Couple Work in South Africa: An Historical overview from Cape Town

We have chosen to focus on the development of couple work in Cape Town, which has grown over the years from its humble beginnings in the voluntary marriage guidance movement in South Africa to the present lively and vibrant interest in the application of psychoanalytic thinking to couple work. The current development described is mainly among private practitioner therapists in Cape Town, as it is in other centres, too. While there are supervision and teaching links between the Cape Town group, Johannesburg, and Durban, these centres have probably been more influenced by the Imago therapy model, over the past years. However, there is a strong trend in the direction of in-depth couple work emerging. This parallels other psychoanalytic initiatives in South Africa, as our first psychoanalytic training for individual psychoanalysts, under the auspices of the IPA, is now in its infancy.

This direction towards more in-depth work represents a shift from the early roots of South African couple work. In 1948, in the Western Cape, the Marriage Bureau began operating under the auspices of the Afrikaanse Christelike Vroue Vereeniging. This early development was in direct response to increasing anxiety about the rising divorce rate in South Africa. Soon, a committee of members of the Cape Town Community was formed to support the small organisation. Meanwhile, in Johannesburg, the Matrimonial Conciliation Board had been started. It was this organisation that was responsible for bringing Dr David Mace, founder of the British Marriage Guidance Movement, to South Africa for six months. Dr Mace assisted the small, newly founded societies to organise along the lines of Marriage Guidance in Britain. Suitable volunteers were selected and trained. In 1958, the Cape Town Marriage Guidance Society, as it was then called, became a registered welfare organisation. By 1981, there were seventeen affiliated branches of what was by then known as FAMSA (Family and Marriage South Africa), all affili