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Psychoanalytic couple therapists have waited eagerly for this book from Mary Morgan. Here in one place are her various ideas expressed in papers read or published in various books or journals. Not that this is a collection of her old papers. It is an integration of her thinking, fully developed yet put forth succinctly in ten illuminating, richly illustrated, chapters. Only chapters 1, 6, and 9 have been previously presented or modified from previous publication. One chapter builds to the next according to the author's orderly intention as she brings her analytic sensibility to the topic of couple relationships. Yet each stands alone with its own reference section, which makes it useful for selection as a recommended article in a reading seminar for couple therapy students. Ideally, I recommend reading the book in its entirety, start to finish.
Chapter 1 provides an outstanding history, current status, and future direction of psychoanalytic thinking about couple relationships as developed at Tavistock Relationships (TR) in the UK. Scrupulous in acknowledging the broad shoulders on which TR stands, Morgan describes and quotes at length from the greats of psychoanalysis—Freud, Klein, Bion, Meltzer, Steiner, Britton, and more recently, Bleger. Morgan gives special credit to her couple therapy forbears—Balint, Bannister, and Pincus—and her contemporaries Balfour, Clulow, Colman, Fisher, Hewison, Ludlam, Ruszczynski, and Vincent. She also draws from Latin American colleagues Berenstein, Vorchheimer, Losso, and Setton; and North American colleagues Scharffs, Wanlass, and Caruso at the International Psychotherapy Institute in Washington DC; and Palacios at the Committee for Couple and Family Psychoanalysis of the International Psychoanalytical Association.
Chapters 2, 3, 9, and 10 deal with the technique of treating couples. Morgan describes how to conduct an assessment, begin couple therapy, gather information from observation of couple interaction and transference-countert