Psychoanalytic Couple Therapy


Book Description

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.




Interpretation in Couple and Family Psychoanalysis


Book Description

This collection of contemporary clinically-oriented papers covers a range of theoretical approaches to the fundamentally important technical issue of interpretation. It offers thought-provoking, cross-cultural clinical perspectives about interpretation with illustrations from cutting edge clinical practice with couples and families. Divided into three sections, the first part of the book examines interpretation within the broader field of psychoanalysis, and notes how it has been applied to couple and family psychoanalysis. Part II considers the current use of interpretation with couples, including how it informs assessment, while Part III focuses on its application with families and considers a broad range of key topics, including the nature of family, social and intergenerational links, the arrival of a newborn, same sex couples’ families, bereavement in a family, and families with adolescent children. Each chapter includes a lively discussion piece. Interpretation in Couple and Family Psychoanalysis: Cross-Cultural Perspectives represents a major contribution to the field of couple and family psychoanalysis. It reflects the fruits of an unparalleled era of global collaboration and the resultant re-shaping of approaches to clinical practice with couples and families. Mental health professionals dealing with couples and families will find it to have immediate relevance to their clinical work, either in their institutional or private practice.




A Couple State of Mind


Book Description

A Couple State of Mind is a much anticipated book aimed at an international audience of practitioners, students and teachers of psychoanalytic couple therapy, describes the Tavistock Relationships model of couple psychoanalytic psychotherapy, drawing on both historical and contemporary ideas, including the author’s own theoretical contributions. The book references contemporary influences of other psychoanalytic approaches to couples, particularly from an international perspective. It will be invaluable for all students learning about psychoanalytic work with couples for other psychoanalytic practitioners interested in this field.




Sex, Attachment and Couple Psychotherapy


Book Description

The contributors to this book have drawn on different mentors to provide a framework for understanding the sexual problems of the couples they see, and to inform the work they do. But whether Freud, Jung, Klein or Bowlby has been the progenitor of their own particular therapeutic narrative, the spirit of enquiry and curiosity is evident in their ap




A Relational Psychoanalytic Approach to Couples Psychotherapy


Book Description

Winner of the 2014 Goethe Award for Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Scholarship! A Relational Psychoanalytic Approach to Couples Psychotherapy presents an original model of couples treatment integrating ideas from a host of authors in relational psychoanalysis. It also includes other psychoanalytic traditions as well as ideas from other social sciences. This book addresses a vacuum in contemporary psychoanalysis devoid of a comprehensively relational way to think about the practice of psychoanalytically oriented couples treatment. In this book,Philip Ringstrom sets out a theory of practice that is based on three broad themes: The actualization of self experience in an intimate relationship The partners' capacity for mutual recognition versus mutual negation The relationship having a mind of its own Based on these three themes, Ringstrom's model of treatment is articulated in six non-linear, non-hierarchical steps that wed theory with practice - each powerfully illustrated with case material. These steps initially address the therapist’s attunement to the partners' disparate subjectivities including the critical importance of each one's perspective on the "reality" they co-habit.Their perspectives are fleshed out through the exploration of their developmental histories with focus on factors of gender and culture and more. Out of this arises the examination of how conflictual pasts manifest in dissociated self-states, the illumination of which lends to the enrichment of self-actualization, the facilitation of mutual recognition, and the capacity to more genuinely renegotiate their relationship. The book concludes with a chapter that illustrates one couple treated through all six steps and a chapter on frequently asked questions ("FAQ's") derived from over thirty years of practice, teaching, supervision and presentations during the course of this books development. A Relational Psychoanalytic Approach to Couples Psychotherapy balances a great range of ways to work with couples, while also providing the means to authentically negotiate their differences in a way which is insightful and invaluable. This book is for practitioners of couples therapy and psychoanalytic practitioners. It is also aimed at undergraduate, graduates, and postgraduate students in the fields of psychiatry, psychology, marriage and family therapy, and social work.




