Family Process

History

The journal was established in 1962 by Nathan Ackerman, Donald deAvila Jackson, and Jay Haley as a mutual project of the Mental Research Institute and the Family Institute (later to be named the Ackerman Institute for the Family). Haley became the first editor-in-chief. During this decade, the journal was sold for $1,000 to what would become the Family Process Institute.

Don Bloch became the second editor. Included in the journal during his tenure was the development of the many types of family therapy models, emphasis on the family life cycle, culture, immigration, marital therapy, and gender. In the early 1980s, Bloch retired as editor, and was succeeded by Carlos Sluzki. During his tenure, the journal became more focused on the diversity of families. Peter Steinglass became editor in the 1990s. Two different trends appeared: a growth of empirical research and the advancement of evidence-based and evidence-informed models of treatment, and the unfolding of the narrative approach in family therapy. These different paradigms, belief systems, sets of assumptions, and approaches to knowledge inhabited the journal side by side. Randomized clinical trials were reported in the journal for the first time.

From 1998 to 2003, the editorship passed to Carol Anderson, the journal's first woman editor.

In the first decade of the 21st century, Evan Imber-Black became editor with the journal publishing both clinical and research issues on such topics as divorce, Latino families, asthma, and interdisciplinary training. During this time, the first translations into Spanish appeared along with translated abstracts into simple Chinese and Spanish.

In 2012, Jay Lebow became the current editor. Video abstracts are now available online for many of the journal's articles, and the first Chinese translation of a full article was published in the journal in 2012.