- Francois, Duc de la Rochefoucauld

A friend of mine tells the following story about something that happened when he was a little boy. At the end of a meal his mother announced to the brothers and sisters, who numbered five, that dessert would be the remainder of a batch of her special home-made oatmeal cookies, whereupon she procured the cookie jar and set it on the table. There followed a noisy scramble by the children to get into the jar, with the littlest brother, age four, last, as usual. When he got to the jar he found only one cookie left, and it had a piece missing, whereupon he grabbed it and tearfully threw it to the floor in a rage of despair, crying, 'My cookie is all broke!'

It is the nature of the Child to mistake disappointment for disaster, to destroy the whole cookie because a piece is missing or because it isn't as big, as perfect, or as tasty as someone else's cookie. In his family the anecdote lived as a standard retort to further complaints, 'What's the matter, your cookie broke?'

This is what happens when marriages break. The Child takes over in one or both partners, and the whole marriage is shattered when imperfections begin to appear. Marriage is the most complicated of all human relationships. Few alliances can produce such extremes of emotion or can so quickly travel from professions of the utmost bliss to that cold, terminal legal write-off, mental cruelty. When one stops to. consider the massive content of archaic data which each partner brings to the marriage through the continuing contribution of his Parent and Child, one can readily see the necessity of an emancipated Adult in each to make this relationship work. Yet the average marriage contract is made by the Child, which understands love as something you feel and not something you do, and which sees happiness as something you pursue rather than a byproduct of working towards the happiness of someone other than yourself. Fortunate and rare are the young partners whose Parent contains the impressions of what a good marriage is. Many persons have never seen one. So they borrow a concept of marriage from the highly romanticized fiction they read, wherein husband has a nice job as a junior executive in a large advertising company and comes home every night with a bouquet of roses to a slender, radiant wife awaiting him in the fifty-thousand-dollar home with Armstrong floors and sparkling windows, in which the candles are lit and the stereo is playing music to make love by. When the illusion begins to shatter, when the carpets are worn hand-me-downs from the in-laws and the stereo won't work and husband loses his job and stops saying 'I love you', the Child comes on with the 'broken cookie' tape and the whole show ends with everything in little pieces. What is borrowed is the illusion and what is blue is the Child. Archaic feelings of not ok contaminate the Adult in each partner, and, having nowhere else to turn, the partners turn on each other.

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It has long been recognized that the best marriages grow when both partners have similar backgrounds and similar reality interests. However, when the Child is in charge of planning the marriage, important dissimilarities often are ignored, and a contract which reads 'till death do us part' is based on such insufficient sameness as 'we both love dancing', 'we both want lots of children', 'we both love horses', or 'we're both on acid'. Perfection is seen in broad shoulders, shiny teeth, big bosoms, shiny cars, or other somewhat perishable wonders. Sometimes the bond is established on the basis of mutual protest on the mistaken assumption that one's enemy's enemy is one's friend. In much the same manner as two children, mad at their mothers, comfort each other in a bond of mutual misery, some couples hang together in us-against-the-world fashion as a protest against the malevolent 'they'. They hate each others' families, they hate their phoney erstwhile friends, they hate the Establishment, or they hate those fatuous institutions of American 'superficiality', bowling, baseball, bathing, and work. They exist in a folie a deux in which they share the same delusions. Yet they soon become objects of their own bitterness, and what used to be the game of 'It's All Them' becomes the game of 'It's All You'.

One of the most helpful ways to examine similarities and dissimilarities is the use of Transactional Analysis in premarital counselling to construct a personality diagram of the couple contemplating marriage. The aim is to expose not just the obvious similarities or dissimilarities but to undertake a more thorough inquiry of what is in the Parent, Adult, and Child of each partner. A couple who enters into such an inquiry might be said to have already a lot in their favour, inasmuch as they take marriage seriously enough to take a long look before they leap. However, one of the partners, having serious doubt about the soundness of the alliance, may undertake such an inquiry on his own. An example is a young lady who was in one of my treatment groups. She asked me to schedule an individual hour for her for the purpose of discussing her dilemma over the fact that a young man she had been dating a short time had proposed to her. Her Child was immensely attracted to him, and yet there was other data coming into her computer which caused her to question whether or not marriage was a good idea. She had learned to use P-A-C accurately and asked that I help her examine this relationship on the basis of examining the P-A-C in each of them.

