Family And Couple Psychoanalysis

This book explores family interaction and family psychoanalysis from varying standpoints used around the world. It illustrates these with extensive clinical cases discussed from varying perspectives. The book is the first in a series of volumes from the International Psychoanalytical Association's Working Group on Family and Couple Psychoanalysis, drawn from its ongoing research into comparative theories and methods of working analytically with families and couples, and with varying types of family structure. It also applies lessons from family psychoanalysis to analytic theory and to the practice of individual psychoanalysis.

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.

Psychoanalytic Work with Families and Couples rethinks the ways in which conflicts present today in psychoanalytic consulting rooms and the nature of suffering in family, couple, and sibling bonds. Based on two major concepts, that of device (drawn from the philosophers Foucault, Deleuze, and Agamben) and that of link (developed by Berenstein and Puget), the authors have developed new approaches to clinical practice with families and couples that focus on the complexity, singularity, and immanence of patient-analyst interaction in the session. In thinking about link dynamics, moreover, they go beyond the consulting room to reflect on how these dynamics develop in other spaces, such as institutions, organizations, and the fraternal circle of colleagues. Part I, Couples and Families Today, discusses changes undergone by families and couples in the last thirty years and their effects on psychoanalytic practice. Attributing a link logic to suffering and to the situations that condition it implies making significant decisions regarding our clinical strategy, our choice of a device and of an interpretive path. Faithful to the idea that the clinical dimension calls for transformations, the second part, Facing Clinical Challenges, includes clinical materials from manifold treatment devices that attest to changes both in contemporary paradigms and in the professional lives of psychoanalysts. Psychoanalytic Work with Families and Couples will be of great interest to all practicing psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.

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.

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.

"This book explores family interaction and family psychoanalysis from varying standpoints used around the world. It illustrates these with extensive clinical cases discussed from varying perspectives. The book is the first in a series of volumes from the International Psychoanalytical Association's Working Group on Family and Couple Psychoanalysis, drawn from its ongoing research into comparative theories and methods of working analytically with families and couples, and with varying types of family structure. It also applies lessons from family psychoanalysis to analytic theory and to the practice of individual psychoanalysis."--Provided by publisher.

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.

This book widens the scope of clinical and theoretical contributions on Couple and Family Psychoanalysis by collecting case presentations and discussions by analysts from Europe, North America, Latin America, China and Australia. The rich cross-fertilization across countries and analytic orientations stimulates cross-cultural thinking and deepens clinical exploration. In English language psychoanalysis, focus on object relations theory emphasizes internalization of early family figures in construction of the psyche, and their projective influence on others through continuing family interaction. Theories of the link and of the field explored in South America and Europe, shift focus from the internal life of the individual onto the influence of the other, and the way superordinate unconscious patterns introjected from previous generations are recreated by interacting members of families and couples, and in turn contribute to the continuing psychic evolution of individuals. Work in other cultures, such as China, brings us face to face with deep structures of thought and family organization that challenge Western psychoanalytic assumptions, even as those families are in rapid change themselves.