The Concept of Positivity in Family Therapy and the Task of Psychological Assistance to the Contemporary Russian Family

From a sociological standpoint, the family is the most important element of society: a healthy family properly performing all its functions—cultural, emotional, and socioeconomic—is necessary for a healthy society. In psychological terms the family may be defined as a system of interpersonal interactions whose purpose, generally speaking, is, on the one hand, to protect the individual from the manipulative influences of society and, on the other, to adapt the individual to life in that society and provide the means for functioning normally within it. All the stages of a person's life, all the most acute existential problems of mankind, are represented, in one form or another, in family psychology, if only because the family is the most important element of the "social situation of each human individual's development" (Vygotsky); yet the personal and the social are present in it in a complex and contradictory relationship. Interactions among family members on the one hand further the incorporation of socie...