First we compared the Parent of each. We found she had a strong Parent, which contained countless rules of conduct and many 'shoulds' and 'oughts'. These included the admonition that you don't rush into marriage without thinking. There were certain elements of self-righteousness, like 'our kind' are the best people. It contained ideas such as 'you are judged by the company you keep' and 'don't do anything that is beneath you'. It contained the early imprints of a home life that was highly organized, where mother was the head of the house, and where father worked hard and late at the office. There was a great store of 'how to' material: How to celebrate a birthday, how to dress the Christmas tree, how to bring up children, and how to handle oneself in social situations. Her Parent was clearly an important influence in her life in that the impressions had been more or less consistent. Although its rigidity was sometimes oppressive and produced considerable not ok feelings in her Child, her Parent nonetheless continued to be a constant source of data in all her transactions in the present.

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We then turned to an examination of the Parent in the young man. His parents had been divorced when he was seven years old, and he had been raised by his mother, who indulged him in material possessions and gave him sporadic attention. She herself was Child-dominated and emotional and acted out her feelings in impetuous displays of spending, with intermittent spells of sulking, withdrawal, and vindictiveness. Father did not come through on the tape at all except as the imprint that he was a 'rotten bastard, like all men". The boy's Parent was so disintegrated and fragmented and inconsistent that it did not come through in present transactions as a controlling or modifying influence over his impulsive, Child-dominated behaviour. Her Parent and his Parent not only had nothing in common; her Parent also highly disapproved of his. It was readily seen that little basis existed for a Parent-Parent transaction about any subject, thus ruling out anything complementary at this level.

We then undertook an inquiry into the strength of the Adult in each and an assessment of their reality interests. She was an intelligent, well-educated young woman who enjoyed a wide variety of interests. She liked classical music, along with what was the current rage; she was well read in the literary classics; she enjoyed making things with her hands and liked to do creative, decorative things around the house. She enjoyed discussing philosophical and religious ideas and, although she could not accept the religious beliefs of her parents, did feel that some kind of 'belief was important. She was reflective, conversationally adept, and inquisitive. She was concerned about the consequences of what she did and felt she had a responsibility for herself. There were certain areas of prejudice which were found to be Parent-contamination of the Adult, as 'Any man over thirty who isn't married is up to no good'; 'A woman who will smoke will do anything'; 'Anyone who can't get through college nowadays is lazy'; 'What can you expect of a divorced man?'

In contrast, her boyfriend's Adult was Child-contaminated. He continued to be self-indulgent, as he had been indulged when he was a little boy. He had been a disinterested student in high school and had dropped out of junior college in the first semester because it 'didn't turn him on'. He was not unintelligent but he had little interest in the serious subjects that were important to the girl. He thought all religion was phoney in the same dismissing way that he thought all grownups were phoney. He couldn't spell, which particularly annoyed her, and the only things he read were the pictures in Life magazine, the 'kind of guy', she said, 'who thinks Bach is a beer'. He had superficial ideas about politics and felt government was bad because 'it takes your freedom away'. He was witty and clever but deficient in content. His primary reality interest was sports cars, about which he professed and exhibited extensive knowledge. It was apparent there was little to promote a sustained Adult-Adult relationship between the two. This level of transaction produced frustration in her and boredom in him.

We then turned to an examination of the Child in each. Her Child was hungry for affection, anxious to please, frequently depressed, and sensitive to incoming signals of criticism, which reproduced a strong feeling of not ok. She could not get over the fact that 'someone so handsome' could fall for her. She had not had many boyfriends and had thought of herself as plain, feeling her features were so ordinary that no one could possibly recognize her after one meeting. She was swept off her feet by this fun-loving, blond Adonis, and she could not discount what a wonderful feeling it was to be loved and pursued. When she was with him she felt ok in a way she had never felt before and could not easily give this up.

