The Groves Conference on Marriage and Family: History and Impact on Family Science

Ernest and Gladys Groves

Ernest Groves contributed to the creation of the field of marriage counseling as an outgrowth of his work as a family sociologist, teaching applied courses on marriage and parenting as part of the university curriculum. Many of us know that he was the father of applied marriage and family courses. But we might not know that what prompted him to create his version of marriage counseling was his work as a minister and professor. Ernest originally was trained as a minister, and in this role was frequently called upon him as a primary source of emotional and interpersonal support—often the only person from whom his congregation sought guidance with marital and family relationships. This pattern of providing assistance to others seeking his counsel continued when he shifted his focus to teaching college students. He was not trained to be a marriage counselor (since in those days there was not a formal course of study to prepare professionals to become marriage counselors) and taught himself to assist his students with relationships, engagement and marriage issues, dealing with their families of origin, parenting, and parent-child issues for parents of children and adolescents.

From the beginning Ernest told those he assisted that he was just a family sociologist and not trained as a psychotherapist but that he was willing to sit with them, help them evaluate choices and process problems, and be a sounding board for voicing their concerns in a safe, confidential place. Because his personality conveyed compassion and becaise of his lifelong interests in marriage and family issues, Ernest Groves developed expertise, and more and more students grew to rely upon for help with marriage and parenting problems. He was a pioneer in teaching marriage and parenting courses and published the first college level text on marriage in 1933 (Rubin, 2008). The combination of this background in the ministry and his early experiences in teaching family sociology courses led Ernest to realize that core human relationship issues in families become the basis for interpersonal relationships. Over time Groves understood that the human development which began in childhood and adolescence Page  65influenced developmental issues throughout life and that these developmental issues must be understood in a relationship context (Mudd, 1985). This understanding of how marriages are partly shaped by earlier interpersonal problems stemming from childhood and adolescence led him to focus on marriage relationships. This background of understanding the importance of marriage and family became a hallmark of his career as an educator and counselor and led Ernest to see value in developing a cumulative understanding of how to prevent as well as treat interpersonal problems in marriage and family (Dail & Jewson, 1986).

The New York Meetings 1931-1942

Beginning in the winter of 1931, a series of meetings on treating marital and sexual problems, organized by “Dr. Robert [Bobby] Dickerson on ‘Socio-Sexual Relations of Men and Women’” played a role in the formation of the marriage counseling profession (Mudd & Fowler, 1969, p. 432). He was a prominent obstetrician/gynecologist who was doing marriage counseling and sex therapy with his women patients and was sought after as a speaker on the topics of marriage counseling and sexual issues in marriage. Among the early members of this group were obstetricians/gynecologists, urologists, and psychiatry specialists. Emily Mudd from Philadelphia and Lester Dearborn from Boston were among the early attendees of these meetings. From the New York area Drs. Abraham and Hanna Stone, Dr. Valerie Parker, and Dr. Robert Laidlaw were early regular attendees. Most of these meetings were primarily educational exchanges of new treatment developments for sexual problems in marriage (Stone, 1951). The meetings were somewhat irregular seminars, and Bobby Dickerson was the early favorite of the presenters.

The Early Groves Conference Influence

It is not clear from the limited records we have about Ernest Groves’ early work as a marriage counselor whether his wife Gladys was involved directly in the process, but we can assume she might have been. She was invited to the meetings in New York City where the early marriage counselors interacted and shared case studies Page  66and research. From what we know, Ernest and Gladys never forgot the importance of linking application to theory and research. Their dream of bringing together the leading professionals interested in marriage and family issues gave them the idea of organizing and hosting a conference in their home in Chapel Hill on the campus at the University of North Carolina in 1934. They invited sociologists, such as Ernest Burgess and John Cuber; home economists, such as Evelyn Duvall; psychologists, such as Lester Dearborn; psychiatrists, such as Robert Laidlaw; obstetricians and gynecologists, such as Robert Dickerson; urologists, such as Abraham Stone; doctors and social workers, such as Emily Mudd; and clergy, such as Sidney Goldstein. It was Emily Mudd and Lester Dearborn who made the linkage between the Groves Conference and the New York City meetings of medical doctors and clinicians interested in marriage counseling. Collectively these marriage counselor pioneers became the nucleus of the founding members of the marriage and family therapy profession.

