Editorial: Emerging Principles of Practice in Couple and Family therapy

• Published date: 01 September 2017
• Author: Jay L. Lebow
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/famp.12309
• Date: 01 September 2017

SEPTEMBER 2017 VOLUME 56 NUMBER 3

Editorial: Emerging Principles of Practice in Couple

and Family therapy

JAY L. LEBOW*

Fam Proc 56:535–539, 2017

This issue includes a very thought-provoking article by Arthur Nielsen about the

practice of couple therapy (Nielsen, 2017). The article offers Nielsen’s formulation for

some best practices of couple therapy, the working template of a highly skillful clinician

and supervisor, but also invites the broader question of whether we are ready to move

beyond the discussion of specific treatment models to an integrative understanding of

underlying principles of couple and family therapy.

Couple and family therapy began as a rich mix of interrelated methods. However, with

the emergence of training institutes and then evidence-based treatments, couple and fam-

ily therapy evolved into a number of competing methods, which on the surface accentuate

very different aspects of relational life, theories of human problems, and methods of inter-

vention (Gurman & Fraenkel, 2002; Lebow, 2014, 2016, 2017; Lebow & Stroud, 2013). In

this evolution, the early common ground of treatments fractured as some, for example,

accentuated the teaching of skills (Christensen, Dimidjian, & Martell, 2015; Roddy, Now-

lan, Doss, & Christensen, 2016), others restructuring systems (Rohrbaugh & Shoham,

2015), and still others remaining nondirective (Dickerson, 2014).

Yet in looking at the work of most couple and family therapists, it is clear that there is

an underlying shared foundation for this work (Lebow, 2014; Sprenkle, Davis, & Lebow,

2009). As I have described at length elsewhere (Lebow, 2014), this underlying foundation

consists of several parts. First, there are common factors underlying all effective

psychotherapies, such as the therapeutic alliance and installation of hope, that apply to

individual as well as relational therapies (Norcross & Lambert, 2011). Second, there are

the special common factors, such as the focus on relational life, that are unique to couple

and family therapies (Sprenkle et al., 2009) . Third is the marvelous set of techniques and

methods of assessment and intervention that have been developed within the schools of

couple and family therapy. These methods are, of course, applied within specific treat-

ments in particular ways, but these concepts and methods are also readily exported into

*Editor, Family Process, and Family Institute at Northwestern, Evanston, IL.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jay Lebow, Ph.D., Family Institute at

Northwestern, 618 Library Place, Evanston, IL 60201. E-mail: j-lebow@northwestern.edu.

535

Family Process, Vol. 56, No. 3, 2017 ©2017 Family Process Institute

doi: 10.1111/famp.12309