic at the Inaugural Pan Pacific Family Therapy Congress in Melbourne, 2001.

Schools of family therapy have been highly selective in their presentation of the theory/practice nexus. Family therapy's method of teaching (the infamous workshop format) has hampered it's growth as a practice and academic discipline. An inadvertent, unhelpful legacy of Gregory Bateson has been that lesser scholars have aped his capacity to draw on other fields of knowledge without his rigour, or his propriety. Family therapy's cavalier dealings with bodies of knowledge and its reliance on miraculous case studies has resulted in the bypassing of individual suffering. The heroic narrative that has dominated family therapy has precluded other styles of stories for therapists, theorists and clients. Family therapy has been dominated by the myth of the hero, with its accompanying motif of the puer eternus (the eternal youth). Family therapy has been forever reinventing itself, forever the ‘new kid on the block’. This fascination with newness has interfered with family therapy's capacity, at times, to consolidate its genuine value as a therapeutic entity.

This paper considers a difficult clinical problem, namely chronicity or recidivism, and examines the appearance of the phenomenon in a number of clinical vignettes. From the vantage point of a clinical introduction, it will be argued that chronicity is an epistemological problem in that it arises from a belief in the clinical value of ‘objectivity’. It will be suggested that ‘objectivity’ is an insufficient concept for dealing with the recursive complexities of clinical practice, and that its application to clinical issues leads both to fragmentation and timelessness. Drawing on the concepts of post modern science, ‘consensual domain’ and ‘irreversibility’ are put forward as more appropriate principles for orienting practice, and the development of ‘symmetry‐breaking interventions' is advanced as a useful therapeutic strategy in addressing situations where chronicity has taken hold.

An individual practitioner's development as a family therapist occurs in the context of the family therapy movement, most manifestly present in its literature and in seminars and workshops offered by its leading exponents. The process by which the therapist interacts with the broader field and consequently incurs shifts in perspective is rarely decribed, or theoretically elucidated. In this current paper, the author's changing orientation to the treatment of anorexia nervosa is viewed via theoretical discussions and case illustrations. The concept of co-evolution, as defined by both Bateson and Jantsch, is invoked to explain how interaction with other practitioners and literature can produce changes in therapeutic emphasis, and Prigogine's concepts of dissipative structures and bifurcation points are utilised in locating both therapeutic and theoretical shifts in time. The discussion briefly considers how therapists can co-evolve with conservative work situations to produce broader contextual changes.