Therapeutic alliance with marital and parental couples: a preliminary study

Therapeutic alliance (TA) represents a crucial variable in explaining the outcome of psychotherapy across different treatments (Ardito & Rabellino, 2011). While most of research to date is about TA in individual psychotherapy, the salience of TA in couple and family therapy has received less theoretical and empirical attention (Friedlander et al., 2011). Furthermore there is a lack of studies about TA in situations where parents are involved in a psychological intervention focused on their child’s problems. Yet, although there is a variety of instruments to assess TA in ndividual psychotherapy, much less interest has been devoted to measure TA with both marital and parental couples. In order to fill this gap the present work is part of a larger research project aimed at validating the Italian version of the System for Observing Family Therapy Alliances- self report (SOFTA-s; Friedlander & Escudero, 2002), an alliance measure that can be used across a diversity of problems and clinical settings including marital and parental couples. This study has been conducting at the Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome and at the Department of Psychology, University of Bologna. Preliminary results from a family-based intervention for marital couples and from a psychodynamic intervention for parents and their children (2-10 years) will be discussed. SOFTA-s and the Working Alliance Inventory (Lingiardi, 2002), a measure of TA in individual psychotherapy, were given to both couples and their therapists at three points in time. The ability to monitor patients and therapists’ perceptions of TA allows to take disagreements, difficulties and other aspects useful for therapists to change interventions during the process and to enhance TA. Moreover different purposes followed in therapy by each member of marital and parental couples may be highlighted through data comparison allowing therapists to improve a sense of a common purpose.