Henry V. Dicks

In this book the author has gathered the various aspects of his theoretical and clinical approach to marriage difficulties into a coherent system, for the benefit of professional workers and students concerned with family and community psychiatry and case work.

He preserves the essentials of the steps by which his concepts developed from one-person therapy into hypotheses for understanding interaction, with the couple as the unit of study.

Based in the psychoanalytic thought of Klein and Fairbairn, Dr. Dicks views both "happy" and disturbed marriages as resultants of motivations determined by residual primary object-relational needs leading to the divergent social and cultural norms and expectations each partner brings to the relationship, which in a time of rapid social change and loss of compelling family mores produce conflicts in role playing in marital as in other group relations. The symptomatology of the resulting stress situations is described in terms of incongruities of social and personal norms with unrecognized demands on self and partner for meeting residual infantile needs.… (altro)