Ernest and Gladys Groves were invited to attend the meetings in New York in 1936, and Ernest rapidly emerged as the leader to help organize and found the American Association of Marriage Counselors (AAMC) in 1942. Ernest Groves was the founding president of the AAMC (Broderick, & Schrader, 1991). His leadership helped shape the initial development of the AAMC as the standard-bearing organization for the field of marriage counseling. It is likely that had Ernest Groves lived longer he would have played even a greater role in the shaping of the new professional association. From the formative years until the 1970s the standards for membership in AAMC (and later AAMFC) included a variety of professional backgrounds (psychiatry, medicine, psychology, social work, family sociology, and the ministry). It is likely that the influence of Ernest Groves brought sociological and social psychological perspectives into the early marriage counselor association. Clearly opening the doors to sociologists produced a generation of early leaders. At least eight of the persons who have served as president of AAMC, AAMFC, and/or AAMFT have come from sociological backgrounds, including Ernest Groves, Gerald Leslie, James Peterson, David Mace, Clark Vincent, John Hudson, Thomas Clark, and Marcia Lasswell. Many early Groves Conferences featured marriage counseling papers Page  67and workshops—emerging as some of the earliest publications in the field of marriage counseling in the new journal Marriage and Family Living published by the National Council on Family Relations (NCFR) from 1944 through the 1950s.

Early accounts of the development in marriage counseling indicate that the formation of marriage counseling and the setting of standards for the new profession was strongly influenced by organizational discussions held by the small group at Groves Conferences (Mudd, 1985). The parallel interest group in New York City included several of he same persons. These two groups became the seminal force for establishing a new profession focused on marriage counseling, beginning with the formation of a committee charged with the responsibility of setting standards for the profession. Ernest Groves established the committee in 1939 at the annual Groves Conference.

Gladys Groves served as editor of the NCFR journal Marriage and Family Living and noted that since the beginning years of the journal, pioneer editor Ernest Burgess routinely saved space in the journal for marriage counseling articles (G. Groves, 1952). With the organization of the AAMC in 1941 a longstanding relationship was established between NCFR and the AAMC. Gladys Groves went on to note that the AAMC would have a...

Virtually all of the early pioneers made a contribution to the establishment of the profession of marriage counseling. Their names appear in early issues of the NCFR and AAMC publications and they all had a common tie through the Groves Conference.

Ernest Groves was the first to make the linkages between psychoanalytic concepts and theories in the sociological literature. In this early stage, Groves published articles in both the sociological and psychoanalytic journals in 1916 and 1917 (Broderick & Schrader, 1991). Groves coauthored the first text on mental hygiene in 1930 and by the mid-30s a demand grew for Groves to teach formal courses in marriage counseling. Beginning in 1937 Ernest Groves offered courses in marriage counseling at Duke University (Green, cited in Dail & Jewson, 1986; Kuehl, 2008; American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, 2008a).

Emily Mudd

Perhaps none of the early Groves Conference on Marriage and Family members played a more pivotal role in helping establish the field of marriage counseling than did Emily Hartshorne Mudd. She was one of the original members of the Groves Conference and a regular contributor to the development of marriage counseling and the fields of human sexuality and marriage and family studies. She was similar to Ernest Groves in many ways since she had an undying commitment to social activism and made significant contributions to humanity throughout her long career.

