Systemic Therapy with an Individual

Reflection on Systemic Therapy with an Individual

The journal article "Advances in Coaching: Family Therapy with One Person" (McGoldrick and Carter, 2001) illustrated how systemic therapy could be done with an individual. The theoretical basis comes from the belief that with change in one person within a system, there would be ripple effect on others. This "one person" is usually the most motivated and functional member in family.  If this is the case, wouldn't it be more systemic to work with more of than one such motivated persons, if they were available? Would it be more effective to concurrently work individually with the "symptomatic" person in a more intrapsychic model, and eventually when ready and consent given by both ends, do joint sessions? 

In preparation for my interview for my MSc application, I'm also starting to think of some research questions for dissertation in my second year. I have two research questions in mind deriving from here : 1. Which type of systemic therapy with an individual is more effective, one that works with the referred person or a significant other?  2. Does number matters in systemic therapy  - involving how many persons is too few, or too many in a session?
Say, what happens if there are 10 or more family members when there is just limited time (1 or 1.5 hours), limited attention-span and limited space to get round to everyone...

Post-reflection (23 May 10): As I'm reading more about ethics in practices now, I would question myself if the questions I posted above came too much from a rather "expert" position. I would need to put the questions into the relevant organisational, cultural and other contextual lenses to answer them. Also, there would be limitations in actual clinical practice to include more persons in a session, eg. client not giving consent, etc, so it would be helpful to have some idea of what could be done I were to be in the worst scenario of only be able to work with only one person in the system.