Historical Origins
The major development of contextual therapy was begun by Ivan Boszormanyi-Nagy with contributions by Geraldine Spark and other colleagues beginning in the late 1960s and continuing through the mid-1980s. Boszormanyi-Nagy continued the development of aspects of the theory throughout the rest of his life until his death in 2007. The main original text of contextual therapy is Invisible Loyalties, which was published in 1973 (Boszormanyi-Nagy & Spark, 1973). This text articulated the concepts of indebtedness to family of origin, ethical and unethical relating, and the idea of an intergenerational ledger that connects generations of families.
The underpinnings of contextual therapy came out of Boszormanyi-Nagy’s work as a psychiatrist treating schizophrenic patients and their families at the Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute beginning in 1957 and
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There is little body of further research or broad use to compare to some of the major family therapy approaches. This lack of major continuation of contextual therapy may be due in part to Boszormanyi-Nagy’s focus on a search for common denominators of therapy as a whole rather than on specifically developing another school of family therapy. Yet the concept of relational ethics has been infused into much of the field of therapy as a whole with the movement toward social justice (Fowers & Wenger, 1997). Several studies over the years have used contextual therapy as the basis for intervention with immigration and acculturation stress (Flores-Ortiz & Bemal, 1989; Dutta, 2014), gay fathers (Rootes, 2013), difficulties of aging families (Anderson & Hargrave, 1990; Jones & Flickinger, 1987), incest within families (Lutz & Medway, 1984), and addiction (Flores-Ortiz et al., 1989; Olson & Gariti, 1993; Soyez, Tatrai, Broekaert, & Bracke,