Comprehensive Care For Your Relationship

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Daniel Wile, Ph.D died on March 18, 2020. With his passing some of the art and elegance within the psychotherapy profession lost a little ground.

Dan Wile was a creative “genius” *. In a sometimes desolate landscape of manualized protocols and interventions, Dan Wile quietly and methodically persevered to better understand himself and the compassionate practice he called Collaborative Couple Therapy.

Wile authored several books on Collaborative Couple Therapy and many scholarly articles addressing various dynamics within psychotherapy. His mentor and eventual collaborator, Bernard Apfelbaum, Ph.D., was a proponent of ego analysis (not ego psychology): understanding human problems as originating from critical and negative self-ego states such as feelings of inadequacy, self-hatred, shame, and self-blame. The ego-analytic therapist helps her client get on his own side, sympathizing with himself and his predicament, so he may exercise compassionate, nonjudgmental curiosity about his predicament. Collaborative Couple Therapy operationalizes and repeatedly models how intimate partners can actualize this compassionate platform within themselves individually and with each other.

Dan was scrupulously committed to process and to values that make therapy compassionate and healing. These include giving voice to the reasonableness in people’s perspectives, structuring intimate conversations between partners as the vehicle for producing change, and encouraging individuals to embrace with kindness the totality of their own unique and subjective human experience. And Wile embodied what he taught.

Dan would sometimes describe his method by saying he helped people make a “better case” for themselves with their partners: He modeled how people could express themselves authentically without blaming or judging each other. Many of us build a case for how right we are by arguing how wrong someone else is. In such an instance Dan might empathically reflect to himself, “He’s not making a very good case for himself.”

Dan’s approach encouraged people to sympathize with themselves, find the reasonableness in their own experience, and learn to express that with compassion for self and with kindness toward one’s partner. Dan was a gentle and inspiring teacher, well-loved and missed by all fortunate to know him. What a lasting case he’s made in the lives of so many.

*From the acknowledgements of John Gottman’s book The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work.

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