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A Couple State of Mind: Psychoanalysis of Couples and the Tavistock Relationships Model is a tour de force. Many readers of this journal may be unfamiliar with the literature on analytic couple therapy. This book is
an up-to-date place to start, a landmark for couple analytic therapists but also a volume to orient the individual analyst to the relevance of this application of psychoanalysis.
Written by Mary Morgan, a psychoanalyst, couple psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and member of the International Committee of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis of the International Psychoanalytical Association, the book is a major contribution to the literature. Morgan investigates the methodology of psychoanalytic couple therapy that originated and developed over seventy years at the Tavistock Clinic (now Tavistock Relationships), and compares these advances with couple psychoanalytic currents occurring beyond the United Kingdom, and between individual psychoanalysis and analytic couple therapy.
The reader will be impressed not only by the rigor of Morgan's scholarly enterprise, but also by the humility, grace, and generosity that those who know her personally will recognize. Here she shares the full range of her original ideas regarding the couple relationship and couple analytic process. Like our moment-to-moment breathing that goes on outside our awareness, we employ Morgan's terms as if we have always had them, forgetting sometimes to credit their inventor. For example, such concepts as the “creative couple” (Morgan 2005), and “projective gridlock” (Morgan 1995) are products of her innovative mind informed by various post-Kleinian influences. The very title of the book—A Couple State of Mind—is an idea conceived by Morgan in 2001, and is thus particularly fitting as a unifying framework for her work with couples.
The book comprises ten chapters, packed with clinical vignettes artfully selected to illustrate complex dynamics and techniques. Commencing with an historical overvie