i currently provide CPP (child parent psychotherapy/Infant Mental Health/Dyadic Therapy) and the parent mental services are referred out to other providers. I conduct individual therapy as needed with the parent however to identify issues risk factors.
If the same clinician work with the parent-child dyad and the parent alone, the challenge would be to be able to conduct each therapy without letting the other therapy invades its own space. It could be difficult to focus on each therapy per se. And typically when working with both a dyad and one member of this dyad, the clinician could tend to take the perspective of this person within the dyad therapy.
I agree with Isabelle that a therapist working with several roles and subsystems in the same family may encounter difficulties relating to her perspective and ability to contain the needs of different subsystems in the family - I wish to add that an especially complicated transference situation may arise, if the individual therapy with a parent is based on child protective needs to identify and monitor risk issues rather than on the parents' own formulation of aims of development of parental abilities.
For a psychodynamic therapist, seeing the individual's family in addition to seeing the individual is a 'No, no!" because s/he doesn't want to interfere with the transference in the therapeutic relationship, etc.
In contrast, for a systems therapist, this arrangement is fine as long as the therapist knows how to manage all these relationships and use them in the best interest of the client.
It seems to me that whether psychodynamic or systemic therapy, the possible complications created by seeing different members of the same family are of the same nature, namely - as Stephen rightly points to - how to manage all these relationships in the best interest of the client. But maybe, especially when carrying out psychotherapy in a child protective context, the core question concerns who is the client, anyhow?
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