Transference in Conjoint Treatment of Married Couples

The History of Couple Therapy: A Millennial Review

“…Even as psychoanalytic therapists were moving inevitably toward modern conjoint methods, they seemed to still cling to a core individual mindset. Thus, Sager (1967b), certainly the most widely influential marriage therapist in the psychoanalytic tradition during the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., Sager, 1967a, 1976, 1981; Sager, Kaplan, Gundlach et al, 1971) wrote, “I am not primarily involved in treating marital disharmony, which is a symptom, but rather in treating the two individuals in the marriage” (Sager, 1967b, p. 185). Sager had not yet moved (cf.…”

“…The perspective of simultaneously including both the interpersonal and intrapsychic domains of experience has been developed in several theoretically integrative models of the marital relationships and marital therapy. Sager's (1976, 1981)“Marriage Contracts” Model, which addressed “conscious and verbalized” expectations, “conscious but not verbalized,” and “beyond awareness” or unconscious “contracts,” was grounded in psychoanalytic theory (Sager 1967a,b), but selectively used behavioral exchanges (such as point‐for‐point quid pro quos) and other assigned out‐of‐session tasks. W.…”

Recent developments in marital therapy

“…Whatever the advantage of this technique over rational discussion in providing access to, and influence upon, the emotional life of individuals, it was unnecessary when the original family members were actually in the room (as with parents and children in family therapy) or where the transferences were already fully established between the two spouses, who could be witnessed interacting together and where it was precisely these transferential projections of early family difficulties which were the source of the problem. Widely accepted paradigms are hard to escape from, but psychoanalysts such as Grunebaum and Christ (1978) and Sager (1966) in the US., and Main (1966) and Dicks (1967) in Britain eventually demonstrated that, when families or couples were seen together, therapy could be quicker, more effective and more widely applicable if the disturbing emotional relationships were clarified and changed where they already existed and were causing the trouble, rather than through encouraging their repetition in relation to the therapist.…”

Family therapy.

“…Some early treatments merged systems and psychodynamic methods (e.g., Ackerman, 1970;Framo, Weber, & Levine, 2003;Sager, 1967), and more recent formulations have placed object relations at the center of family treatment (e.g., J. S. Scharff & Bagnini, 2002). Psychodynamic family approaches share many characteristics and interventions.…”