Couples on the Couch ─ Psychoanalytic Couple Psychotherapy and the Tavistock Model

Couples on the Couch provides a clear guide to applying the Tavistock model of couple psychotherapy in clinical psychoanalytic practice, offering a compelling sampling of ideas about couple relationships and couple psychotherapy from a broadly relational psychoanalytic perspective. The book provides an in-depth perspective to understanding intimate relationships and the complexities of working in this domain.The chapters and their accompanying discussion also offer a fertile resource of material for readers who have not previously had exposure to the theory and technique of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, as well as offering an expanded and more rigorous approach to those who are already familiar with the Tavistock model. The chapters cover key topics including: unconscious beliefs, forms of couple relating, sex and aging and draw upon the work of Klein, Winnicott and Bion, as well as attachment and object relations theory.

The majority of the contributors are affiliated with the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relations (TCCR) in London or The Psychoanalytic Couple Psychotherapy Group in Berkeley, California and make fundamental use of the theoretical model that has been developed at TCCR since the 1940's. Couples on the Couch provides an introduction to the TCCR approach to couple psychotherapy and exposure to the depth and breadth of this framework. Each of the chapters contain in-depth theoretical and clinical case material, presented in tandem with formal discussion, demonstrating how theory may be applied in a variety of clinical encounters and by doing so, deepening the theoretical understanding of the difficulties that beset couples and the challenges posed to those who work with them. The book provides an in-depth perspective to understanding intimate relationships and the complexities of working in this domain.

Couples on the Couch will be of great interest to couple psychotherapists and counselors, marriage and family therapists, psychoanalysts, as well as graduate and postgraduate students in psychology, marriage and family therapy, or those in psychoanalytic training programs.

Shelley Nathans, Ph.D. is on the faculty at California Pacific Medical Center, Psychoanalytic Couple Psychotherapy Group, and the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. She has authored papers on infidelity and projective identification in couples, and is the director and producer of the film Robert Wallerstein: 65 Years at the Center of Psychoanalysis. She is in private practice in San Francisco and Oakland.

Milton Schaefer, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst in private practice in San Francisco. He is on the faculty at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis where he has taught Relational Theory and Couples Therapy and is a faculty member of the Psychoanalytic Couples Psychotherapy Group. He has presented and published on high conflict divorce, ethical issues, and psychoanalysis and art.