Purging Concepts From the Study of Marriage and Marital Therapy

The need for concepts to understand marriage and marital therapy is emphasized by the relative paucity of theory in the marital literature. The title of Coyne's article (this issue) therefore struck us as timely and promising. As indicated in our article, we believe that the cognitive domain may indeed yield useful concepts for understanding marriage and marital therapy. Coyne disagrees strongly with this viewpoint; he attacks the purported hegemony of cognition ("cognition iiber alles") and offers a "solution" (in this case a pure marital therapy cleansed of degenerate cognitive elements). Unfortunately, his response speaks only minimally and often indirectly to the arguments we offer in our original article. This is perhaps a necessary consequence of caricaturing our position in order to emphasize how it differs from his own.' Although there clearly are differences between our positions, these are not always the ones expressed by Coyne. Moreover, Coyne's attempt to draw an overly sharp contrast between "interactional" and "cog-