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I would like to thank Francis Grier, not only for his thought-provoking paper, but also for his intriguing and singular contributions to psychoanalytic thinking about couples over the years. As both an editor and a writer, he has explored the impediments to creative couple life. Grier has imaginatively mined the Oedipus myth to enrich our understanding of couple dynamics, unfolding the familiar story to highlight aspects of couple relating as represented by the three different couples in the story: Oedipus' parents, Laius and Jocasta, who “cannot cope with a threesome” (with difference, guilt, exclusion, jealousy, and other intense emotions); Oedipus and Jocasta, who illustrate the desire to turn a blind eye to truths that are felt to be unbearable; and the king and queen of Corinth, an apparently more well-functioning couple who seem able to live generatively within a more realistically perceived world.
In his influential paper, “No Sex Couples, Catastrophic Change, and the Primal Scene,” Grier (2005) builds on Britton's thinking and addresses the central importance for couple life of coming to some terms with oedipal reality, and of navigating triadic relating. In his paper “Lively and Deathly Intercourse,” he enlists Bion's conception of L, H, and K links, representing loving, hating, and the need for knowledge, as vital and vitalizing elements in psychological and couple life. I have long admired Grier's finely tuned ear for the thematic tensions inherent in couple life and for the countervailing internal forces we all struggle with, and was delighted to have the chance to discuss his work with him.
The two couples he talks about in “Psychotic and Depressive Functioning in Couples” — one more rigidly sunk in a paranoid-schizoid world than the other — no doubt sound familiar to couple therapists. We hear them in our offices lamenting, “What happened to us?” or angrily declaring, “You weren't like this before!” Paradoxically, although they are trying to retain what