Family psychology: Progress and prospects of a maturing discipline.

is the condition of modern day family psychology? Merely posing this question raises what in psychotherapy research has been termed the problem. An additional dimension of this question's presentation, given our circumstances, would be called the problem. While the criterion problem raises the question, What is our yardstick of measurement? the context problem has to do, as the very term reveals, with the context we wish to consider when asking about family psychology's current status. That is, asking about family psychology within modern day psychology is to ask about family therapy as well. We can, and should, ask about the status of family psychology, as an academic and scientific specialty within psychology. However, as many have observed (Buehlman, Gottman, & Katz, 1992; Kaslow, 1990; Liddle, 1988a, 1992; L'Abate, in press; Markman, 1992), the developmental level of family psychology must be considered, by anyone's evaluation, at an early stage. So, we distinguish family therapy as one clinical manifestation of family psychology. Early on, we were concerned with distinguishing family psychology from family therapy (Kaslow, 1987; Liddle, 1987a). With this accomplished, the present scene seems to call for work that can understand family therapy, as a clinical specialty, and perhaps as a field and distinct profession as well, as a force within mainstream psychology.