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His Child, on the other hand, was aggressive, self-serving, and manipulative. He had 'always gotten his way', and he planned to get his way with her, too, which was part of the problem, since her Parent would not allow her to enjoy the exotic pleasures to which he proposed to introduce her. His Child so contaminated his Adult, and his Parent was so weak, that not only could he not weigh consequences, he thought the whole idea of consequences was silly and puritanical and preferred, like Scarlett O'Hara, to 'think about that tomorrow'.

As their relationship progressed there became less and less to talk about. Nothing existed Parent-Parent, little existed Adult-Adult, and what did exist on the Child-Child level soon produced major disturbances in the girl's Parent. The relationship then began to settle in a Parent-Child pattern with her assuming the role of the responsible and critical partner and his assuming the role of the manipulative, testing Child, reproducing his original situation in childhood.

This P-A-C appraisal was quite different from a judgement as to how 'good' or 'bad' each partner was. It was a search for objective data about each, with the hope of predicting what kind of relationship might be possible in the future. After much reflection on this material, the girl decided to give up the relationship as a bad deal that held little promise for happiness for either one. She was helped to see, also, how her not ok Child was vulnerable to the advances of men who were less than she was' in that she had the feeling she wasn't good enough for a 'really nice guy'. She not only found why this relationship was not complementary, but she discovered what she truly was looking for in a man and proceeded not on the basis of her not ok position but on the basis of a new self-respect.

Not all relationships contrast so clearly as this one. She had a strong Parent and he had a weak Parent. There are many cases where both partners have a strong Parent, but with different and frequently discordant content. Different religious and cultural content can produce serious difficulties if each partner feels the strong need to abide by the unexamined dictates of his Parent. Sometimes this difference is glossed over in the early stage of a marriage, only to emerge with fierce urgency with the arrival of children. Although a Jewish man may agree in advance that his children be raised in the Catholic faith according to the wishes of the Catholic bride-to-be, this does not mean that he may not be deeply troubled about it later on. The feeling here is that 'my religion is better than yours' and, in fact, 'our people are better than your people", which soon is reduced to 'I am better than you'. This is not to say that differences of this kind cannot be resolved, but they require an emancipated Adult in each partner proceeding on an I'm Ok - you're ok basis.

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These differences are acknowledged ideally before the marriage. But this seldom happens. The young couple is in love; the partners, if they do have any premarital counseling, spend a perfunctory hour with the minister and then proceed on the basis of fulfilling a wish for what is called a happy marriage, frequently without the benefit of having seen one.

What are the possibilities, then, for reconstructing or salvaging a marriage which has been entered into without the benefit of this kind of analysis? Since no two people are exactly alike, the idea of perfect compatibility is illusory. The problem can perhaps best be stated in terms of comparative difficulties: it is difficult to work out the differences and make compromises, but it also is difficult to proceed with the alternative, the dissolution of the marriage. One cannot proceed on the basis of rigid absolutes, such as 'divorce is always wrong', because there are other principles involved which also apply. Insisting that a woman continue to live with a cruel and abusive husband and never find happiness with anyone else is to discount the importance of human dignity in favor of retribution: You made your bed, now lie in it. To insist that a man continue to support a lazy, vengeful wife who denies any complicity in the deterioration of their marriage discounts the same principles of human dignity. This is not to say that we cannot hold to the ideal of marriage as a permanent bond, but we must not see it as a license to trap people into an arrangement in which they forever are bound by legal but no moral obligations. Sometimes people do not begin to examine their marriages until they see the divorce advancing upon them. Then the comparative difficulties begin to emerge, and they begin to comprehend the nature of the choices they must make.

