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.
It is a privilege to have been asked to write this review of Mary Morgan’s long awaited book on the psychoanalysis of couples; a book that encompasses the history and development of clinical and theoretical concepts, as practised at Tavistock Relationships (TR).
It feels particularly apt to be reviewing this book for the Journal of Child Psychotherapy, not only because I have trained both in child psychotherapy and couple psychotherapy but also because of the strong links between these two areas of clinical practice.
… as a child psychotherapist I have often experienced situations in which the couple’s difficulties are very firmly lodged in the child who then becomes the identified patient. In such circumstances addressing the couple issues can be problematic because the parents have not signed up for couple work and the therapist may feel she doesn’t have permission or expertise to venture into that area. (Ryz, 2018, pp. 192/3)
When considering further training, this had been one of the main reasons I eventually chose to train to work with couples, rather than with individual adults.
As stated in the editor’s forward of Morgan’s book: ‘This is the first book to describe in detail a method of therapy that has been under development for 70 years, since the founding of the Family Discussion Bureau in 1948’. (Abse, 2019, p. ix)
The book is beautifully written, in a clear and simple style that belies the depth and complexity of the concepts outlined, offering the reader an A–Z-like guide to couple therapy. As well as referencing the ‘contemporary influences of other psychoanalytic approaches to couples, particularly from an international perspective’, (ibid) the book includes the author’s seminal ideas on ‘the couple state of mind’ (Morgan, 2001, 2005, 2019), a concept which forms the cornerstone of her work and of the clinical practice at TR, an aspect of which is explored earlier in this issue by Mary Morgan herself.
This concept is rooted in the idea that in order to u