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Love Songs: Listening to Couples

Author(s) : Perrine Moran

Reviews and Endorsements

Why is it so difficult to live and stay together? This is a question that Perrine Moran explores in an original and challenging book where psychoanalysis meets popular culture. The narrative that unfolds is anchored in real-life stories of relationships and framed by the love songs that epitomise them. This is not a soundtrack or an illustration but a shared imaginary landscape that the readers of Love Songs: Listening to Couples are invited to navigate by ear.
Madeleine Renouard, academic, writer, and art critic

Perrine Moran has written an original and engaging book that takes seriously insights provided by songs from different musical traditions into the ubiquitous experience of love and loss. An experienced couple psychotherapist, she provides a deft psychoanalytic analysis of the themes they portray alongside detailed illustrations of how they have surfaced in her clinical practice. This is a book to deepen an appreciation and understanding of how the need to love and be loved plays out in human relationships, fortified, of course, by a playlist. It is a reminder that the arts can speak more directly and poignantly than the best of therapy textbooks.
Christopher Clulow, PhD, Consultant Couple Psychotherapist and Senior Fellow of the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology

Perrine Moran’s Love Songs: Listening to Couples is a beautifully crafted book. She explores the music and lyrics of iconic love songs to highlight experiences of love in all its forms. Through a psychoanalytic lens, she articulates clearly why the songs strike powerful chords in all of us. Moran seamlessly links the songs to the experiences of couples she has worked with therapeutically. Here we see the depth of her knowledge in understanding couple dynamics – from early life experiences of the vicissitudes of love, through to the inherent tensions and challenges of adult love. This book will be valuable to those who want to know more about love as it manifests and is understood in the process of couple therapy. However, I would recommend this highly accessible book to anyone who wants to think further about love in all its complexities, and joys.
Mary Morgan, Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, Couple Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist, Senior Fellow of Tavistock Relationships, and author of A Couple State of Mind

Perrine Moran’s long experience as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist is shared with sensibility, compassion, and open-mindedness, listening for what else is true, and what has happened to love. She illuminates the connections between couple conflicts and the development of the self in infancy, and in families and cultures of origin. We are shown the baby and child still active in the feelings and unconscious hopes and fears of adults in relationships, and hence we see psychoanalytic theory creatively at work in very skilled hands. I was not sure beforehand how well the pairing with love songs would work, much as I love most of the songs, but, actually, this really brought the couples in distress alive, and allows us, the reader, to get better into the therapist’s chair. Clinicians are used to reading case histories and vignettes from sessions. It is interesting but it is work … In this book, the passion, longings, and heartbreak these songs may re-evoke from our personal lives complement the clinical and theoretical descriptions of the couples’ predicaments. Just as the therapist’s musical associations helped to pinpoint the affects with which each couple needed her help, they allow us to re-find how sharp and unbearable those predicaments are.
Mary Hepworth, Emeritus Professor, University College London Psychoanalysis Unit