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As part of the Marital Studies Series from the Tavistock Institute, this book examines marriage as the nexus of the interaction between social and individual needs. The eight contributors provide a scholarly description of marriage that is well grounded in a historical framework and benefits from the varied input of sociology, theology and psychoanalytic theory. In addition, a prologue sets forth the book's central themes using a highly relevant case study of marital conflict. In the first and final chapters, the editor, Christopher Clulow, discusses the central themes and concludes with the factors that can make for a ‘good enough marriage’.
Directed primarily at professionals dealing with the institution and relationship of marriage, this book is not first and foremost solution-orientated. Rather, it seeks to heighten awareness of the multi-layered nature of marriage, of the powerful interactive relationship between its public and private components, and to examine contemporary marriage within that context.
Although the book is organized around eight chapters with titles such as ‘Learning from divorce’, ‘Theological images of marriage’, ‘Women, men and intimacy’, the central themes weave in and out through all the chapters in a manner that sometimes seems disorganized and disconcerting. However, this interweaving also underscores the image of marriage, both institution and personal relationship, as an evolving, complex, interactive process. Social researchers and psychotherapists are urged to be more conscious of their own impact on the institution of marriage since their questions, assumptions and interactions are often taken as definitions of marriage, and judgements of what is good, bad and normal about it.
Marriage has changed a great deal in recent decades. The shift in emphasis from institution to companionate relationship was hastened by three interactive factors: the radically decreased correlation between sexual intercourse and procreation with its related p