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Reading Families in Transformation: A Psychoanalytic Approach, an excellent volume, edited by Anna Maria Nicolò, Pierre Benghozi, and Daniela Lucarelli, it is vividly apparent how much psychoanalysis has evolved in the past several decades. Here is a compilation of papers on family and couple work representing, as stated in the preface, “the state of the art of psychoanalytic understanding of the complexity of the family and the couple in our times” (p. xvii). This collection offers, again in Kernberg's words, “a fascinating enrichment of the psychoanalytic study of social structures” (p. xx). The theoretical terrain includes Dicks, Anzieu and Lemaire, Barranger, Ogden, Ferro, and others. A central focus of the volume pertains to the ways in which object relations theory, and couple and family psychoanalysis, are enriched by the idea of the link, an interpersonal concept that “tends to act as a bridge connecting the internal world of the person to external reality” (p. xli).
Even before getting to the included papers, we are offered in the “Prologue” and in the “Introduction” a clear and expansive history of couple and family psychoanalysis and of the editors' central roles in its development. They successfully trace the growth of a field in which the intrapsychic, the interpersonal, and the trans-generational, the imaginary, the real, and the symbolic, all have weight and significance and must be considered in our work. In my view, the “Introduction” alone is reason enough to read this book, as it offers a perspective on the field of couple and family psychoanalysis that is at once organising and expansive. The body of the book is organised in three sections, “Couples and Families Today”, “Oedipus in the New Families”, and “Clinical Work with Families and Couples”.
In the first section of the book, Benghozi explores the impact of genealogical transmission of shame on family functioning. He emphasises the ways in which shame impedes symbol formation, and therefore can