Emily was born in 1898 and lived until 1998, coming close to having lived in three centuries. She grew up in a time when women were expected to play a secondary role to men and to make their primary commitment to home, family, raising children, and supporting their husbands emotionally. That she began her career in this era makes her contributions even more remarkable. We [the chapter authors] first met Emily Mudd when she was in her 80s at a Groves Conference on Marriage and Family meeting in Pocono, Pennsylvania in 1981, and we became instant friends. Emily adopted us and took us under her wing. We ate meals together and spent numerous hours hearing her tell stories of the pioneering experiences in the field of marriage and family (Mudd, 1981, 1985).

As have countless other Groves members we have been privileged to know since our first trip to a Groves conference in 1972, Emily became our mentor and teacher, helping to shape our careers. Emily’s Page  69early work in premarital counseling had parallels to that of Ernest Groves in some ways but took a different turn in others. We found common interests in our commitment to three threads of work that Emily had helped to pioneer. The first was marriage counseling and marriage and family therapy. The second was the need to focus on prevention, not just remediation, in treatment and programs. The third focus of Emily’s pioneering work that directly impacted our own career interest was her focus on healthy families and finding out what families who are successful do to thrive (Mudd, Mitchell, & Taubin, 1956).

Emily Mudd was a woman ahead of her time in many ways. When she was a young woman during WWI she joined the women’s land army and played a vital role along side other women in helping carry on the efforts of men who were off fighting the war. After she married Dr. Stuart Mudd, a prominent member of the medical school faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, Emily became a mover and shaker in the Philadelphia community, establishing the first birth control clinic in the 1920s. At that time “...it was against the law to prescribe or dispense information on contraception, but she was protected by another law—she was pregnant and could not be arrested” (Mitchell, 2008, p. 41).

In the early part of the 1930s Emily Mudd had made contacts through the New York Meetings from 1931-1942 organized by Dr. Bobby Dickerson (previously discussed). Emily was a regular member of this ad hoc group that met periodically to discuss issues related to marriage and sex therapy. It was at one of these meetings that she met Bobby Dickerson and the two of them discussed his work. She told Dickerson that she wanted to establish a marriage counseling center in Philadelphia and invited him to be an after-dinner speaker in her home for a dinner party of prominent Philadelphia friends. At this dinner in 1932 the seeds were sown for the establishment of the Marriage Council of Philadelphia.

In 1950 Emily made the pioneering move of establishing a training center through a major university. Emily helped give the Marriage Council of Philadelphia a solid academic home at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School through the Department of Psychiatry. Page  70The third woman to be named to the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school and the first woman to become a full professor there, Emily also taught the first course at an American medical school dealing with sexuality. She helped edit Alfred Kinsey’s book on female sexuality and work closely with the Masters and Johnson clinic in St. Louis.

The Marriage Council was the foundational base for establishing the Division of Family Studies in the Psychiatry Department with a mission of training, research, and clinical services. Here Emily developed the first method for measuring counselor effectiveness. This linkage to the university created a basis for establishing training centers and setting standards for the field of marriage counseling as a profession. Thus Emily not only helped to establish the field of marriage counseling but also was a key person in helping create linkages for establishing the field’s early standards and professional organizations. A colleague of both Emily Mudd and Ernest Groves was a man named Lester Dearborn who first envisioned the idea of establishing the American Association for Marriage Counselors. Lester was one of the few psychologists at that time interested in marriage counseling. In the early days of the marriage counseling profession the group met in conjunction with Groves Conference meetings in Chapel Hill as well as at periodic meetings in NYC. After the National Council on Family Relations was established in 1938 the group also met at the NCFR conference. It is no small contribution that the early Groves Conference members—led by Ernest and Gladys Groves—played pivotal roles in the establishment of NCFR.

Following the lead of Ernest Burgess (a friend of Ernest Groves) some of the top sociologists who had provided seminal contributions to what we now know as family sociology infiltrated the field of marriage counseling and family life education. This sociological focus helped shape the development of social contextual awareness in marriage and family relationships and helped to shape the interpersonal relationship emphasis in the budding new profession of marriage counseling. One of the early sections established in NCFR was the counseling section which became another gathering place for this small group of marriage counselors on the verge of Page  71founding a new profession. This meant establishing standards for the profession and exchanging formal and informal discourse with presentations that were frequently given at NCFR.