Uncoupling Convention


Book Description

What does it mean to be member of a gay/lesbian couple or family? The contributors to Uncoupling Convention: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Same-Sex Couples and Families address this question by drawing on two cultural movements of the twentieth century: psychoanalysis and the gay/lesbian civil rights movement. Taken together, these traditions provide a framework for understanding, and providing psychotherapeutic assistance to, gay and lesbian patients who present with troubled relationships. The contributors to this volume espouse a clinical focus that supplants the heterosexual perspectives of traditional psychoanalysis with new narratives about family life. Drawing on cultural, feminist, gay/lesbian, and queer studies, they illustrate how concepts of gender and sexuality are routinely informed by unproven heterosexist assumptions - both conscious and unconscious. By examining the changing developmental needs and family dynamics of gay and lesbian families, the contributors broaden our very understanding of what a family is. They illustrate how contrasting cultural constructions of homosexuality and family life play out in same-sex couples. They delineate the multiple realities of gender subjectivity, both in children and in their gay parents. They ponder how technology is shaping reproductive experiences, as lesbians become part of the biomedical system. And they explore recurrent themes of feeling different and ashamed, including the shameful secrecy surrounding same-sex couples' financial matters. In uncoupling conventions, the contributors are effectively coupling post-Freudian psychoanalysis with the insights of queer theory and the critical edge of contemporary cultural studies. The result is a framework for addressing the relational and family-related challenges of gay and lesbian patients that ranges far beyond traditional approaches and will benefit analytic, couples, and family therapists alike.




Families in Transformation


Book Description

Families in Transformation is a collection of essays by eminent scholars on the psychoanalysis of couples and families and provides a wide ranging and articulated picture of the current situation in Europe. The reader will find various psychoanalytical models applied in it: from object relations theory to group analysis to the theory of links, encountering the lively and rich French, Italian, and British schools at work in different settings. Themes range from myths to secrets, to incest and the brotherly dimension of families; from adoptive families to the conflicts over separation, in addition to papers discussing perverse and violent couples. The book shows how it is possible to put together an understanding of the individual's internal world with the interpersonal dynamics of families, their bonds and relations, expressed in somatic and active terms at the inter- and trans-generational level.




Psychoanalytic Approaches to Loss


Book Description

Psychoanalytic Approaches to Loss: Mourning, Melancholia and Couples applies psychoanalytic ideas to the clinically complex issue of loss in couples and families and outlines a new model for the treatment of associated unresolved grief. In line with contemporary approaches to couple and family psychoanalysis, this integrated object relations and link theory model provides a clear framework and approach for assessing and treating this clinical presentation. The book brings together contributions from internationally known and respected clinicians and authors who focus on loss, including repeated pregnancy loss, the loss of a child or parent and the loss of a relationship itself. These psychoanalytic couple therapists take the reader inside their consulting rooms, enabling observation of their approaches to the treatment of couples experiencing loss and associated unresolved grief. Psychoanalytic Approaches to Loss: Mourning, Melancholia and Couples will make an important contribution to the literature on grief and mourning and the application of psychoanalytic thinking to couples presenting with difficulties linked to unresolved grief, following loss. It represents an essential resource to psychotherapists, counsellors, family therapists, mental health professionals and many others supporting those experiencing loss.




Couples on the Couch


Book Description

Introduction : core concepts of the Tavistock couple psychotherapy model / Shelley Nathans -- Couples on the couch : working psychoanalytically with couple relationships / Stanley Ruszczynski -- Discussion of "couples on the couch : working psychoanalytically with couple relationships" / Rachel Cooke -- Unconscious beliefs about being a couple / Mary Morgan -- Discussion of "unconscious beliefs about being a couple" : beliefs about a couple and beliefs about the other / Milton Schaefer -- The Macbeths in the consulting room / James V. Fisher -- Discussion of "the Macbeths in the consulting room" / Shelley Nathans -- Psychotic and depressive processes in couple functioning / Francis Grier -- Discussion of "psychotic and depressive processes in couple functioning" / Julie Friend -- Romantic bonds, binds and ruptures : couples on the brink / Virginia Goldner -- Discussion of "romantic bonds, binds and ruptures : couples on the brink" / Rachael Peltz -- How was it for you? Attachment, sexuality and mirroring in couple relationships / Christopher Clulow -- Discussion of "how was it for you? Attachment, mirroring, and the psychotherapeutic process with couples" / Leora Benioff -- Growing old together in mind and body / Andrew Balfour -- Discussion of "growing old together in mind and body" / Leslye Russell.




Couple Stories


Book Description

This book presents the application of key psychoanalytic concepts in thinking about the dynamics in the couple relationship. The contributions to the first part, mainly theory, discuss how different psychoanalytic ideas can be used in conceptualizing the nature of couple interaction. In the second part, on clinical practice, four couples tell their stories during their clinical sessions. Couple Stories conveys a lively experience of the couple's relationships as these occur in the consulting room and there are several commentaries for each 'couple story'. Commentaries explore the concepts described in the earlier part of the book, as well as clinical themes that couples bring to their sessions and the difficulties that they have encountered in the course of their relationship. Commentaries also provide an insight into how psychoanalytic couple therapists think about the clinical material, what they might select as a focus, and how they may go about developing a hypothesis about the nature of the relationship between the partners.