A miserable marriage may make the life of the gay divorcee or the carefree bachelor seem grand indeed; yet, an impulsive choice on the basis of an unexamined assumption may lead to even further despair. That the life of the formerly married is not all it's cracked up to be is the subject of a book by Morton M. Hunt. {1} This author writes of the many realities following a divorce, which must be considered by people contemplating divorce in order to make their decisions on the basis of a comparison of difficulties: the difficulty of loneliness as a recurring pain, the loss of old friends who do not want to 'take sides', the loss of children, the heartbreak of children, the financial ravages, the implications of failure, and the fatigue of knowing one has to start all over. An Adult appraisal of one's situation must take into account these realities.

Then the inquiry must be turned to the marriage itself. Very often only one partner is willing to initiate the examination, since one of the most common marital games is 'It's All You '. If one partner, say the wife, comes into treatment and learns P-A-C, we then concentrate on ways in which we can 'hook her husband's Adult' and interest him in learning the language as well, for only on the basis of a common language can anything begin to develop on an Adult-Adult basis. If one partner refuses to cooperate in this, the chances for saving the marriage are greatly diminished. But if both are interested enough to work at the marriage, P-A-C provides them with a tool to separate themselves from archaic Parent dictates and by now well-established game patterns.

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One of the first things they may examine after they have learned the language is the marriage contract itself. The average marriage contract is a bad one, a fifty-fifty deal with emphasis on the bookkeeping. Erich Fromm calls this kind of marriage contract a 'trading of personality packages'. Don't they make a good match? She will be such an asset to him. Don't they complement each other? He trades his position with the Junior Chamber of Commerce for her contribution as an I. Magnined and Helena Rubinsteined 'arm piece '. As such, they become things and not people, in a competitive market. They must keep the fifty-fifty thing going, or the economy goes bust. This kind of contract is made by the Child. The Child has a comprehension of fairness, of fifty-fifty, but in its not ok position it does not comprehend a more profound principle, that of unlimited liability for another person, where one does not hold back with fifty per cent but is willing to be blind to the score and give totally all the time to the partner in a community of purpose established by the Adult. In a book of exquisite meditative thought, Paul Scherer, Brown Professor Emeritus of Homiletics at Union Theological Seminary, expresses this idea in this way: 'Love is a spendthrift, leaves its arithmetic at home, is always "in the red" ...' {2} The Child, which is a get-love creature, cannot see love in this way. The Adult can. There is an arithmetic of desperation in the world today, where everyone is asking for love but very few seem able to provide it. This is because of the continuing overriding influence of the I'm not ok - you're ok position of the little child. It has existed in everyone. We must keep in mind how the little person tries to relieve himself of this burden early in life by the original games of 'Mine Is Better' and 'I've Got More'. It is true that a fifty-fifty idea begins to emerge. Yet the not ok seems to crowd out the idea of fairness early in life.

One morning my daughter Heidi, then four, was about to have a treat with her playmate, Stacey. They were both preoccupied with who was to get the bigger piece, even though they had been reminded many times that this kind of contest only led to problems. Mother then gave them each an Oreo cookie. It was clear, even to the girls, that these were identical cookies. Yet in the face of this sameness, Heidi still could not resist the protest she had begun and persisted, 'Ha ha - I get the same as you, and you don't!' This is the sort of hidden one-upmanship held in reserve by the Child in the fifty-fifty marriage.

The couple seeking to save their marriage must, therefore, enter into a collaborative effort to emancipate the Adult so that the not ok in the Child, as well as the troublemaking content in the Parent of each, can be examined to see how this archaic data continues to dominate and wreck their relationship in the present.

Common relationship wreckers are absolute declarations of 'That's the way I am - don't try to change me.' Holding to a rigid 'I am a grouch before my first cup of coffee' blames a person's faults on his nature and not his nature on his faults. The 'Grouch Before Coffee' racket ruins every morning in many families. What could be the best part of the day, a send-off with enthusiasm to the tasks ahead, is instead a miserable, hostile bedlam. The kids go off to school grumping, husband rushes off to work with acid indigestion, and mother feels let down because she has just lost her captive audience. The fact is that no one has to be a grouch before his first cup of coffee or any other time. He has a choice, once his Adult is emancipated.