Emily Mudd (1985) described this process as “planting the seeds” at the annual Groves Conference meeting with both formal and informal dialogue about ideas that emerged into formal presentations and papers. These sessions might be a part of seminars and workshops at Groves conferences even though they were not within the theme of the meeting. When Emily shared this piece of the Groves Conference history and how it played a meaningful role in organizing the marriage counseling pioneers it reminded us of the many times we have been a part of ad hoc interest groups that have sprung up through the Groves Conference. This has always been a unique tradition at Groves conferences that makes it special and allows flexibility for birthing new ideas and professional interests by collectives of Groves Conference members who then use these exchanges to formulate research programs—and sometimes even create avenues for social action and policy ventures along the way.

Emily called these ad hoc conversations the “meetings of the mind” that forged new beginnings for the new profession of marriage counseling (Mudd, 1985). She recalled an early dialogue she and Ernest Groves had in 1935 over the focus of marriage counseling. She said she described herself as a social worker dabbling in helping couples who were struggling in their marriages. Emily got into this work through her early work in helping women learn about birth control. Breaking new ground as a crusader to promote social change, she was viewed by her peers as an activist. She said that is the one thing that she and Ernest Groves had in common because both were social reformers in their own way (Mudd, 1985). We think it was that conversation when Ernest Groves told her that he had been a minister, and in that context he was struck by the social problems of the day which seemed to stem from family relationships (Mudd, 1985). According to Emily, the social reformer in Ernest is what made him want to help the young couples who sought his counsel.

Without those countless meetings of the mind among the various founders of the new profession, they likely would never Page  72have arrived at the point of forming the American Association of Marriage Counselors. All of those early marriage counselors were free spirits striking out on a new path—since no one really had any training in marriage counseling and all of them had to invent their own techniques without the benefit of formal training and theory (Mudd, 1985).

David and Vera Mace

Since David and Vera Mace brought a worldwide reputation for establishing marriage counseling in England and the United Kingdom it was natural that Emily Mudd, as Director of the Marriage Council of Philadelphia, would invite the Maces to join the American Association of Counselors and attend the Groves Conference in 1949. From then on, both David and Vera played key roles in Groves Conferences, serving terms as secretary/treasurer in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. We met the Maces at the first Groves Conference that we attended in May 1972 when Charles received the Groves Conference Outstanding Student Scholarship. Vera Mace, as treasurer of the Groves Conference, invited us to her room to meet David. The Maces became our primary mentors and teachers in marriage and family therapy and marriage enrichment. We had many years of working closely with the Maces in planning conferences and workshops that we chaired together (D. Mace & V. Mace, 1972, 1974, 1979, 1980, 1981; D. Mace, V. Mace, C. Cole, & A. Cole, 1981, 1982). In this context and in the context of receiving training and supervision from David and Vera Mace, we gained an appreciation for the significance of their contributions to the field of marriage and family therapy worldwide.

In many ways the Maces’ work and careers had a number of parallels with those of Ernest and Gladys Groves. Both couples were pioneers and social reformers, making their mission in life to improve the quality of marriage and family relationships. David began his career as a Methodist minister, serving congregations in England and learning firsthand of the difficulties couples had in making marriages work at the height of the worldwide depression and years of World War II. This is when David started his work as marriage counselor. While still a minister, he studied for his Ph. D. in sociology, Page  73specializing in family sociology. During the height of WWII, David Mace spearheaded a movement to establish marriage counseling and marriage guidance throughout England and the British Empire, culminating in an act of Parliament establishing Marriage Guidance Centers throughout Great Britain. The legacy of marriage counseling and guidance soon became a worldwide mission the Maces worked to achieve by embarking on five world-wide tours to recruit and train marriage counselors in Africa, Australia, Asia, Europe, North and South America, and several south Pacific islands.

