Guest Editorial

Freud began the process of applying psychoanalysis to concerns beyond clinical work with the individual, investigating groups and cultural issues with a comprehensive reach rooted in analytic theory. He did not, however, follow up on the family. The couples that were parents to his early patients, like Dora and Hans, were supporting cast, not principals in his dramas—hindrances or helpers of the main character.

Nevertheless, his keenly observant eye captured so much information that others have been able to construct plausible family stories from his narratives and to offer alternate therapeutic strategies that might have involved the families. If we do this, it is not to second-guess Freud, but to document alternate paths for psychoanalytic understanding.

We credit John Bowlby, at the Tavistock Clinic's Children's Department, with the introduction of family treatment. Sometime around 1950, he is said to have made an almost off-hand remark to John Elderkin Bell about his belief in seeing the families of the children. Bowlby meant that he saw the parents, but Bell took the cue and began to see whole families and was followed in this by Nathan Ackerman. Bowlby enthusiastically approved of this development and also began to see families, as did a few other analysts. But the field of family therapy, with Americans in the lead, became nonanalytic because classical theory did not transfer well to a group setting. Later it became pointedly antianalytic—partly out of criticism of analysts for ignoring the family, and partly, we believe, as a way of establishing the field of family therapy as a separate entity in opposition to an identifiable enemy.

Some analysts continued to believe in conjoint therapy. The Tavistock was a hotbed of development of applied psychoanalysis, including work on organizational consultation and education. Enid Balint founded The Family Discussion Bureau, now called the Tavistock Marital Studies Institute, and Henry Dicks studied spouses in parallel ps