Couples on the Fault Line

Couple therapy is no longer simply a matter of helping couples adjust to the different stages of the life cycle: the life cycle itself has changed. Advances in reproductive technology, the rise of electronic communication, increasing time pressures of daily life, the continuing transformation of gender roles, and the loosening of constraints on same-sex and cross-cultural partnerships are just some of the developments reshaping relationships today. This cutting-edge book brings together prominent marital and family therapists to explore the new challenges--and opportunities--facing couples and the clinicians who work with them. Illustrated with vivid case material, the volume presents a range of approaches to helping couples reconsider and reorder their life priorities around such central issues as love, marriage, parenting, commitment, intimacy, and aging.

The authors of these chapters represent many different outlooks and areas of expertise. What they share is the ability to translate social awareness into clinical practice--reexamining and reevaluating accepted family therapy models and techniques in light of the changing contexts in which couples live. Illuminating the many ways that the private world of the couple is affected by outside social, cultural, and technological forces, chapters cover such topics as:

*Making time for each other in the information age

*Delayed parenting, reproductive technologies, and the crisis of infertility

*Divorce, remarriages, and growing old together

*Multiculturalism in the family--issues facing cross-cultural couples

*Myths and realities of gender roles today

*Working with gay and lesbian couples

*Current approaches to domestic violence

*Treating depression in the couple therapy context

Offering fresh perspectives and cogent clinical insights, this book is a vital resource for therapists working with couples and for advanced students of family therapy, social work, clinical psychology, and psychiatry. In the classroom, it will serve as a supplemental text in courses on the family life cycle and the treatment of couples.