“Understanding Couples and Families—Similarities and Differences between Object Relations and Link Theory Perspectives”: European Regional Couple and Family Psychoanalytic Conference 2015*, 14 November 2015, Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships, London

The European Regional Conference brought together the different perspectives of object relations couple therapy as developed by The Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships (TCCR) in London and the International Psychotherapy Institute in the US, and link theory, developed in South America by Pichon Rivière and his followers. The aim was to examine the way these two perspectives have been able and can continue to enrich each other.

It was a courageous undertaking, with the heartfelt participation of academics and clinicians of many different languages and very different cultural backgrounds, who compared and exchanged views on the concepts of link and object relations, two ways of analysing the process of intimacy between two people.

René Kaës rightly pointed out that

if all of us here have a common reference point in the fundamental corpus of psychoanalysis, it nevertheless varies in its versions depending on people, societies and cultures. The English culture of psychoanalysis evolved in a different context from the French or Argentinian one. These differences are significant in psychoanalytic practice with families and couples: variations exist depending on sensitivities, theoretical options and cultures on which they were built.

David Scharff introduced the groundbreaking contributions to link theory of Argentinean psychoanalyst Pichon-Rivière; he then compared in detail some of Pichon-Rivière's most important ideas with those of psychoanalytic object relations theory derived from the British contributors, Klein, Fairbairn, Bion, Winnicott, and Bowlby, and highlighted current psychoanalytic developments. He drew attention to the fact that Pichon-Rivière's work is largely unknown in the English language analytic world and has only recently been indirectly introduced through writings influenced by him. Scharff maintains that Pichon-Rivière's ideas deserve to play a fuller part in the psychoanalytic connection with clinical work and with the relationship between the w