Marriage burnout: A new conceptual framework for working with couples

Currently there are three major approaches to marital therapy—the psychoanalytic, the behavioral, and the systems approach. The main difference between the approach proposed in this paper and these approaches has to do with the difference between clinical and social psychology. In spite of all the differences among them, all three of the traditional approaches represent clinical psychology in terms of theory and treatment. Burnout, on the other hand, is a social psychological concept. It is defined as a state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion caused by long term involvement in situations that are emotionally demanding. Those emotionally demanding situations are characterized by a combination of unrealistic expectations and the vicissitudes of life with another person. The implications of the difference between these two approaches for working with couple’s problems are the major subject of this paper.