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Love and music form the heart and the spine of Perrine Moran's Love Songs: Listening to Couples, a deeply felt love letter to the theory and practice of psychoanalytically informed couple psychotherapy. Moran gathers her thoughts around a creative and original central idea, namely to use popular (love) songs to introduce and illustrate commonly encountered and troubling presentations which bring couples to our consulting rooms.
This is a couple therapy book that thinks in songs. Moran's use of music goes far beyond the illustrative, and the songs are allowed a starring, rather than a supportive, role. She invites the reader into her melodious countertransference, the product of her analytic reverie, describing how these musical communications, co-created between the couple and their therapist, land unexpectedly in her receptive mind for a sojourn of generous welcome and careful analysis. She shows how this particular form of musical receptivity informs and enriches her clinical thinking.
The main chapters are organised around central issues in couple therapy, such as disappointment, enmeshment, separation, difference, or that which remains unspoken between partners. Each chapter is built around the coupling of a creative interpretation of a selected piece of music and an illustrative clinical vignette taken from Moran's long-established clinical practice.
These sections are preceded by a concise opening, which gathers up some of the relevant couple psychoanalytic concepts from a developmental perspective. Moran roots these ideas in an overview of the emergence of intimate non-verbal, rhythmic, and musical communications, suggesting that these developments are foundational in establishing a sensitive “tuning-in”, initially between infant and caregiver and then, if things go well enough, within intimate adult relationships.
This opening section showcases one of the many strengths of the book. Although the ideas are complex, they are firmly established and alive in the aut