ABSTRACT
As individual psychotherapy has stimulated the emergence of a dynamic model of personality organization (Freud), conjoint family therapy presses for an adequate model of transactional dynamics. This is not to say that in studying the family level of social organization one can dispense with Freudian psychodynamics. It means that family relations represent a higher, more complex organizational level which requires a broadened theoretical outlook in order to explain the family's emergent interactional and transactional phenomena. That the construction of a transactional language is of great practical significance is immediately apparent to those psychotherapists and psychoanalysts who, having been trained in individual-oriented theories and techniques of psychotherapy, have subsequently been exposed to the experience and practice of conjoint family therapy. The group process or the psychology of groups, as has been often stated, cannot be composed of the additive properties of the component individuals, and the individual's motivation
34 INTENSIVE FAMILY THERAPY
will be greatly altered when subjected to group psychology. Conceivably, family psychiatry can become the foundation of a general understanding of the deeper dynamics of all social relations.