An old French song goes, '... l'amour est l'enfant de la lib-erte ('love is the child of freedom'). Love in a marriage requires the freedom of the Adult to examine the Parent, to accept or reject it on the basis of present-day contexts and also to examine the position of the Child and the troublemaking compensations, or games, it has devised to deny, or rise above, or to throw off the burden of the not ok.

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Married couples who enter group treatment do so for a variety of reasons. Some have heard about Transactional Analysis and come 'to learn something new'. Others come in search of an answer to a vague but unsettling question along the lines of 'Isn't there more in life than this?' Some come because their children are having trouble. Many come because their marital relationship is in critical condition. Many of the thirty-seven couples whom I treated during one four-year period were contemplating, or at least had discussed, divorce as the only way out of their problems. Some had begun legal proceedings and were referred by their lawyers or by the judge of the Domestic Relations Court. The crisis of seventeen of these couples (46 per cent) was brought to a head with the admission of one partner to the hospital for severe depression with suicidal preoccupation or attempted suicide. Fourteen of the hospitalized patients were wives and two were husbands, and, in one case, both husband and wife were hospitalized together at their own request 'to keep things even'. None of these couples had been married less than ten years. All had children and some had grandchildren.

They learned P-A-C, either in a hospital group or in individual sessions in my office. When the concept was understood by both partners, there was eagerness expressed to join one of the existing married-couples groups of five couples each. The average number of treatment sessions for each couple was seventeen, roughly one session a week for four months. My married couples groups are scheduled for the last hour of the day for one hour but occasionally run longer. Of these thirty-seven couples, thirty-five, to my knowledge, are still married, two are divorced. Four of these thirty-five dropped out of the group because they would have had to give up their games and were unwilling to do so. The other thirty-one couples report good transactions in their marriages, in which each partner is now finding the excitement of new goals, the relative absence of old destructive games, and the achievement of intimacy. In achieving one of the original goals of treatment, that of saving the marriage, we can report an 84 per cent success with this group of patients.

The relationship of many couples is a complicated mesh of games, wherein accumulated resentment and bitterness have produced intricate, repeated versions of 'Uproar', 'It's All You", 'Blemish', 'So's Your Old Man', and 'If It Weren't for You I Could'. The rules and stereotyped plays in these games are catalogued in great detail in Berne's Games People Play, which has been one of the standard manuals assigned for reading to couples in treatment. These games all grow from the early childhood game of 'Mine Is Better', designed to overcome the original fear of being cheated. One of the most brilliant exposes of a game existence is written by Edward Albee in the already, mentioned Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? This play illustrates that despite all the desperation produced, there still are enough secondary benefits that the games, in a sense, hold the marriage together. Some marriages are held together by virtue of one 'sick' partner. If that partner begins to get well and begins to refuse to get involved in the old games, the marriage begins to fall apart.

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One husband, whose wife had just been released after a ten-day stay in the hospital, called me in a state of consternation saying, 'My wife seems happier and better but now I can't get along with her at all.' Marriage is like posture; if the shoulders begin to droop a complementary droop must develop somewhere else to keep the head perpendicular to the feet. Similarly, if one partner changes, other changes must complement this in order to keep the relationship intact. This is one of the major weaknesses of the old types of psychotherapy, where the psychiatrist treated only one partner, and refused to even talk with the other partner. The emphasis was on the relationship established between the psychiatrist and the patient, leaving the marriage relationship outside the door. As the patient's loyalty and behaviour began to change, the marriage frequently suffered because the other partner had no conceptual tools with which to understand what was going on or to understand his own accumulation of fury and despair.

