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When an unsolicited copy of this book arrived on my doormat, I was inclined to put it on the pile of pending reading material which, I suspect, I will never get round to. There is a boom in self-help books at the moment, and here, I thought, was just one more example. Self-help advice and psychoanalytically informed clinical practice are uneasy bedfellows, so why bother to make the effort to read it, never mind review it?
Well, clinical practice has generated a wealth of insight and understanding that applies to every couple relationship; it is just that we are generally not very good in communicating about it. Yet there is a large community who may not make, may not need to make, or maybe even could be helped to make the journey to our consulting rooms if we strike chords that resonate with their experience. I think this book manages to do that, and in a way that neither pathologises nor trivialises the threads from which webs of close relationships are formed.
The author, Daphne de Marneffe, is a psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist working with individuals, couples, and families in the Bay Area of San Francisco. She has accrued substantial experience in her years of practice and this is the basis from which her book is written. Some of the colleagues whose help she acknowledges will be known to couple psychoanalytic psychotherapists on this side of “the pond” who have visited the Bay Area over many years to help develop couple psychotherapy there.