Dr. William Doherty, professor of Family Social Science, was featured in the New York Times in a story about couples therapy, specifically the challenges in the field and how it differs from individual therapy practice.
“For starters, there’s an ever-present risk of winning one spouse’s allegiance at the expense of the other spouse’s,” explains Doherty in his groundbreaking 2002 article on the topic of awkward couples counseling in the Psychotherapy Networker, titled “Bad Couples Therapy.” “All your wonderful joining skills from individual therapy can backfire within seconds with a couple. A brilliant therapeutic observation can blow up in your face when one spouse thinks you’re a genius and the other thinks you’re clueless — or worse, allied with the enemy.”