About the Book
In this time of vulnerable marriages and partnerships, many couples seek help for their relationships. Psychoanalytic couple therapy is a growing application of psychoanalysis for which training is not usually offered in most psychoanalytic and analytic psychotherapy programs.This book is both an advanced text for therapists and a primer for new students of couple psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Its twenty-eight chapters cover the major ideas underlying the application of psychoanalysis to couple therapy, many clinical illustrations of cases and problems in various dimensions of the work. The international group of authors comes from the International Psychotherapy Institute based in Washington, DC, and the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships (TCCR) in London. The result is a richly international perspective that nonetheless has theoretical and clinical coherence because of the shared vision of the authors.
Table of Contents:
Series Editor’s Foreword , Preface and Acknowledgements , Fundamental Principles of Psychoanalytic Couple Therapy , An overview of psychodynamic couple therapy , Shared unconscious phantasy in couples , Intimacy and the couple—the long and winding road , Attachment, affect regulation, and couple psychotherapy , Aggression in couples: an object relations primer , Getting back to or getting back at: understanding overt aggression in couple relationships , Responding to the clinical needs of same-sex couples , The selfdyad in the dynamic organisation of the couple , Dreams in analytic couple therapy , Why can being a creative couple be so difficult to achieve? The impact of early anxieties on relating , Assessment And Treatment , The couple state of mind and some aspects of the setting in couple psychotherapy , Establishing a therapeutic relationship in analytic couple therapy , The triangular field of couple containment , Projection, introjection, intrusive identification, adhesive identification , Negotiating individual and joint transferences in couple therapy , Narcissism in a couple with a cocaine-addicted partner , The dream space in analytic couple therapy , Clinical narrative and discussion: a couple who lost joy , Understanding and Treating Sexual Issues , How development structures sexual relationships , Assessing the sexual relationship , Addressing sexual issues in couple therapy , Unconscious meanings and consequences of abortion in the life of couples , Working with affairs , Special Topics , The couple as parents: the role of children in couple treatment , Divorce and parenting wars , Trauma in the Couple , Treating Intergenerational Trauma: The Bomb that Exploded Me Continues to Blow up My Family , But My Partner “Is” the Problem: Addressing Addiction, Mood Disorders, and Psychiatric Illness in Psychoanalytic Couple Treatment , The Ending of Couple Therapy with a Couple Who Recovered Joy , Epilogue
About the Author :
David E Scharff
Review :
"Psychoanalytic Couple Therapy represents a major advance in a crucial and, until recent years, underdeveloped application of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Chronic marital conflict is a major source of human suffering and consultation to psychotherapeutic practitioners. The original application by Henry Dicks of Fairbairnian psychoanalytic theory and Melanie Klein's exploration of primitive defensive operation and object relations in the therapeutic approach to couples in conflict had opened a new field of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The expansion of this field with new knowledge stemming from psychoanalytic theory of small group dynamics, understanding of attachment pathology, trauma therapy, and open system theory of personality and cultural interactions, however, took a relatively long time. The reader of this book will find both clear definitions of the corresponding clinical instruments and their theoretical basis, and their practical application to a broad spectrum of couples' conflicts. The underlying unconscious fantasies of both partners are highlighted and explored in the context of transference/countertransference activations in the triangular therapeutic encounter. This volume shows how sexual difficulties, cultural constraints and contradictions, gender issues, and clashes of rigid personality patterns are linked to these unconscious fantasies and their roots in infancy and early childhood. The richness of the contributions permits the reader to detect technical commonalities and disagreements, and gives the reader the stimulation and freedom to achieve his or her own synthesis of this creative, sophisticated overview of psychodynamic couple therapy today."--Otto F. Kernberg, MD, Director, Personality Disorders Institute, New York Presbyterian, The University Hospital of Columbia and Cornell
