Psychoanalysis seeks the sources of human motivation in the patient's interior life and past.
It leaves to the patient responsibility for behavior in the present. Couple and family therapies focus on current behavior and leave responsibility for inner life and the past to the patients. These statements, while not incorrect, are mere caricatures of the two approaches. At best, they are outmoded presentations of the most extreme positions of opposing and apparently incompatible schools. I believe both approaches are not only compatible, but necessary, to clinical work and thought.