Marital Therapy

This book is welcomed to the series as a truly unique contribution to the literature on marital therapy. It is written for the empirically oriented psychotherapist, regardless of his or her discipline, who encounters patients with marital discord and has been distressed by the absence of an acceptable conceptual model for treatment. Psychoanalysis, behavior therapy, general system theory, and social learning theory have all made important contributions to treatment. But all too often these approaches have focused either on individual psychopathology or on the formal elements of marital interaction. This volume is the first to propose an approach to marital therapy which is clinically sophisticated, empirically based and which integrates important elements of seemingly disparate theoretical systems. The result is a cognitive-behavioral model for the treatment of marital discord which borrows from both psychoanalytic and behavioral contributions by translating them into the language of cognitive social psychology. The author documents the toll in human suffering as well as the ubiquitous nature of marriage-related problems. Despite the frequency with which marital dissatisfaction and discord are encountered in clinical practice, an amazingly high percentage of mental health professionals have received inadequate training in either the theory or technique of effective clinical intervention. The absence of a conceptual framework linking individual psychopathology to interactional difficulties has wors- ened the problem for clinicians interested in conjoint treatment.