The Ramsay Family in Virginia Woolf''s To the Lighthouse: A Study of Arrest at Stage Three of Family Development as Delineated in Solomon''s "A Developmental, Conceptual Premise for Family Therapy"

The five stages of family development and their phase-specific tasks as delineated by Michael A. Solomon in an article that appeared in this journal (1973) are given dramatic representation by Virginia Woolf in her novel To the Lighthouse (1927). The novel begins with the Ramsay family system arrested at the third stage of development; and it is only after the death of Mrs. Ramsay that the remaining family members begin to attend to the phase-specific tasks of stages four and five, and family development commences.     

The Concept of Collusion: A Combined Systemic-Psychodynamic Approach to Marital Therapy

The author presents some new theoretical aspects and therapeutic implications of the concept of Couples in Collusion, (22), first published in 1975. According to this concept, the emotional attraction in the selection of a mate is based on a fascinating, mutual, and alarming theme, shared by both partners in order to be mastered together. The partners unavowedly start colluding to compensate for former frustrations and to repress fears of intimacy. After some time of living together and in defense of repressed feelings, they may enter into an escalation of the dysfunctional interactional pattern. Experience shows that severely neurotic personalities don't necessarily start colluding, provided that their partners don't gratify regressive needs or reinforce their defenses but help to cope with the frustrations of these unfulfilled regressive wishes. Therapies based on the concept of collusion aim at the improvement of intradyadic and extradyadic boundaries and the depolarization of extreme progressive-regressive behavior. These goals can be reached by both systemic and psychodynamic techniques. The concept of collusion may serve as a guide for this therapeutic process.     

The co-therapy relationship: Mutuality,agreement and client outcome

This project, utilizing a pretest and posttest design, studied interactions between co-therapists and the relationships of their interactions to client outcome. Six co-therapist pairs at a counseling center saw two clients in multiple treatments yielding twelve cases. The study investigated co-therapist relationships in regard to: (a) their level of mutuality or caring for their partners, (b) their ratings of the quality of their relationships, and (c) their agreement as to perceptions and behavior during sessions. Also investigated were: the relation of co-therapist interaction to client outcome and the personal growth of the therapists over the course of therapy. Results supported success claims of the literature concerning co-therapy.