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Is what I do as a psychoanalytic couple psychotherapist “psychoanalysis”?2 Much literature exists on what defines psychoanalysis. Of course, there is no final conclusion, but I think it is possible to refer to a set of concepts that most psychoanalytic practitioners would hold to — unconscious processes, the conflicts between life forces and anti-life forces or between love and hate, resistances, and the inevitability of transference and countertransference. In my experience, these concepts come very close to what is available for the clinician who has a couple relationship in treatment and who holds the same “neutral role” as any analyst in observing, processing, analysing, and communicating what is experienced in the clinical encounter.
We are the products of our relationships, and our ways of relating shape our world. Central to the psychoanalytic model of the mind — even though the various schools of psychoanalysis express it differently — is that human nature develops within and is fundamentally based on intrapsychic, interactive, and interpersonal processes — processes necessary to meet the needs