Discussion

Carolyn Maltas' paper, “Concurrent Therapies When Therapists Don't Concur,” addresses a common problem that has not been adequately discussed. Her case and presentation describe the complications of therapists who resist collaborative communication. Successful collaboration can be a wonderful experience for the therapists and the couple. It usually separates the individual neurotic conflicts from the marital conflicts, so that both can be understood, explained, and interpreted. The therapists get a chance to share information, frustration, and/or gratification with trusted colleagues, in unusually difficult but interesting cases.

When therapists do not concur, the individual therapists and marital therapist are isolated and left to improvise, often in creative ways. This paper demonstrates a creative, insightful, compassionate solution in a situation where both individual therapists were probably unaware of their countertransference reactions and busy overprotecting their patients. Maltas maneuvers the therapy into an understanding of the individual therapies, and, by refocusing the therapy, leads the spouses into a nonregressed, psychologically sophisticated, analytically oriented study of the dynamics in an ego-observing manner. She avoids the temptation to criticize the other therapists, probably a product of her own countertransference sophistication, and thus she avoids a marital therapy failure and probably a divorce.

Let me refer to my professional experience to put into context the frame of reference for my discussion. By 1981, I was a therapist in thirty-seven concurrent therapy cases, twenty-five with three therapists. In fifteen of these cases, I was the marital therapist, where both