Table of Contents

1. What Is Responsible for Therapeutic Change?: Two Paradigms
2. A Brief History of Common Factors
3. Common Factors Unique to Couple and Family Therapy
4. The Big-Picture View of Common Factors
5. A Moderate View of Common Factors
6. Getting Clients Fired Up for a Change: Matching Therapist Behavior with Client Motivation
7. A Strong Therapeutic Alliance
8. Models: All Roads Lead to Rome
9. A Meta-Model of Change in Couple Therapy
10. The Case against Common Factors
11. Common Factors Training and Supervision
12. Implications for Clinicians and Researchers
Appendix A. Moderate Common Factors Supervision Checklist
Appendix B. Instruments from Other Authors Related to Common Factors

About the Author

Douglas H. Sprenkle, PhD, is Director of the Doctoral Program in Marriage and Family Therapy at Purdue University, where he is also Professor of Marriage and Family Therapy within the Department of Child Development and Family Studies. A past Editor of the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, he is the author of over 100 articles and 6 books. Dr. Sprenkle has received the Cumulative Contribution to Marriage and Family Therapy Research Award from the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, among other honors. Sean D. Davis, PhD, is Assistant Professor and Site Director of the Marital and Family Therapy program at Alliant International University, Sacramento Campus. His dissertation on common factors in couple therapy won the Graduate Student Research Award and the Dissertation/Thesis Award from the American Association of Marital and Family Therapy. He has published several articles on common factors in couple and family therapy. Jay L. Lebow, PhD, is a Staff Therapist and Research Consultant, The Family Institute at Northwestern University, and Clinical Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University. The author of 100 book chapters and articles, he is a past president of the Division of Family Psychology of the American Psychological Association and is involved in The Family InstituteaaC--a s Psychotherapy Change project.

Reviews

"A long-awaited, critically important contribution. The authors offer a guidebook for understanding and integrating the common factors that cut across distinct therapies, and also present an extraordinarily thoughtful and nonpolemical examination of the strengths and weaknesses of the common-factors strategy. This book will help advanced therapists better understand and sharpen what they do; will help intermediate and beginning-level therapists discover and utilize potent common factors that will enhance their effectiveness; will help theorists cast their ideas in a more generic and universally accessible language; and, lastly, will help researchers integrate common factors into their hypotheses and research designs. A huge step ahead for our field--read it." - William M. Pinsof, President, The Family Institute at Northwestern University, USA "The best antidote yet to technique-heavy approaches to couple and family therapy. This book restores appropriate attention to the role and the person of the therapist, and urges therapeutic flexibility and creativity. It is 'must' reading for anyone engaged in learning about systems-oriented therapy or teaching and supervising couple and family therapists." - Alan S. Gurman, Department of Psychiatry (Emeritus), University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, USA "This thought-provoking book offers the reader an outstanding resource for identifying common factors that drive the change process in relational psychotherapies. As the number of available modalities grows with each passing day, students, clinicians, and researchers will find the paradigm presented here to be extremely useful in isolating what is specifically responsible for change and figuring out how to incorporate it into doing what we do best. A 'must read.'" - Frank M. Dattilio, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts, USA