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This is an important new book in the field of marital therapy. When I first picked it up and looked at the title and author, I recalled an article by Sager, Kaplan, and others on the Marriage Research Committee of the Society of Medical Psychoanalysts, in 1971 in Family Process. The article was excellent, so I assumed that the senior author had expanded it into a book. This he has done, but he has accomplished much more than that.
Sager has developed a new way of looking at couple interaction. Although others (Don Jackson, for example) have developed classification systems in marriage and family counseling, Sager's system is particularly appealing for its simplicity and elegance. He divides the behavior of partners into seven partner-behavior profiles: equal, romantic, parental, childlike, rational, companionate, and parallel. He not only gives the characteristics of each but carefully describes what happens when any two of the profile types—for instance, equal-romantic—develop a couple relationship.
The section on marriage contracts describes contracts from three levels: (1) conscious and verbalized as in the written contract, (2) conscious but not verbalized, and (3) unconscious and unverbalized. The first category is apparent at the time of marriage, the second shortly after the honeymoon; the