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When a psychoanalyst writes a book like this, our expectations are high. This may be, in Leonoff's language, a disillusionment that one needs to acknowledge and work through. But my expectations were more than satisfied. This book is rich with observations, psychoanalytic and otherwise, about the extremity of high-conflict divorce. It also provides an understanding for treating all couples in crisis.
In the early chapters, Leonoff distinguishes high-conflict couples. “High-conflict-prone individuals are described as more personality
disordered, projecting, blaming, and non-reflecting than their divorcing peers” (p. 6). They are obviously less amenable to treatment and to legal intervention. The words “hateful” and “destructive” are used throughout this book to describe the overwhelming emotions in this cohort. Their ultimate destructiveness is to deny the connection with the other, which facilitates their no-holds-barred behaviour.
The histories of the individual couple partners in the first chapters are brief as Leonoff introduces us to this complex arena. He seems sometimes to be falling into the “good guy/bad guy” trap, favouring one partner, giving us a more sympathetic picture of that person. It is in these early chapters that the author makes an important plea for divorce education—an idea brimming with promise, which this book goes a long way to fulfil.
Leonoff hits his stride by chapter 3 when he writes about the dynamics in partner choice. Chapter 4, “Disillusionment Therapy,” offers more of a psychoanalytic perspective. He writes about marriage as a third—an entity separate from each individual partner. Later in this chapter he suggests the term “coupleness” to describe this in another way, a salient aspect of functioning relationships. This gives us a way of measuring the state of the divorcing couple: have they retained some relational, coupleness, capacity?
“Successfully married couples often share this capacity. Each naturally tends to the needs of the