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More About Couples on the Couch: Approaching Psychoanalytic Couple Psychotherapy from an Expanded Perspective

Editor : Shelley Nathans

Reviews and Endorsements

"Shelley Nathans’s new volume, More About Couples on the Couch, is a wonderful collection of clinical and theoretical articles. International contributions drawn from leading members of Tavistock Relationships in London, the faculty of The Psychoanalytic Couple Psychotherapy Group in the San Francisco Bay Area, along with other leading therapists illuminate areas of couple relationships that have been largely out of the spotlight: creativity and imagination, love as a creative illusion, no-sex couples and same sex couples, along with a variety of psychoanalytic theoretical contributions. This volume offers a treasure trove the well-read couple therapist will not want to miss." - David Scharff, co-founder & former director, International Psychotherapy Institute and former chair, the International Psychoanalytic Association’s Committee on Couple and Family Psychoanalysis.

"In this second volume of Couples on the Couch, the seminal book on psychoanalytic couple psychotherapy, we see the merit and value of expansions in theory that allow new ideas and therapeutic projects to emerge. Most importantly, how deeply resonant these innovations are for couples where issues of culture, race, identity, and sexuality are central. This excellent edited volume of papers by international scholars will help therapists understand and work with different kinds of relational configurations and the complex process of undoing, divorcing, or repairing the damages and strains in contemporary relationships." - Adrienne Harris, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy.

"In this second collection of papers under the title of Couples on the Couch, Shelley Nathans has brought together papers from a variety of theoretical orientations, complementing her first collection (co-edited with Milton Schaefer), which took a primarily contemporary Kleinian object relations approach, developed at Tavistock Relationships in London, in its theoretical understanding of human growth and development, and how this informs an understanding of the dynamics of intimate couple relating and clinical work with couples in distress.

In this collection, Nathans includes an impressive array of papers using the writings of Winnicott, Bollas, Ogden, Fairbairn and Kohut, and the theoretical orientations offered by field, mentalisation, relational and link theories, and by self psychology. Each paper is followed by a discussion, which is very often as substantial as the paper to which it is responding, and together they offer complementary, supplementary and sometimes alternative emphases on in-depth psychoanalytic work with couples.

Though the Tavistock Relationships model has roots in Jungian (Alison Lyons, Janet Mattinson) and Independent tradition (Enid Balint, Michael Balint) thinking, its subsequent development leaned heavily on the Kleinian and post Kleinian object relations understanding of the processes of splitting, projective identification, narcissism and containment as being fundamental to an in-depth exploration of the psychic structure of intimate couple relating. These remain as cornerstones, but the papers in this collection demonstrate how further theoretical constructs substantially add to and develop this understanding.

Using many clinical vignettes all the papers demonstrate how the orientation which they discuss is applied to the clinical work with couples in the consulting room.

What this volume demonstrates, as did the first, is the efficacy of psychoanalytic understanding and treatment in the therapeutic work with intimate couple relationships, and not just with individuals which is where these theories were first developed. More than that, again, as with the first volume, these papers implicitly demonstrate how an understanding of the intrapersonal and interpersonal dynamics of intimate couple interaction informs and strengthens our theories about and clinical practice with individuals." - Stanley Ruszczynski, psychoanalyst, BPA (British Psychoanalytic Association), IPA, and psychoanalytic couple psychotherapist.