Presents a clinical technique for working with troubled couples based on a particular theory of multiple communication in therapy. The technique, a "systemic couples reversal," prescribes a way of managing the multiple communications of stability, change, and meaningful Rorschach. Provides a theoretical map, clinical procedure, and…

Argues that theorists have ignored insights of family therapists such as Bateson, Boszormenyi-Nagy and Spark, Satir, and Watzlawick and Weakland. Family therapy provides unique insights into the nature of intimacy. Existing case material adds to descriptions of intimate relations. Examples of how systems theorists could look at intimacy supplement…

Rapprochement among competing methods and views of marital and family therapy constitutes a major creative challenge for the field in the 1980s. Although integrative efforts have begun, psychodynamic understanding of intimate relationships is necessary for continuation of integrative process growth. (Author/NRB)