You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In this powerful and wide-ranging examination of domestic violence within couple relationships, Motz provides a much-needed window into the world of the “toxic couple”, which, as she says, “reflects the interaction of two disturbed individual attachment systems”. Rooted as these are in childhood trauma, the book offers a psychological and indeed largely psychoanalytic perspective on the development of domestic violence within couple relationships. Drawing on Welldon's work on “malignant bonding”, Motz is able to map the perverse, enmeshed relationships in which abuse and cruelty become the norm, while emphasising the potential to damage future generations.
She describes the addictive force and power of violent relationships “those that are fuelled by passion, destructiveness, jealousy and a wish to control the other” (p. 1). However, although addressing the more extreme coercive controlling type of domestic violence, the strength of Motz's analysis, and one that will have particular appeal to a couple psychotherapeutic audience, is the emphasis on the ways in which both partners consciously and unconsciously are seen to participate in and contribute to