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This book, Parlando con la coppia (“Talking with the couple”), not yet translated into English, is a collection from members of “Archipelago”, the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies of the Couple and Family, founded in Milan in 2004. The Centre is rooted in cultural and societal changes and events of that time; as work with mixed couples from diverse backgrounds
and cultures, nuclear vs. extended families, institutional consultation, and court work became more popular, an adaptation of traditional psychoanalytic techniques was required.
The first two chapters are mostly theoretical and describe the move from an intrapsychic approach, used in individual psychodynamic work, to the inter-psychic and relational approach that has contributed to the birth of couple psychoanalytic psychotherapy. It was the relationship with the “other” (parent(s), partner, group, or institution) that now took centre stage, and the mind was seen as formed by internalisation of experiences and objects, including relationships and functions.
Furthermore, it was the parental couple, with its diverse functions of containment, reverie, thinking, regulation, and transformation, that was seen as internalised by the infant. Two minds interacted when two parents came together. When things did not go right in this meeting of minds, difficulties were bound to occur.
The therapeutic encounter was conceptualised as encompassing the couple's individual minds and their interactions based on past and present experiences, together with the therapist's contribution. This created a “field”, as some authors have called it (Baranger & Baranger, 1969; Ferro & Basile, 2011; Kernberg, 2011), with the therapist as an active protagonist contributing to the therapeutic dynamic and change.
The contributors to this book explore shifts in psychoanalytic theory since Freud, Klein, Winnicott, and Bion. Their ideas, as listed here, are central to the understanding of couple interaction: the relationship between container and