History and foundations

Understanding where couple therapy comes from… and in what spirit to enter it

This first chapter lays the foundation on which the whole training unfolds. In three complementary sequences, Robert Neuburger invites us to understand why and how couple therapy established itself as a specific practice, distinct from family therapy or marriage counselling.

He also shares the stance in which he offers this transmission: not as an instruction manual, but as a sharing of tools, to be appropriated according to one’s style, one’s clinical practice, one’s values.

Through a reading that is at once historical, systemic and existential, this chapter covers:

• the emergence of couple therapy in the face of the crumbling of traditional frames (extended family, work, institutions);
• the fundamental distinction between family therapy and couple therapy, centred not on a “designated patient” but on a bond between two subjects;
• the need, for each therapist, to cultivate a singular, non-prescriptive stance, founded on the thoughtful appropriation of clinical tools.