ABSTRACT
Family and couple therapy were born into the cradle of psychoanalysis from diverse sources. In the United States in the 1950s, Nathan Ackerman realised that his psychoanalyst colleagues had overlooked the influence of the most important relationships of their patients, and began to see whole families therapeutically. Family and couple treatments became increasingly surface and behaviourally oriented, employing psycho-education and behavioral manipulation more than insight or understanding. Another significant development was the birth of significant understanding of sexuality in relationships, notably through the work of Masters and Johnson in the 1960s and 1970s, as translated into psychoanalytic terms by Helen Singer Kaplan in the 1970s and 1980s. In many European and South American countries, however, psychoanalytic interest in families and couples remains strong. In these regions, there is a tradition of psychoanalytic family and couple therapy that has never been eclipsed by the non-analytic family therapies.
