ROLE REPERTOIRE IN MARRIAGE

Abstract

Marriage counselling has been largely concerned with restoring the union to a level of "healthy interaction," the very treatment for which means that one, or both, partners admit to being guilty of neurotic behavior. Successful counselling is achieved by modifying the behavior of the most guilty party, usually in the direction of the more stable or dominant partner. Such practices have relied heavily on psychiatric-psychological quests for diagnostic definitions of normal personality, which has perhaps hindered our understanding of the rich variety of human behavior for at least the last half century. Recently alternative and perhaps more useful models for exploring human behavior have become available to us, particularly those involving role playing, a therapeutic concept originating with the pioneering work of J. L. Moreno, which has been further explored and utilized by Laing, Cooper, and others.