By the mid-1960s, family therapy had a problem it could itself have analysed quite well: a failure of communication. Everyone was drawing family diagrams, but nobody called them by the same name.

"Family diagram", "family tree chart", "intergenerational map" – the terms were as varied as the therapists who used them. What was missing was a name that captured the essence of the thing, and the paradox of the situation was that a discipline devoted to understanding communication had failed at its own.

The solution came around 1972 from Philip Guerin, a student of Murray Bowen's who could apparently think systemically and also read Greek. He combined genos (descent, lineage) and gramma (something written, a record) into "genogram" – and produced a word that immediately made clear what it was about, without anyone having to look it up.

A handsome name, certainly. But a name alone does not make a common language. What the young genogram needed more urgently than anything else was standardization. In the 1970s, every therapist drew their family diagrams according to their own judgement – circles here, squares there, lines in every direction. A genogram from New York was barely readable in California, which was roughly as useful as a map that only its maker can interpret.

The Pioneers of Family Therapy

It was, however, also a time when family therapy in the USA was experiencing its flowering, and there was no shortage of great personalities:

Salvador Minuchin (1921–2017), the Argentine pediatrician who developed Structural Family Therapy in the slums of New York. He worked with families that academic therapists had labelled "unreachable" – and proved that unreachable often simply means the therapist has not gone far enough.

Virginia Satir (1916–1988), the "mother of family therapy", who with her warm, direct manner brought families to talk honestly with each other for the first time. Hers is the lovely observation: "The problem is not the problem. Coping is the problem." – which, freely translated, means: it is not the problem that makes our lives difficult, but the way we try to get rid of it.

All these pioneers worked with family systems. But a unified visual tool that all of them understood – one that could do more than a family tree – was still missing. Creating this tool would become the life's work of a young woman who had originally studied Russian. That a Russianist of all people would bring order to family therapy is one of those turns that life, with its distinct taste for irony, occasionally arranges.