A Tandem Approach: Marriage Counseling as Process in Tandem with Individual Psychotherapy

More attention must be paid to the marriage and family unit in the mental health field (Haley, 1975), however, working exclusively with that unit and ascribing the cause of behavior solely to the interpersonal system would only perpetuate another kind of one-sidedness. This paper presents a tandem approach, a form of combined treatment, that maintains a balanced perspective of the individual and marriage and family unit, provides a synthesis for intrapsychic and interpersonal theories of the causation of behavior, integrates the techniques of the modalities of individual psychotherapy and marriage counseling, and expedites the solution of underlying intrapsychic and interpersonal problems