Treatment team in conflict: The wishes for and risks of consensus

THIS ARTICLE explores the clinical, systemic, and interpersonal dynamics of conflict between therapists on a treatment team. It considers treatment implications in regard to how therapists handle conflicts with one another, and focuses attention on the pressure they experience to resolve differences and reach consensus. Specifically, the author suggests that the therapist's ability to tolerate a lack of consensus, and to understand and accept conflicting perspectives with respect to a given patient, can help that patient begin to tolerate and integrate his or her own ambivalent feelings. Such integrative efforts may enable the patient to eventually deal with conflicting affects more directly within a single therapeutic relationship.