If he could afford it, the other partner might enter treatment with someone else only to become further estranged as he, too, shifted the object of his affection. With little basis for communication, the way was open for new and better ways to play 'Mine Is Better' in the form of 'My Therapist Is Better Than Your Therapist', or 'I Am Overcoming Transference Faster Than You Are' or 'I'll Make a Decision About Whether to Make Love to You After My Session Wednesday'. Both were indulging their Child in exclusive introspection which, though it may have provided useful data as to the origin of their own feelings, did not truly come to grips with the reality of an existence of not one person but two people in a relationship called marriage.

An item in the Sacramento Bee, though perhaps a bit extreme, is none the less pertinent: 'Many a psychiatrist insists there is no mental emotional health if man does not face reality. If that be the case why do they make their patients lie on couches where it is so easy to daydream? Maybe a spiked mattress would be better.'

Each partner must be willing to acknowledge his complicity in the difficulties of the marriage. The 'It's All You' point of view is exposed as fallacious by Emerson in his observation that 'no man can approach me except through my own act '. If the husband has been abusive for ten years and the wife has taken it for ten years, then she, in her way, has participated in the exchange. If either partner refuses to acknowledge this complicity, there is little hope for change.

Arthur Miller in his sensitive story about Maggie in After the Fall (a character who bore a striking resemblance to his wife, Marilyn Monroe) wrote that his play was 'about the human animal's unwillingness or inability to discover in himself the seeds of his own destruction'.

It is always and forever the same struggle: to perceive somehow our own complicity with evil is a horror not to be borne. [It is] much more reassuring to see the world in terms of totally innocent victims and totally evil instigators of the monstrous violence we see all about us. At all costs, never disturb our innocence. But what is the most innocent place in any country? Is it not the insane asylum? There people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all. The perfection of innocence, indeed, is madness. {3}

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This 'horror not to be borne' is understandable when one considers that the admission of complicity adds still another load to the crushing not ok burden which has caused the problem in the first place. The admission of guilt is hard. It is this final affront to the abject Child, this additional burden, that is referred to by the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer: 'Is not this to lay another and still heavier burden on men's shoulders? Is this all we can do when the souls and bodies of men are groaning beneath the weight of so many man-made dogmas?' {4}

Understanding Structural Analysis - the nature of the Parent, Adult, and Child - shows us a way out of this dilemma of on the one hand the impossibility of change without the admission of complicity, and on the other the crushing implications of the admission of guilt. In a very practical way we can see a difference in how we confront a person with what he  does. If one says, 'You are a cranky, ill-tempered, difficult, unpleasant person, and this is what is wrong with your marriage,' one is simply supporting the not ok position and producing feelings that make the person even more cranky, ill-tempered, difficult, and unpleasant. Either that, or you drive him into a deepening depression. If, on the other hand, one can sympathetically say, 'It is your not ok Child that constantly makes trouble for you and by reacting in the old cranky and ill-tempered way to destroy your chances for happiness in the present,' there is some objectification of the dilemma, and the person sees himself not as a total zero but as a combination of past experience, both plus and minus, which produces difficulty. Moreover, it makes possible a choice. A person can acknowledge this reality about himself without falling apart, and this acknowledgement can begin to strengthen his Adult for its function of examining the Parent and the Child and the way in which these old tapes come on to produce the tyranny of the past.

Without the acknowledgement of 'my part in our problems' Transactional Analysis or game analysis can simply become another way of expressing hatred: 'You and your damn Parent', 'Your nasty Child is coming on again, dear'. 'There you go, playing a game again.' These constructions then become clever and abusive epithets in a new game of 'game calling'. As we see the problems that can arise, we begin to understand the significance of the idea expressed in the title of Arthur Miller's article about his play, 'With Respect for Her Agony - but with Love'.

A commitment to this idea is what is required of couples entering treatment if they are to succeed in building something of value in their marriage. A final question emerges: When we stop playing games then what do we do? What else is there? What do you do with an emancipated Adult?

