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I have had some experience with conjoint therapy with different therapeutic aims under a variety of circumstances. In some instances the aim and technique bear no relationship to the psychoanalytic method, even though psychoanalytic theory (especially object-relations theory) is the frame of reference. An example would be conjoint sessions with father, mother and adolescent child where the aim is clarification of disturbed metacommunication between the various family members.
More frequently I have conducted conjoint analytic psychotherapy with husband and wife with therapy of the marriage as the primary focus and when formal psychoanalysis of one or both partners was not practical nor indicated.
More closely related to the focus of the present panel is conjoint therapy as an addendum or supplement to psychoanalysis. This may be
instituted in the terminal phase of an analysis of one marital partner or after termination of analysis proper.
In this instance and as a parameter of psychoanalytic therapy, I would make a distinction between such a procedure and that of individual or conjoint interviewing of the spouse of an analysand, because the conjoint therapy is an addendum or introduced as a method of termination.
As an addendum, it may be desirable to have such therapy conducted by a therapist other than the original analyst, especially when the transference images which the unanalyzed partner and the analyst have formed of each other are so fixed as to become mutually reinforcing and self-fulfilling. This, too, depends largely on the personality and experience of the original analyst.
Not long ago, a colleague who was moving to another city referred a forty-three-year-old woman to me. He felt that, despite an otherwise successful analysis, she still needed support in dealing with the “reality” of an inadequate husband. In our first session this woman let drop a remark which caused me to think her “inadequate” husband was in large part a myth shared by the patient and