18th-Century German Writers Pioneered Modern Marriage Therapy
Scholars discovered that German moral philosophers in the 1700s developed relationship advice strikingly similar to modern couples therapy—emphasizing daily affirmation, conflict de-escalation, and self-reflection. The finding reframes how we understand the origins of contemporary emotional management practices and suggests therapeutic approaches to personal life have deeper historical roots than commonly assumed.
Originaltitel: Tempering the Marital Mind: Civic Regimens of Love and Marriage in German Mid-Eighteenth-Century Moral Weeklies
<p>This article contributes to the historiography of romantic marriage in the eighteenth century by analyzing discourses on marital love and happiness in the moral weeklies of the German writers Georg Friedrich Meier and Samuel Gotthold Lange. Meier and Lange raise overarching questions about why so many marriages are unhappy and argue that long-term marital contentment requires spouses to discover and confirm each other ’ s qualities and abilities on a daily basis. Each must reflect and affirm the other while also practicing a kind of de-escalation in conflict situations, for instance by withdrawing and calming oneself before facing problems anew. I argue that this apparently modern therapeutic approach to marital relationships was part of a civic morality in the making, a morality that pointed forward to the emergence of a modern individual self while also being rooted in a long tradition of spiritual exercises and therapeutic regimens.</p>