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In many respects the title of this book is misleading. It suggests that attachment theory is its primary conceptual base, and that it will outline a structured, possibly short-term, treatment model. In fact, the author, who is Associate Professor of Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School, has had a long career of working psychoanalytically with couples, informed primarily by object relations theories, and his book reflects this.
In his own words, he utilises a “wound oriented, object relations model”. His central premise is that couples fight many times over the same issue, and that this fight is a defence against exposure to an attachment injury arising from partners' early developmental experiences. Identifying and working with the core injury provides a focus for the work and the primary route to improving couple relationships. So far, so familiar. What is novel (or, in terms of the first couple therapy model used by Tavistock Relationships, traditional) is his emphasis on working with partners separately, at least during the early stages of couple therapy. The rationale for this is that by modifying the influence of internalised representations of family relationships, a context is