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This is a well edited volume that brings together the work of psychoanalysts and psychotherapists from Australia, China, Europe, Israel, Latin America and North America who are working psychoanalytically in their work with couples and families. The editors David E. Scharff (from Washington, DC, USA) and Elizabeth Palacios (from Zaragoza, Spain) have done an excellent job in weaving together a rich selection of clinical work that spans different cultures and diverse analytic orientations in such a way that it deepens our understanding of our clinical work. It also allows us, the reader, to become immersed in and engage with the different working styles employed by clinicians internationally.
By way of some background, this volume is the fifth in the series of books that form the Library of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis which was set up to publish the creative exchange of ideas and clinical practices around the world in the field of couple and family mental health. It is also the first book to emerge from several meetings of the International Psychoanalytical Association's Working Group on Family and Couple Psychoanalysis. This working group is made up of internationally distinguished couple and family psychoanalysts, and this book draws upon their ongoing research into comparative theories and methods of working analytically with couples and also with varyingly structured families.
The psychoanalysts and psychotherapists who have contributed to this book provide plenty of case material which they discuss through their particular theoretical frameworks. In doing this they potentially offer us, the reader, two types of experiences: firstly, we can get closer to understanding their thought processes whilst they are working; and, secondly, we can find ourselves sitting with them as they struggle with their patients, feeling and bearing the uncertainty of what will happen next.
The content of the book is organised around two main theoretical concepts that underpin the cli