A common base for psychotherapy and family therapy.

Describes the paradigms of psychoanalysis and family therapy and contends, based on clinical experience, that they have common links. For example, the insight sought in a psychoanalytic approach led inadvertently to changed interactions sought in family therapy, and changed interactions sought in family therapy led inadvertently to insight. The relationships among, sources of accuracy and distortion in formulation, sources of agreement and disagreement, and the role of real interactions in preserving object- and self-representations are explored. It is hypothesized that the change agent for both psychoanalysis and family therapy is the same. That is, the provision of unusual interactions in an emotionally significant relationship makes maintenance of existing self- and object-representations impossible. New mental operations that result constitute the change in individuals and the possibility of growth and new adaptations. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)