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While Jung certainly acknowledged the ubiquity of the couple, he never did ‘couples work’. How do Jungian analysts work with Jung's notion of coupling? Given the centrality of anima and animus in Jung's conceptualizing of the individual's inner and outer life, Jungians are well positioned to engage in couples therapy, yet few practitioners choose to do so. The Jungian adage
that ‘the face we show to the unconscious is the face the unconscious shows to us’ is evident not only in our inner landscapes, but in our literal couplings as well. Yet Jungians are more inclined to help individuals struggling in their literal relationships understand the roots of those difficulties as expressions of internal dynamics, self-states, or unconscious blind spots that hold opportunity for the growth of the individual.
The Heart of Couple Therapy: Knowing What to Do and How to Do It, by Ellen Wachtel, is a thorough, well balanced, integrative offering in a field that is increasingly market and brand driven. Wachtel's goal, which she deftly achieves, is to move beyond individual modalities to a clinical model that draws upon and integrates many approaches, including psychoanalytic, attachment, intersubjective, behavioural, systems, narrative, cognitive behavioural, and psychodynamic. It is written for therapists who work with couples, almost like supervision for their cases (p. 6).
Wachtel draws upon her extensive experience in private practice and teaching at the Ackerman Institute, and she cites her own evolution to a more integrative approach as responsible for her increased success with couples. One gets the sense that she lives what she writes. The book is dedicated to the successful coupling that her two adult children have achieved and the book's epilogue (which I found to be the most interesting portion of the book for its overview of theory and Wachtel's distillation of it) is written by her husband, with whom she has successfully coupled for decades. I recommend reading the e