Prologue

Family therapy began in the early 1960s WITH THE INFLUENCE OF Gregory Bateson and general systems theory on the founders of family therapy in the United States (Nathan Ackerman, Salvador Minuchin, Murray Bowen, Carl Whitaker, Jay Haley, and Virginia Satir). Some founders were analysts who recognized that relational contexts influence personality development. At that time, psychoanalysis did not include systems theory. In England, the analyst H. V. Dicks (1967) recognized the influence of relationship on development and introduced a model of mutual but separate analyses for couples. Given this history, family therapy and individual therapy developed separately. In England in the 1970s, object relations theory began to influence both family therapy and psychoanalysis, as did Fred Sander's book Individual and Family Therapy (1979) in the United States. Subsequently, relational psychoanalytic theory and intersubjective psychoanalytic theory, with their emphasis on the relational nature of all interaction, further influenced family therapy.

The reciprocal influence of family therapy and individual therapy allowed family therapists more flexibility in their techniques. They could now see members of a family individually while using a family concept during the treatment. Meanwhile, individual therapists (including psychoanalysts) who were influenced by systems theory were more likely to observe the interactively created aspects of an individual's dynamics. This idea now seems pervasive in most treatments, family or individual.

This issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry is dedicated to the idea that analytic formulations can further understanding of a couple and inform therapeutic action. The nine analysts writing here provide differing perspectives on understanding and treating couples' difficulties. We believe that both common denominators and differences can shed light on the usefulness of psychoanalytic thinking in therapeutic action with couples. In their articles, analysts Ba