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The creativity of Couple Stories is a fine demonstration of how, far from producing confusion and lack of conceptual clarity, the interplay of different analytic voices, each with a different approach to the same clinical material, enriches our thinking about couple relationships. Co-edited by Aleksandra Novakovic, psychoanalyst, psychologist, and couple psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and Dr Marguerite Reid, a consultant child and adolescent psychotherapist and couple psychoanalytic psychotherapist, the book's breadth of vision and understanding reflects the rich diversity of their respective professional backgrounds and trainings.
Divided into two principal parts, this volume opens with the section entitled ‘Mainly Theory’, which presents the reader with a solid platform of theoretical papers by Tavistock Relationships authors, Aleksandra Novakovic, Viveka Nyberg, Mary Morgan and Dr David Hewison. These papers explore core couple psychoanalytic ideas: love, hate and generosity, oedipal dynamics, projective identification processes and containment from an object relations approach and predominantly post-Kleinian perspective as developed at Tavistock Relationships over the past 70 years. This model considers the powerful unconscious forces at work in the couple relationship, and how the emotional and relational patterns, frequently ambivalent, uncertain and mistrustful, formed in early childhood, may be reactivated in the adult couple relationship, making it very difficult for the couple to find reflective space in their relationship in which to think about what is going on between them. This approach views the couple's relationship as the patient, and the focus of the therapist's concern.
The book's sequential arrangement of papers reflects a fundamentally post-Kleinian-informed theoretical model which views psychological development in terms of shifts and oscillations, from paranoid-schizoid states of mind to a more depressive state of mind in which concern for the