The Establishment of Goals

A ship with no destination drifts and is carried along by the prevailing tides, now up, now down, groaning and creaking in the high seas, tranquil and lovely in the calm. It does exactly as the sea does. Many marriages are like this. They stay afloat but they have no direction. The priority input in their decision making is, What are other people doing? They conform to their social circle in attire, housing, raising children, values, and thinking. 'As long as others are doing it, it must be OK,' is their standard of what to do. If 'everyone' is buying a certain kind of luxury automobile, they also will buy one, even if their hire-purchase commitments already constitute a library of monthly bad news. They have not built their own set of independent values concerned with their own particular realities and therefore frequently end up disillusioned and in debt.

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Only the Adult can say 'no' to the Child's clamouring for something bigger, better, and more in order to feel more ok. Only the Adult can ask the question, If four pairs of shoes make you happy, will ten pairs make you happier? The rule is that each increment of material possessions brings less joy than the one that immediately preceded it. If one could quantify joy, it is likely that a new pair of shoes brings more happiness to a child than a new car brings to a grown man. Also, the first car brings more joy than the second, and the second more than the third. H.L. Mencken said, 'A man always remembers his first love. After that he begins to bunch them.' The Child in us needs bunches - as on Christmas morning: surrounded with gifts the child cries, 'Is that all?' A little boy was asked on a children's television programme what he got for Christmas. 'I don't know,' he said, distressed, 'there was too many.'

An Adult examination of a family's realities can weigh whether or not the acquisition of a certain possession will be worth (in terms of joy) the mortgage, the department store bill, or the diversion of the money from something else. The Adult can also give in to the Child's need to collect bunches of possessions by taking up a hobby such as collecting stamps, coins, rare books, model railroad equipment, bottles, or rocks. The Adult can determine whether the expenditure for these collections is realistic. When it is, the 'bunching' is fun and harmless. If it is bankrupting the family, however (eg, collecting villas, sports cars, and original Picassos), the Adult may have to say 'no' to the Child's fun.

Decisions regarding hobbies, possessions, where to live, and what to buy must be made according to a set of values and realistic considerations unique to the marriage. Agreement about these decisions is extremely difficult if goals for the marriage have not been established. A couple in treatment may learn to see the difference between Parent, Adult, and Child, but they are still on the same social sea, and if they do not chart a course, they will, despite all their insights, continue to follow the old ups and downs and fun and games. It takes more than knowing something to muster the power to cut through the social currents. It takes the establishment of and embarking upon a new course in the direction of goals arrived at by the Adult. Persons either set a new course or they fall back into the same patterns of drift. It does not matter how many charts they have.

This is where the considerations of moral values, of ethics and religion, become important to the course of a marriage. A man and wife must undertake some fundamental inquiries about what they consider important in order to chart their course. Will Durant views the fundamental problem of ethics in the form of the question, 'Is it better to be good or to be strong?' {6} This question can be asked in many ways in the context of the marriage. Is it better to be kind or to be rich? Is it better to spend time with the family or to spend time in civic activities? Is it better to encourage your children to 'take it on the chin' or to 'hit back'? Is it better to live big today or hoard every penny in the bank for tomorrow? Is it better to be known as a thoughtful neighbor or to be known as a civic leader?

These are questions which can lead to hopeless forensic entanglements unless they are asked by the Adult, for they are difficult even then. It is not enough to know what opinions the Parent in each partner contains in answer to these questions. It is not enough to know the Child needs the feelings of each. If the Parent or Child data is in disagreement, there must be some ethical standard accepted by both, which can give direction to the course of the marriage and value to all decisions that must be made. It has been said that 'love is not a gazing at each other, but a looking outward together, in the same direction'. The Parent and Child in each partner may lead backward to great divergence. Only through the Adult is convergence possible. Yet the goal 'out there' cannot be established without moral and ethical considerations. One of my frequent questions to a couple in an impasse over 'what to do now' is: 'What is the loving thing to do?'

This is the reaching beyond scientific evaluation to the possibility of the evolution of something better than what has been before. What is 'being loving'? What is love? What kinds of words are 'should' and 'ought'? These questions are considered in depth in Chapter 12, 'P-A-C and Moral Values'.