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In the eight years or so that James Fisher was a staff member of the Tavistock Marital Studies Institute (TMSI), he became one of the major thinkers within its long tradition
of thinking and working psychoanalytically with couple relationships. One of the many pleasures of the book he has now produced is the way he demonstrates his continuity with the TMSI tradition while at the same time developing it in a highly individual and original way. In this, he is true to the book's main theme: that marriage (of any kind) involves an intercourse of two individuals, each of whom acknowledges and values the essential separateness of the other. Fisher's ‘intercourse’ within the ‘parental couple’ of the TMSI and the resulting creation of this book seem to be a model of the kind of ‘marriage’ he has in mind.
Fisher contrasts the creative intercourse of marriage with a state of narcissism in which the other is related to primarily via projective identification and is, therefore, unconsciously regarded as equivalent to the self. He suggests that there exists in every individual and in every couple a tension between narcissism and marriage. He emphasizes that aspect of narcissism which consists of ‘an intolerance for the reality, the independent existence of the other’ and contrasts it with a state of marriage characterized by ‘a passion for and a dependence on the other’ (p. 1). In narcissism, there is a longing, perpetually disappointed, for an other who will be perfectly attuned to oneself. Fisher sees the core of the distress that couples bring to marital psychotherapy as concerned with the vicissitudes of this frustrated longing, the violence it can generate and the unbearable agony of being its recipient as well as its agent. Of course, it is usually the case that the narcissistic longing to abrogate the separate reality of the other is a shared phantasy and so both partners express and receive the impossible demands of the other in an escalating ricochet of projections fam