Comprehensive Family Therapy (CFT) was developed originally by Arthur Stein in the late 1950’s and formalized by Diana and Sam Kirschner and their associates at the Institute for Comprehensive Family Therapy in the 1980’s. CFT integrates potent elements of psychodynamic, systems, and behavioral theory into a treatment model encompassing individual, couple, and family therapies.

CFT is like other psychotherapeutic approaches in viewing emotional difficulties as a composite of genetic, biochemical, environmental and relational factors. It’s the relational factors that the CFT therapist takes on ~ with what is fundamentally a relational approach. That is, the CFT therapist establishes a relationship with the client that is designed to repair damage from earlier life and correct faulty relational patterns getting in the way of healthier present-day relating.

To do this, CFT encourages the therapist to deeply involve him/herself in the life of the client. The therapist takes into consideration the quality of the relationship the client had with his/her parents, other authority figures, and current significant others as s/he establishes the bond with the client. The process of delineating appropriate boundaries for the work is, in and of itself, and intensive therapeutic endeavor.

CFT is a model of health rather than of disease. In the evaluation stage, the CFT therapist paints a picture of family relationships to assess where on the continuum of optimal family functioning the family currently falls. The standard medically-oriented model, on the other hand, paints a symptom picture to determine whether a client does or does not have a disease. Thus "change" in CFT is seen in the evolution of healthier relationships – spousal, rearing and independent (with friends and co-workers). The approach is comprehensive in that all levels of relating are addressed simultaneously. The therapist who is attracted to CFT, then, is one who is sophisticated both in thinking and relating.