Diana Kirschner

Diana Adile Kirschner is an American psychologist and author. Early in her career she was involved in the field of integrative psychotherapy, a movement that seeks to find the best practices from among the major schools of therapy. Kirschner's work involved integrating individual therapy, couples therapy, and family therapy into an approach called Comprehensive Family Therapy. The book she coauthored, Comprehensive Family Therapy, was nominated by the American Psychological Association as one of the 100 most important books on family psychology.

Kirschner has written extensively on psychotherapy integration, couples and family therapy, the treatment of sexual abuse, and the role of psychologists in family-owned businesses and the media. Her chapter on Comprehensive Family Therapy was included in the two-volume survey and history of the field, Voices in Family Psychology. Various texts on integrative psychotherapy have included Kirschner's work on treating couples and families, the process of change, the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder in incest survivors in the context of family dysfunction, and the treatment of difficult children.

Kirschner was a founding member of the editorial board and contributor to the Journal of Couples Therapy. She was also a founding faculty member and director of the Pennsylvania-based Institute for Comprehensive Family Therapy, a non-profit, postgraduate mental health training and treatment center whose certificate program in marriage and family therapy was accredited by the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy.

A past focus of Kirschner's research has been the impact of the marital relationship on children's functioning and the common underlying characteristics of healthy marriages. Kirschner hypothesized the existence of a set of critical variables impacting children's well-being and social functioning, as well as the existence of a link between the quality of the marital relationship and everyday marital conflict and the way the spouses reared the child. Recent studies have validated this correlation. In a 2002 study of over 2,500 married parents with a child under 18 living at home, researchers found that marital conflict had a direct impact on children's problems, was related to more frequent use of harsh discipline, and increased the level of conflict between parents and adolescents. Kirschner's findings regarding the impact of marital conflict on children's adjustment are relevant to the "nature vs. nurture" controversy. Cummings and Davies reported similar results.

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