Editorial

This issue of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis has been collated while processing the experience of attending the International Congress on Couple and Family Psychoanalysis held in Madrid in February, 2017. The congress theme was “Interpretation in Family and Couple Psychoanalysis” and we present a report of its proceedings by Jill Savege Scharff, as well as an article “The role of interpretation in the assessment phase of couple psychoanalysis” based on a presentation by Timothy Keogh and Cynthia Gregory-Roberts and the responses of two discussants, Damian McCann and Alicia Leisse de Lustgarten. Reflecting on the stimulating, collaborative, and comparative discussions at the congress about the place of interpretation in our practice, I found myself musing on the ways in which the phrase “putting two and two together” offers potential literal and figurative meanings with which to consider what we are trying “to put together” in our work with couples and families. Keogh and Gregory Roberts’s article and the discussants’ responses provide examples of what can happen when conjoint therapy brings two sets of couples together to make sense, with the help of interpretation, of unresolved conflict and distress.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (which must be right!) defines interpretation as “an explanation or a way of explaining”, with the inference that there might be a number of ways of explaining what is being interpreted. This leads us into questions of subjectivity that, in turn, relate to philosophy, to difference, and to curiosity—the very stuff of psychoanalysis. All this was reflected in the discourse in Madrid, which was rich and often mind-bending. Sometimes the requirement to absorb both literal facts and figurative concepts, was so intense, however, that it became impossible to think sufficiently to be able to “put two and two together.” The OED’s definition of putting two and two together is “to draw an obvious conclusion from what is known or evident”. Al