More About Genograms by Monica McGoldrick Over the past few decades use of the genogram as a practical tool for mapping family patterns has become more and more widespread among health-care professionals. As genograms have become widely used in the fields of medicine, psychology, social work, and the other health care, human service, and even legal fields, I wrote, originally with Randy Gerson, Genograms: Assessment and Intervention, a practical guide to genograms, now in its second edition and published by W. W. Norton, to illustrate more fully the growing diversity of family forms and patterns in our society and the applications of genograms in clinical practice. The genogram is still a tool in progress. Based on feedback from those who read the book and use genograms in their work as well as other developments in the field, the symbols have been evolved since the first edition appeared in 1985, which reflected a standardization developed by the North American Primary Care Research Group in collaboration with leading family therapists. We hope that evolution of the genogram as a tool will continue as clinicians use genograms to track the complexity of family process. While a genogram can provide a fascinating view into the richness of a family's dynamics for those in the know, it may remain a collection of meaningless squares and circles on a page to those who don't know the players in the drama. Our solution to this dilemma has been to illustrate the theory of genograms primarily with famous families about whom we all have some knowledge, rather than clinical cases. We are family therapists, not historians, and thus the information we have been able to glean about these famous families is limited. Most of the sources have been newspapers, magazines and biographies. Many readers may know more about some of the families than we were able to uncover from published sources. We will from time to time be putting the genograms of various famous families on the website. We trust that future biographers will be more aware of family systems and use genograms to broaden their perspective on the individuals and families they describe. We welcome any information from readers about the people we have included- especially from those more expert at gathering genealogical and other information about these people. We apologize in advance for any inaccuracies in the diagrams as they are drawn.
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