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Couples on the Couch: Psychoanalytic Couple Therapy and the Tavistock Model, edited by Shelley Nathans and Milton Schaefer, is a creatively edited compilation of papers undertaken by two research and teaching groups—the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships (TCCR, now called Tavistock Relationships, or TR), located in London, and the Psychoanalytic Couple Psychotherapy Group (PCPG), located in Berkeley, California.
To provide some history, approximately two decades ago a group of dedicated psychoanalytically informed clinicians in the Bay Area made contact with TR—an institute that had pioneered in developing theories and methods for the treatment of disturbed couple and group relationships, rooted in psychoanalytic thinking, especially the object relations tradition. As I understand the origins of this partnership, these California clinicians, all seasoned in the psychoanalytic tradition and wanting to learn more about the Tavistock application to couples, traveled to London to study the developments occurring there. Later the TR clinicians were invited to Berkeley to teach and supervise the Bay Area clinicians. Emerging from these repeated sojourns was a relationship between the two groups, eventuating in the founding of PCPG. Since then PCPG has continued to expand upon the Tavistock tradition, while continuing its collaboration with TR.
Here I will say something about the Tavistock model and its history, especially for those less familiar with its approach in the treatment of couples. Beginning in the 1940s, Enid Balint, a London psychoanalyst, was instrumental in developing the Family Discussion Bureau, a precursor of TR. Eventually, she and her husband, Michael Balint, became