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In the spring of 2014, Joshua Ehrlich's Divorce and Loss: Helping Adults and Children Mourn When a Marriage Comes Apart was published just as Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin announced to a media frenzy their “conscious uncoupling.” The mechanical and anesthetized connotation of that phrase, conceived by the therapist Katherine Woodward Thomas (2012), is a clear example of the human need to minimize and avoid the exquisitely painful affects associated with the losses and changes of an unraveling marriage. By focusing on the process of mourning, an aspect that Ehrlich argues has been overlooked in the field of divorce and child custody, he uses a psychoanalytic lens to illuminate the feelings and meanings that are camouflaged and defended against by the conflicts, disengagements, and distractions that preoccupy families as well as helping professionals during this difficult period.
In this small volume, Ehrlich successfully constructs a bridge between the two literatures of divorce and child custody, on the one hand, and psychoanalysis, on the other, by using his extensive training, knowledge, and experience as both a psychoanalyst and a clinical psychologist who has worked in the various roles of custody evaluator, parent coordinator, mediator, and therapist. Ehrlich exposes therapeutic and legal readers to psychoanalytic authors from several theoretical orientations. To name but a few, he cites papers by George Hagman on mourning, Thomas Ogden on painful affects, Heinz Kohut and Estelle and Morton Shane on narcissistic vulnerabilities with loss, and Lora Tessman on divorce and child custody. Conversely, he introduces clinicians not specialized in the field of divorce and custody to the findings of such experts as Judith Wallerstein and Joan Kelly, Jan Johnston, Neil Kalter, Robin Deutsch, Nehami Baum, and Morton Chethik, among others. Ehrlich's facile integration of these references into his text and the extensive bibliography he has assembled