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I want to thank Monica Vorchheimer for bringing us this extremely rich and complex exposure to link theory in relation to the work of psychoanalytic couple psychotherapy. We are very fortunate. She has distilled a large body of theoretical literature that is complicated and new for most of us here in the U.S., and we are treated to her focused perspective on link theory as it relates specifically to the complex world of psychoanalytic work with couples. She is highly qualified to lead us down this road, and the paper is groundbreaking.
It is also a challenging paper since there is so much new information to think about, and since Monica's thinking is layered, often moving in several directions simultaneously and endeavoring to communicate the complexity of the relationship between two psychoanalytic views of the human psyche, two lexicons, and two logics. In Puget's (2010) words, “The logic of the psychic world, which we have been unfolding and exploring in great depth since Freud, and the logic of the relational (linkage) world do not coincide” (pp. 5-6).
Monica's point of entry into the relationship between these two logics is her observation of something quite familiar to us: a couple's catastrophic reaction to a loss of understanding, which she enlists as a way of bringing together two avenues of psychoanalytic thought to bear on a third arena of focus — the couple relationship. On the one hand of this exploration, we have our familiar lineage and body of theory, resting on Freud's elucidation of the importance of internalization, repetition, and internal representation in psychic life. On the other hand is the world of link theory, and the exploration and highlighting of the ongoing importance of presentation, immediacy, and social structure. In her paper, Monica is showing us how these two