Four Decades of International Collaboration with Tavistock Relationships

We began a rich collaboration with the Institute of Marital Studies (IMS) in 1982, which has continued in many forms over almost forty years. The Institute has seen many alterations of name and logos up to its current incarnation as Tavistock Relationships (TR), whilst consistently maintaining its leading role in teaching, research, and the practice of couples therapy. The tagline in their brochures says it all: supporting couples; strengthening families; safeguarding children.

Our association with the Tavi1 started when we were completing the first three-year evaluation of our Becoming a Family group intervention with parents expecting their first child. Christopher Clulow had just published his book, To Have and To Hold: Marriage, The First Baby and Preparing Couples for Parenthood (1982), and the publisher asked us to review it. We were delighted to find that Chris and his colleagues at the IMS had developed a way of working preventively with expectant couples to strengthen their relationships as they approached first-time parenthood, as we had been doing for some years with Californian first-time parents. As soon as he read our review, delighted to discover like-minded souls, Chris made contact and invited us to come to London so we could meet and talk in person. When we accepted his invitation, Chris, who was to become Director of the IMS, invited us to chat with him and his colleagues in their location at the Tavistock Centre, Swiss Cottage. At that time the IMS staff numbered six or seven clinicians. From afar, we had fantasised that the famous Tavistock Centre would occupy a cozy, ramshackle Victorian house, so we were somewhat taken aback by the modern industrial building in which the Tavi made its home from the mid-1960s until 2009, its long and dimly lit corridors lined with faded portraits of the leading descendants of the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology.

At the time, at the University of California, Berkeley, we were the only Psyc