How Couple Relationships Shape Our World: Clinical Practice, Research and Policy Perspectives, edited by Andrew Balfour, Mary Morgan, and Christopher Vincent, Karnac, 2012.

This new publication from TCCR (Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships) follows two long-standing traditions of the Centre's publications since its inception in 1948. One strand is that of books and journal papers which focus on the interactions between the partners of the intimate couple relationship and between them and the various psychosocial realities which effect that relationship: be that the birth of children, infertility, childhood illness, the death of a child, depression, divorce, unemployment, and family secrets, to name but a few. The other strand of the Centre's publication history is more clinical, with the books and papers aimed at developing the theory and practice of clinical psychoanalytic psychotherapy with couples.

This new book not only follows in those two traditions, but offers a significant and sophisticated development and emerges as almost encyclopaedic in its breadth. Previous publications have focussed on one issue that confronts the couple relationship or on aspects of clinical theory and practice. This text is much more ambitious and addresses issues in relation to parenting, divorce, depression, and family transitions, is informed by clinical practice and social research, and explores these issues against the political context within which couples and families exist.

This synthesis of clinical practice, teaching, research on the one hand and on the other hand, matters of social policy, demonstrates the maturation of the TCCR from a clinic and a training institute, to a centre of exploration