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Reviewing this book poses a number of difficult issues for a psychotherapist like myself who is committed both to psychoanalytic therapy with couples and to the values associated with a feminist, egalitarian framework. These are issues which we as psychotherapists of any persuasion avoid at the cost of our integrity, issues concerned with the values inherent in our discipline.
Dr Claire Rabin, a university social work lecturer in family and couple therapy and a therapist herself in Tel Aviv, draws on her research and therapy with couples in the USA, the UK and Israel. She has written a valuable and exhaustive survey of a therapeutic approach to couples grounded in what contemporary sociologists describe as the values of the ‘companionate marriage’- or to use the term Dr Rabin cites, ‘peer marriages’. This is clear in the expressive title she has chosen, emphasizing both the twin goals of equality and friendship in marriage and the task of the therapist as ‘empowering’. One important strength of the book is the extensive use of the sociological and ‘family and marital therapy’ literature concerning both contemporary aspirations towards equality and friendship in intimate relationships and the correlation between sexist patterns and marital distress. If for no other reason, the book is worth reading for bringing the reader up-to-date on a literature which psychoanalytic psychotherapists all too often ignore.
A second strength of Dr Rabin's book is her inclusion of detailed clinical illustrations, along with extensive quotations from research couples, which allow the reader to see clearly how she uses her principles of an ‘empowering’ approach in the consulting-room. The spontaneous and conversational quality of the clinical examples derives from the fact that they are actual transcripts of recordings of sessions. It allows readers to form their own judgements of this way of working with couples. Dr Rabin acknowledges that this approach ‘shares a great deal with a sociol