Love Songs: Listening to Couples
Book Details
- Publisher : Karnac Books
- Published : January 2025
- Cover : Paperback
- Pages : 142
- Category :
Family, Couple and Systemic Therapy - Category 2 :
Psychoanalysis - Catalogue No : 97939
- ISBN 13 : 9781800132672
- ISBN 10 : 1800132670
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Perrine Moran considers the power of popular love songs to trigger emotion and capture what is at the heart of couple dynamics. In songs, music and words – the non-verbal and verbal – combine to create a unit. In couples, two people create a unit that combines togetherness and individuality, a potentially problematic blend.
The dilemma of how to be emotionally dependent on another without losing oneself underlies many issues that couples bring to therapy and is the stuff of many love songs. Its management results in different dynamics, which the chapters of this book identify. An understanding of the unconscious connections between early, primary relationships and those formed in adulthood sheds light on the experiences of couples, whether or not they enter therapy.
Written in an accessible and relatable style, Perrine Moran brings psychoanalytic concepts to couple relationships through the medium of music. In her clinical work as a couple therapist, she often found herself thinking of a specific song that encapsulated something at the core of a couple. At other times, a song came to mind that captured a pattern repeated in a number of couples. Intrigued, Moran began to explore in depth the link between love songs and couples. The result is a book that focuses on different types of couple dynamics, such as disappointment, enmeshment, and difference, and the songs and case vignettes that best illustrate them.
A playlist, Love Songs. Listening to Couples, is available on digital streaming services, for readers to enjoy as they turn the pages of the relevant chapters (Spotify, Amazon Music) - see table of contents below for links.
Love Songs: Listening to Couples is ideal for practitioners and trainees working with couples and will appeal to a wide range of readers who enjoy popular music and are curious, for personal, academic or professional reasons, about couple dynamics and problematic interactions.
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
Table of Contents
A playlist, Love Songs. Listening to Couples, is available on digital streaming services, for readers to enjoy as they turn the pages of the relevant chapters (Spotify, Amazon Music)
Acknowledgements
About the author
Introduction
1. Connections
2. Push and pull: Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me
3. Disappointment: Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
4. Enmeshment: I’ve Got You Under My Skin
5. Difference: Somewhere . . .
6. The unspoken: If You Could Read My Mind
7. Separation: They Can’t Take That Away From Me
Afterword
References and song, film, and stage listings
Index
About the Author(s)
Perrine Moran, MA, is a psychodynamic psychotherapist and a couple psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She is a visiting lecturer and supervisor at Tavistock Relationships. She has taught psychoanalytic couple theory internationally as well as on two master’s programmes at Tavistock Relationships. She was a supervisor at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. She is the arts editor for Couple and Family Psychoanalysis, and a member of the editorial board of the Revue of the International Association for Couple and Family Psychoanalysis. She is bilingual, works with individuals and couples in English and in French, and has a private practice in London.
Before training as a psychotherapist, Perrine Moran was a lecturer in French literature at the University of London, and an actress in Paris, where she ran a fringe theatre in the basement of a Cuban restaurant.
Customer Reviews
Our customers have given this title an average rating of 5 out of 5 from 1 review(s), add your own review for this title.
christopher simon wintle on 04/03/2025 15:20:06
(5 out of 5)
What a remarkable book this is! It is not just beautifully written and presented, but even more strikingly embodies a profound humanism. Perrine Moran (who has a Polish background) is a couples therapist who admits that she is affected by what she hears, and copes in two ways: by pegging her interpretations to the titles of mainly popular songs of the last century or so, and in one case by writing a psychodrama that celebrates the power of enduring love between a wife, her daughter and her senile husband. She thus integrates music and lyrics into object relations theory, in a way that I (as an interested and musical lay reader of psychology) have not seen before. Each chapter highlights a problem - or issue - in the way couples relate, and the whole is well introduced and summarized (at the end). I expect to return to this book repeatedly for its sensitivity, intelligence and compassion. I also hope that PM writes more in he same vein. Warmly recommended.
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