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The Real-Life Relationships of most intimates usually reiterate familiar patterns, those intricately layered interactional loops we inhabit, just as we inhabit “home” without “seeing it” as the outsider does. We evolve the patterns as developmental exigencies call forth changes. We have little awareness of their scope, architecture, and intricacy, or how they shape us as we cocreate and coperpetuate them. This mutual shaping is the familiarness of intimacy, the fluent enactment of knowing we belong. Even when the familiar is chronically painful, as in especially rigidified interactional patterns, we cannot get outside of what we don't know; we cannot change our participations in their endless replays to make them different enough for new possibilities to emerge. And so we live in deep and multiple binds that tie in ways but dimly grasped by us as partners in intimacy, as parents and children and siblings.
Family therapists aim to interfere with the way those binds are perpetuated. Their goal is to allow the ties to generate and accommodate new and growth-facilitating interactional patterns. Gerson's unique book introduces psychoanalysts to the perspectives of the family therapist in a way that illuminates what the therapeutic levers are made of and why they are placed where they are; but it also compares how the very same clinical problem might be seen and addressed from a psychoanalytic perspective.
Gerson's guide for psychoanalysts to couple and family therapy's world of theory and praxis contrasts demarcated psychoanalytic and systemic paradigms in mutually illuminating figure-ground relationship. Gerson shows how the dynamic understanding of a clinical problem from either perspective enriches the other, rather than excluding, subordinating, or rendering the other meaningless. Her extended presentations of clinical material demonstrate varieties of interventions and their rationales. She shows convincingly that similar therapeutic outcomes might