Approaches to intervention

This chapter discusses four approaches to practice that may be useful in guiding work with marital problems. Of these, crisis intervention, task-centred work, and group work are psychological in character, while sex therapy constitutes an approach to working on particular sexual tasks, using primarily behavioural techniques. This therefore appears after the section on task-centred work as a highly specific instance of that approach. Crisis intervention is discussed first, since work on marital relationships frequently begins because couples have exhausted their own resources and feel they are experiencing a crisis.