PSYCHOTHERAPY WITH COUPLES

T he Tavlstock Institute of Marital Studies has a clalm to being the most important institution in the world for
the psychoanalytic study of marriage. It was. in 1948, the first institution founded along psychoanalytic lines to be dedicated to the study and improvement of marriage. at a time when the stability of marriage had begun to decline around the world. Most early psychoanalytic theorists had been wary of dealing with marriage. keud assumed that the health and the well-being of the individual were naturally above that of the survival or intrinsic value of relationships. While he understood that children benefited vastly from supportive and Iovlng parents
and were lucky indeed if they had parents who loved each other emotionally and sexually, his clinical writing L pervaded with the assumption that family members constitute a frequent and important source of harassment to the psychoanalyst getting on with the job of freeing the neurotic individual from the shackles of his past and of those family members who. in his view. so often offered formidable resistance to change.