The Technique of Married Couple Group Therapy

Couples group psychotherapy: Rebuilding the marital relationship following disclosure of sexual deviance.

“…A review of the literature turned up only one paper (Hitchens, 1972) about the use of couples group psychotherapy as an adjunct to a specialized group therapy program for sex offenders. Marital group therapies have been utilized in the treatment of sexual and marital dysfunctions (Blinder & Kirschenbaum, 1967; Price et al, 1980; Reckless & Byrd, 1980; Smith & Duane, 1980), as well as in the treatment of alcohol addiction (O’Farrell & Cutter, 1984).…”

A Family Perspective of Psychosomatic Factors in Illness: A Review of the Literature

“…One would have liked more data; it seems reductionistic to associate headaches, impotence, phobia, etc. But Haley's insight is not dissimilar to Freud's (45) “a husband informs the physician as follows: ‘my wife suffers from nerves, so that she gets on badly with me: please cure her so that we may lead a happy married life again.’ But often it turns out that such a request is impossible to fulfill — as soon as the wife is freed from her neurotic inhibitions she sets about dissolving the marriage, for her neurosis was the sole condition under which maintenance of the marriage was possible.” Blinder (12), from his experience treating couples' groups states, “Spouses will sabotage their partner's attempts to remove the very symptoms that appear to cause so much dissension between them, lest this clear the field for exposure of their own pathology,”—“the man whose wife ceases to be frigid may suddenly find himself impotent; the woman whose husband's headaches no longer confine them to the house may for the first time be confronted with the fact of her own agoraphobia.” One factor in psychosomatic symptoms in the couples was “failure to meet lifelong narcissistic yearnings for unconditional love.”…”

Marital Therapy: An Integrative Behavioral‐Learning Model*

“…In expanding the behavioral-learning approach, the following sources were used: Bach and Deutsch ( 1970) who illustrated the use of explicit guidelines in communication training; Blinder and Kirschenbaum (1967), Satir (1967) and others who emphasized cognitive restructuring and affective relabeling to remove the couple's distress from its negative, emotionally destructive context; Hurvitz ( 1970) in his strategy of encouraging couples to adopt constructive as opposed to nonconstructive conceptions of their problems; and Lederer and Jackson ( 1968) in the application of contractual exchange as a problem solving strategy in the dyad. An integrative rationale was derived from problem solving theory (Bloom & Broder, 1950;Osborn, 1963) whereby the entire therapy process is conceived as the couple being taught a logical sequence of problem solving involving the different treatment components delineated in the therapy program.…”