After the end of WWII, the Maces moved to the United States, and David was hired to teach courses in family sociology, human relations, sexuality, and marriage counseling to seminary students at Drew University. David was invited to join the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania’s Psychiatry Department, Family Studies Division, to work with Emily Mudd in training marriage counselors. In 1960 he gave up his faculty appointment at the Marriage Council of Philadelphia to accept an appointment with Vera as the Co-Executive Directors of the American Association of Marriage Counselors. Their task was to help turn the fledgling organization around since it had been unable to expand its membership base from a little over 200 clinical members and was on the verge of going bankrupt. The Maces’ solution to the problem was to use their Quaker frugality. They moved the offices into the basement of their home in Patterson, New Jersey and operated the office on a shoestring. They had just enough funds to hire a part-time secretary to help with correspondence and filing and to pay for a phone and their travel expenses in representing the AAMC. Some months there was enough money left over to pay the Maces a small salary to compensate the husband-wife team for assuming this massive responsibility. Other months the funds were insufficient, and the Maces donated their time without compensation. During the seven years that the Maces served as co-executive directors they accomplished several significant improvements in the AAMC: They helped establish standards for training and membership, were responsible for helping AAMC grow to over 2000 clinical members, and established the financial stability necessary for the AAMC to survive and move toward maturity as the standard-setting organization for the profession of marriage and family counseling/therapy. Toward the end of their tenure as Page  74co-directors, the AAMC made strides to expand the organization by adding family counseling/therapy to a marriage counseling/therapy focus to become marriage and family counseling/therapy (Mudd & Fowler, 1969).

David and Vera modeled not only how to be a loving married couple but also how to work as a team—making a significant lifelong contribution to the three fields of marriage and family, marriage and family therapy, and marriage and family enrichment. Much like Ernest and Gladys Groves, the Maces worked together as a dynamic team to create a powerful force, a stronger dynamic than one person working alone. David was the visionary and Vera was the pragmatist who helped forge a workable plan to accomplish many of their joint projects.

Vera and David were humble about their many contributions. David would not even put his awards and honors on the wall in his office or home. They were inspiring teachers and supervisors, training thousands throughout the world to be marriage and family therapists and marriage and family enrichment leaders. David was perhaps one of the most prolific writers in the marriage and family field. He published over 1,000 papers and 30 books, with many of his books and articles being translated into a wide array of languages including Afrikaans, Chinese, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Urdu.It is arguable that through their work the Maces made marriage counseling, and later marriage enrichment, a worldwide mission—spreading the gospel to improve the lives of couples and families.

Another feature of David and Vera’s work that parallels the early work of Ernest and Gladys Groves was the combination of learning from the couples they worked with, expanding their vision of how to do marriage counseling and enrichment, and training others to carry on their vision for the future of the field. Both couples left a meaningful presence in our work today. Their legacies are rich and enduring testimonies to how purposefully they lived their lives, helping every couple they met find the potential to make their marriage a meaningful experience: one that gives purpose to a life of sharing intimate moments and growing throughout the course of Page  75the relationship. The Maces—like the Groveses—believed marriage is a process that evolves. From the couples they taught in marriage enrichment seminars, the Maces discovered the power of marital dialogues in the presence of other couples to teach couples how to learn from each other’s experience (Mace & Mace, 1981). Both the Maces and Groves were focused not just on remedial treatment but on finding lasting solutions that led to prevention of the painful deterioration of relationships—often because couples simply never learned to make their marriage intentional with a marital growth action plan to chart their future.

Would the Early Pioneers Recognize Marriage and Family Therapy Today?

