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James Fisher's sub-title, Emerging from Narcissism towards Marriage, concisely expresses the main theme of his enquiry into the human struggle with intimate relationships. He is a psychoanalytically trained psychotherapist working in couple therapy at the Tavistock Institute of Marital Studies, which (founded as the Family Discussion Bureau in the 1950s) has long been at the forefront of marital work in Britain.
The theoretical underpinning of Fisher's clinical approach is quickly apparent. By ‘marriage’, he tells us, he means not matrimony as such, but a mental state in which the internal relationship to the object combines intimacy with the acknowledgement of separateness. It follows that a couple seeking and achieving separation may in objectrelations terms actually be moving towards the possibility of ‘marriage’, or ‘remarriage’. He suggests that ‘there is no good divorce that is not at the same time a marriage in the sense of a relationship that is not completely distorted by the narcissism of each partner, especially when there are children’ (p. 2).
Narcissism is defined ‘not as a pre-occupation and investment in the self as opposed to others, but as states of mind in which the reality of the other is attacked, undermined and denied’ (p. 2). For Fisher, it follows that the lessening of distortions caused by projective identification will enhance the ability of even a parting couple to manage the separation in a realistic and potentially healing way.
He links narcissism and marriage in the same way that Bion linked the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions: narcissism ↔ marriage, thus helpfully showing the oscillation between the two states that will continue throughout life. Their interplay profoundly influences the structure and later vicissitudes of the Oedipus complex, and these two themes are interwoven through the book.
Fisher illustrates his themes first through literature: in the first and last chapters drawing on two Shakespeare plays, in the middle s