ABSTRACT
When I first started professional work with troubled couples and families almost forty years ago, the dominant theoretical orientation in the mental health field was that of orthodox psychoanalytic teaching. A cardinal rule was that therapists, in order to protect the transference relationship between themselves and their clients, never saw or spoke to spouses, parents, or children. If your identified patient was a child, the child would be in individual therapy with a psychologist or psychiatrist and, if other family members were seen, a social worker did "casework" with them. Ninety-five percent of the time, "them" was the child's mother; fathers were rarely involved in the therapy process. It was permissible for the social workers to interview the parents together on those rare instances when fathers came to the clinics because they "weren't really doing psychotherapy." After ten years of performing "casework" with parents and avoiding virtually all contacts with the "real patients," I returned to the University of Pennsylvania for doctoral studies and with hopes of learning marriage counseling. I was fortunate enough to have my advanced clinical training at the Marriage Council of Philadelphia under that esteemed pioneer, Emily Hartshorne Mudd, and her able staff. She had published her first book, The Practice of Marriage Counseling, in 1951 with Association Press. While she was always careful to pay homage to the medical profession, especially psychiatry, with its psychoanalytical, individualistic emphasis, Dr. Mudd has for years been advocating, teaching, and practicing intervening with couples' problems by having one therapist work with both partners in the marital system. She quoted one of her mentors, Frederick Allen, MD, an eminent Philadelphia child psychiatrist:
The same counselor should work with both partners. By having two different counselors on a case, the focus, the dynamics, the interaction, the interweaving of the service toward a common goal, would be lost. It would be working with individuals instead of with marriage partners and complicate the problem for which help is sought.
(p. 204 from a February 10, 1949 presentation by Dr. Allen)