In the 80 years since the first marriage counseling clinics were opened in the United States, the profession of marriage and family therapy has undergone significant growth and expansion, maturing beyond the wildest dreams of Ernest Groves and many of his early cohorts in the field. In the past eight decades, the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy has expanded the original dreams of the founders to include refined standards of practice that have only become possible with the development of extensive research and theory gains. We will address three areas of expansion in the rest of this chapter: (a) the development of research and theory; (b) the refinement of standards for accreditation of training centers; and (c) statutory recognition of the profession of marriage and family therapy. Each of these developments has made a significant contribution to the place marriage and family therapy now holds in the larger scheme of health care in the United States.

Development of Research and Theory

In the early days, marriage counseling, and later marriage and family counseling, emerged with little if any research basis to justify that it worked. Few theories existed, and those theories that did were heavily influenced by the classical psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic theories of the first part of the 20th century. The field of marriage counseling was slow to develop a coherent set of theories that focused on how relationships work and change. The research that has emerged since the 1970s clearly has been more systematic in employing the scientific rigor of today’s standards of scholarship. Much of this research has been influenced by the behavioral and cognitive behavioral theories that emerged out of family psychology and by the systemic theories that have roots in family sociology. John Gottman’s (1999) research in this area summarized many of the claims of couple therapy and exposes many of the myths that—when subjected to the rigors of scientific research—could not be supported by clinical experiments. Another thread of expansion in couple therapy and marriage has been the emphasis on emotionally focused therapy (Greenberg & Johnson, Page  791986). This recent work demonstrates significant impacts of the role of adult attachment in formulating and maintaining meaningful love relationships and marriage. Although Mace (1982) was unaware of this work before his death in 1990, he clearly was following similar threads with his theories of love and anger and the development of intentional marriages that create a safe haven for being “fully known and fully loved” (Mace, 1982). The power of emotions and connection were common cores to Mace’s work and are central to Johnson’s (2004) and Greenberg’s (1997) emotionally focused couple therapy models for treating marital and couple relationships.

In the 1950s some of the pioneers witnessed the gains made in family therapy with seminal research on the treatment of schizophrenia using the whole family. There were several significant projects funded by grants from the National Institutes of Mental Health and private foundations. In this brief review it is impossible to mention all of this impressive body of research and theory development. Perhaps the most enduring of this early research in family therapy comes from the work done through the Bateson project in Palo Alto which became the foundational basis for the interactional theories that have dominated family therapy for the past 60 years. From this work Don Jackson and his team at the Mental Research Institute have stimulated a wide array of research and model development that is central to family therapy training today (Ray, 2006).

In addition to the development of significant gains in family therapy research and theory, the field has seen a geometric expansion of journals and books specifically focused on marital and family therapy. The field of marriage and family therapy had no journals of its own until 1962 when Family Process was first published as interdisciplinary journal. The American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy did not publish a journal until the inaugural issue of the Journal of Marital and Family Counseling appeared in 1975. In 1979, after the name change of the organization to the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT), the journal was renamed as the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy. A review of the journals published today revealed nearly two dozen different journals devoted specifically to marriage and family therapy articles. The number of new books being published each month in the field Page  80of marriage and family therapy makes it nearly impossible to stay current in the field, and many practicing family therapist keep up with only a few specialties in their interest areas. This expansion of the literature has played a key role in establishing marriage and family therapy as a unique, independent mental health profession.

Perhaps the most significant gain in moving the field of marriage and family therapy to the level of respect it currently enjoys is based on a move to verify theories through evidence-based research. In an impressive collection of papers covering 10 different areas of treatment used by marriage and family therapists, Douglas Sprenkle compiled major research analyses, including meta-analytic studies of the best research published in the field of marriage and family therapy (Sprenkle, 2002). This body of research findings provides clear empirical evidence that marriage and family therapy and marriage enrichment are valid approaches to treatment. Furthermore, this research permits us to evaluate the degree of confidence we can place in various treatment protocols and intervention models, providing empirical bases for the approaches practitioners may choose in a wide variety of areas, such as depression, substance abuse, domestic violence, conduct disorders of children and adolescents, marital problems and enrichment, and marital and family preparation programs. Sprenkle (2002) pointed out that we are now moving past the era of claims based solely on the charismatic personalities of the originators of models and theories, and their disciples, to an era of scientific verification. The field of marriage and family therapy will continue to move forward as multiple teams of researchers independently test and refine models in order to find out what works and needs to be continued or what does not and needs to be discarded.

