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I have always been interested in integration, in seeing the value of more than one viewpoint and approach to solving problems. This began at my family’s dinner table, as I watched my moderate Republican father debate history and politics with my socially activist mother, an ardent Democrat. Their marriage was also bedeviled by recurring arguments concerning the relative merits of emotion and logic. No surprise that my career has focused on trying to help warring couples do better.
It helped that I loved school and pretty much all the subjects taught there. My educational path covered the waterfront: I majored in Social Studies at Harvard while taking premed courses, moved to Johns Hopkins for medical school, did my psychiatric residency at Yale (at a time when the biopsychosocial model was ascendant), then went to Philadelphia Child Guidance for family therapy training, and finally landed at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, which exposed me to self psychology and, later, to the seminal work of my colleague, Carla Leone (e.g., 2008), who invited me to a Meet the Author session at our national IAPSP conference.
As my clinical interest focused on couple therapy, I added behavioral interventions, including some from PREP (Markman et al., 2001), and others from expert negotiators (e.g., Fisher et al., 1981) which I included in the undergraduate course I created at Northwestern University, Marriage 101: Building Loving and Lasting Relationships (Nielsen et al., 2004). That course, now in its 22nd year, melds all the above inputs, offering students a combination of practical skills for handling conflict and self-exploration experiences to help them develop insight into how they relate to others.
All of this, together with many years of clinical work, led to my first integrative text on couple therapy, published in 2016, A Roadmap for Couple Therapy: Integrating Systemic, Psychodynamic, and Behavioral Approaches. Described by John Gottman (whose research also influenced m