Lynn Hoffman (
Paris
Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...
,
France
France, officially the French Republic, is a country located primarily in Western Europe. Overseas France, Its overseas regions and territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the Atlantic Ocean#North Atlan ...
, September 10, 1924; December 21, 2017)
was an American
social work
Social work is an academic discipline and practice-based profession concerned with meeting the basic needs of individuals, families, groups, communities, and society as a whole to enhance their individual and collective well-being. Social wo ...
er,
family therapist
Family therapy (also referred to as family counseling, family systems therapy, marriage and family therapy, couple and family therapy) is a branch of psychotherapy focused on family, families and couples in intimate relationships to nurture chang ...
, author and historian of family therapy. Her mother,
Ruth Reeves
Ruth Marie Reeves (1892–1966) was an American painter, Art Deco textile designer and expert on Indian handicrafts.
Early life and education
Ruth Marie Reeves was born in Redlands, California, on July 14, 1892. She attended the Pratt Institute i ...
was a painter,
Art Deco
Art Deco, short for the French (), is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design that first Art Deco in Paris, appeared in Paris in the 1910s just before World War I and flourished in the United States and Europe during the 1920 ...
textile designer and an originator of the
American Index of Design. She graduated
summa cum laude
Latin honors are a system of Latin phrases used in some colleges and universities to indicate the level of distinction with which an academic degree has been earned. The system is primarily used in the United States. It is also used in some Sout ...
in
English literature
English literature is literature written in the English language from the English-speaking world. The English language has developed over more than 1,400 years. The earliest forms of English, a set of Anglo-Frisian languages, Anglo-Frisian d ...
in 1946 from
Radcliffe College
Radcliffe College was a Women's colleges in the United States, women's Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that was founded in 1879. In 1999, it was fully incorporated into Harvard Colle ...
, and after editing psychology works, she started
MSW
MSW may stand for: Businesses and organisations
* Manatawny Still Works, a craft distillery in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, United States
* Massawa International Airport, Eritrea (by IATA code)
* Ministry of Interior (Poland) ()
* Muslim Society of Was ...
studies in 1969 and specialized in family therapy.
Originally a
systems
A system is a group of interacting or interrelated elements that act according to a set of rules to form a unified whole. A system, surrounded and influenced by its environment, is described by its boundaries, structure and purpose and is exp ...
-
strategic
Strategy (from Greek στρατηγία ''stratēgia'', "troop leadership; office of general, command, generalship") is a general plan to achieve one or more long-term or overall goals under conditions of uncertainty. In the sense of the "art o ...
theorist and therapist, she became a proponent of post-systems/
post-modern
Postmodernism encompasses a variety of artistic, cultural, and philosophical movements that claim to mark a break from modernism
Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experi ...
/collaborative approaches. She was an advisory editor of ''
Family Process
''Family Process'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering research on family system issues, including policy and applied practice. It is published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the Family Process Institute. Since 2007, the journal ...
'' and ''
Journal of Marital & Family Therapy
The ''Journal of Marital and Family Therapy'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy. The journal was established in 1975. The current editor ...
''. Until her retirement in 2000, she had for many years been on the faculty of the
Ackerman Institute and the
Smith College School of Social Work. She spent her last years as a lecturer at
Saint Joseph College in
West Hartford
West Hartford is a town in Hartford County, Connecticut, United States, west of downtown Hartford. The town is part of the Capitol Planning Region. The population was 64,083 at the 2020 census.
The town's popular downtown area is colloquiall ...
,
Connecticut
Connecticut ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It borders Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, New York (state), New York to the west, and Long Island Sound to the south. ...
.
Bibliography
*
Haley, J. & Hoffman, L. (1967; 1994)
''Techniques of family therapy.''New York: Basic Books. (1994 printing – Northvale, NJ: Aronson.)
*Hoffman, L. (1981). ''Foundations of Family Therapy: A Conceptual Framework for Systems Change.'' New York: Basic Books.
*
*
*
*Hoffman, L. (1993)
''Exchanging Voices: A Collaborative Approach to Family Therapy.''London: Karnac Books.
*
*Hoffman, L. (2002). ''Family Therapy: An Intimate History.'' New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
*Hoffman, L. (2007). The art of "withness": A new bright edge. In H. Anderson & D. Gehart (Eds.), ''Collaborative therapy: Relationships and conversations that make a difference'' (pp. 63–79). New York, NY: Taylor & Francis Group.
See also
*
Harlene Anderson
Harlene Anderson (born 1942) is an American psychologist and a cofounder of the Postmodern Collaborative Approach to therapy. In the 1980s, Anderson and her colleague Harold A. Goolishian pioneered a new technique that is used to relate to patients ...
*
Jay Haley
Jay Douglas Haley (July 19, 1923 – February 13, 2007) was one of the founding figures of Problem-solving brief therapy and family therapy in general and of the strategic model of psychotherapy, and he was one of the more accomplished teachers, ...
Notes
External links
Lynn Hoffman
from ''Daily Hampshire Gazette
The ''Daily Hampshire Gazette'' is a six-day morning daily newspaper based in Northampton, Massachusetts, United States, and covering all of Hampshire County, Massachusetts, Hampshire County, southern towns of Franklin County, Massachusetts, Fra ...
''
article
from ''Amherst Bulletin
The ''Daily Hampshire Gazette'' is a six-day morning daily newspaper based in Northampton, Massachusetts, United States, and covering all of Hampshire County, southern towns of Franklin County, and Holyoke. The newspaper prints Monday through ...
''
Social Construction Therapies Network
Family therapists
American psychotherapists
1924 births
2017 deaths
American expatriates in France
Radcliffe College alumni
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