ABSTRACT
Three principal theoretical approaches have influenced the development and practice of marital therapy in Britain and the United States: psychodynamic, systems, and behavioural theory. Of the three, only the first has been applied with any consistency in Britain to marital problems, through the writings of the Institute of Marital Studies. Consequently, this is the approach with which British social workers are most familiar, although apart from Dicks’s (1967) work their writings are hardly known in the United States. It has tended, perhaps unfortunately, to dwarf the contributions of other approaches, which may in fact be more easily understood and used by social workers in non-specialist settings.