Refinement of Training Standards

The field of marriage and family therapy has undergone many changes in training standards since the original set of standards was formulated in the 1930s. The first university and freestanding institutes (The Marriage Council of Philadelphia, The Menninger Foundation, and The Merrill Palmer Institute) were accredited by the AAMC in the 1950s. The University of Pennsylvania was the Page  81first university accredited to train marriage counselors. In 1977 a new therapy organization emerged from the leaders of the family therapy field who served on the editorial board of Family Process. When the American Family Therapy Association (AFTA), now known as the American Family Therapy Academy, was formed in 1976 it was viewed as a potential rival organization of the AAMFC. This led to two key changes that have shaped the development of standards. In 1978 The Commission on Accreditation for Marriage and Family Therapy Education (COAMFTE) was recognized by the federal government to set the standards for training in marriage and family therapy. The original members of COAMFTE were composed of a blue-ribbon panel of 10 members from AAMFT and 10 members from AFTA. Today the accreditation standards set by COAMFTE are recognized as the standards for the profession. In the United States more than 30 universities have accredited doctoral training programs and nearly100 universities have accredited masters degree training programs in marriage and family therapy.

With the expansion of the field and the refinement of training standards, the field has matured from what many of the early generations of marriage and family counselors (E. Groves, 1945; Harper, 1953; Kerckhoff, 1953) viewed as a part-time professional specialty within other established mental health professions to a full-fledged independent profession with its own standards, body of literature, and training programs. Today the training standards for marriage and family therapists include a minimum of a two-year course of study in marriage and family and a rigorous core of clinical experience under tight supervision from an AAMFT Approved Supervisor. The unique focus of marriage and family therapy has remained the systemic orientation that the early pioneers, such as Ernest Groves and David Mace, developed from their sociological roots.

Statutory Recognition

Two external signs that the field of marriage and family therapy has matured as a separate and independent profession are (a) having its own body of research literature; and (b) professional standards, especially statutory recognition by governmental bodies. One of the Page  82most important markers of establishing a profession is external recognition of the uniqueness of the profession. The sociology of occupations (Kerckhoff, 1953) has long held that a profession has to provide unique functions not played by other professions and be recognized as important by the external society agents within the larger social structure. In the case of marriage and family therapy, the profession started with interdisciplinary traditions and connections to other professions (e.g., law, medicine, psychology, social work, sociology, and the clergy). Therefore it was logical to expect the development of an independent profession to take several years to reach the maturity necessary to be recognized as being able to stand alone as a separate profession and not be viewed just as a specialty or subspecialty of another profession. Complicating this emergence as a separate and independent profession is the reluctance of the allied professions to give up claims to marriage and family as core parts of what their professions do in their work.

It took more than 30 years from the time the first marriage and family counseling and therapy services were offered in the United States for regulatory boards for marriage and family therapy to be established in any of the states. California was the first to establish regulatory standards with the establishment of licensure for marriage, family, and child counselors in 1963. It has taken nearly a half a century for marriage and family therapy to achieve statutory recognition in all 50 states. The first significant recognition of marriage and therapy by the federal government of marriage and family therapy as an independent profession eligible for reimbursement without medical doctor referral was the inclusion of benefits by the Department of Defense under the Civilian Health and Medical Program for Uniformed Services (CHAMPUS) in 1974 for AAMFC Clinical Members. The second significant recognition is the passage in 2008 of federal legislation recognizing the importance of mental health services as a core part of health care insurance plans. This legislation is a landmark achievement for all mental health professions—including marriage and family therapy—because it recognizes mental health care is a core part of health care that should be a reimbursable benefit for policyholders.