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This book draws a picture of contemporary psychoanalysis with couples and families. It is fifth in Karnac's series of the Library of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis and results from the work of the Committee on Family and Couple Psychoanalysis of The International Psychoanalytical Association. The book values the diversity of ideas and approaches in the psychoanalytic community by contributors from Argentine, Australia, Brazil, China, Italy, Israel, Panama, Spain, Mexico, UK, and US—from four of six continents of our globe.
Psychoanalytic couple and family therapy has deep roots—or maybe we could see it as coming from a rootstock that has grown beneath Europe, South America, and US. Freud's theory of mind and its development in British object relations theory by Fairbairn, Klein, Winnicott, Bion, and Bowlby in the mid-twentieth century is the basis of our understanding of the internal world of relationships. As the work of Bion pays attention to intrapsychic links, Pichon Rivière's link theory pays attention to the links and interpersonal relationships between people. Unfortunately, because he wrote in Spanish, his ideas did not readily reach the English speaking world. The family therapy movement found the idea of interpersonality in systems theory and turned its back on psychoanalysis. There then began a long period of family therapy focusing on behavioural thinking, psycho-education, and behavioural manipulation, forgetting the meaning of unconscious processes and the inner life of the family members. When Kaplan translated Masters and Johnson's thoughts of sexuality in relationships to psychoanalytic terms, Freud's psychosexual developmental theory transformed into adult sexual interaction. With the advent of object relations, group analytic, intersubjective, and relational approaches the ideas of unconscious communication and unconscious fantasy became stronger in couple and family therapy.
In the first part of the book, David Scharff, Elizabeth Palacios, Lia Ra