You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This issue is Part 2 on the topic of couple and family therapy. Part 1, on the topic “Psychoanalytic Couple and Family Therapy”, was published in this journal last year (Scharff and Scharff, 2003). To contributions from Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Argentina and the United States in the previous issue, we now add those from Australia, Panama and the East and West Coasts of the United States.
The field of family therapy has largely evolved in distinction to psychoanalysis, depending on cognitive-behavioral, systemic and structural techniques to effect symptom change. The object relations approach has an important contribution to that field in bringing family therapists insight on the defensive, communicative and structure-building functions of unconscious processes, resistance and working in the transference. It gives psychoanalysts a way of thinking about the development of the person and interaction of personalities in a language that is near to family experience and communicates complex ideas about the unconscious to couple and family therapists who think that affect is a manipulation and that insight is unnecessary for change. In this volume, we bring together research on neurophysiology, affect regulation, and infant attachment, couple relating, and divorce; clinical insights on sibling rivalry and play; and concepts of defense against annihilatory and Oedipal anxieties from theories of individual object relations and marital interaction. This rich input from related fields augments the psychoanalytic approach to couples and families.
The infant's cry for the mother reverberates in the mind of the adult the infant has become. The adult manages the distress of this internal infant by holding and containment in identification with the mothering person's love, or seeks understanding from a spouse. The contributors describe how that normal adaptation is skewed when the mother is not attuned, the self is not mature, or the spouse is unresponsive to emotional cues. Th