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In recent years a number of patients have been entering treatment who are not easily helped by the standard analytic procedures. They run the gamut from borderline schizophrenics to persons with seemingly intractable character disorders. They seem to have been subjected to or to have lived through a series of circumstances in their formative years which make them difficult to affect by usual techniques.
This problem has led to the exploration and development of new approaches in therapy, aiming at a greater diversity of stimuli, a greater flexibility of treatment, and a greater variety of interpersonal experiences.4 One very recent development of this type is the attempt to structure the therapeutic situation so that it is analogous to the family setting in which the patient developed psychologically: toward this end, it employs two analysts and two or more therapeutic settings; one of the latter consists of standard individual analysis, the second of group analysis, and the optional third of alternate sessions (group meetings without the analyst). This method, which is now being subjected to ongoing research study in varied settings,3 will be referred to in this paper as “conjoint psychoanalysis.”