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The Stories We Tell Ourselves: Mentalizing Tales of Dating and Marriage provides a psychodynamic approach to interpersonal relationships, dating, and marriage. Thompson and Tuch have managed to write a book that zones in on a mentalization-based treatment approach for couples (MBCT) that provides a meticulous integration of concepts from psychodynamic theory, attachment theory, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology.
The authors offer three ways to view relationships: the psychoanalytic, attachment theory, and mentalization. Although Thompson and Tuch employ a multidimensional perspective, their new model of marital therapy focuses mainly on mentalization, a mode of treatment originated and pioneered by Peter Fonagy and his colleagues.
This book will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, clinical social workers, marriage therapists, and all those interested in learning more about the dynamics of intimate relationships from a multidimensional perspective, with the main emphasis on how to conduct mentalization-based couples therapy. This is a compelling account, bringing couple and marital therapy to a new level as it examines unconscious motivations and instinctual forces that constitute the underlying dynamics within the matrix of marital relations. Most impressive is the integration of many master clinicians, which include Henry Dicks, Heinz Kohut, John, Gottman, Jessica Benjamin, and others.
Who knew about love? Did Keats? Shelley? Shakespeare? While these authors are not poets, they use their many years of expertise in clinical practice in an innovative piece of work offering an exploration of love relations and what gets in the way of love through the process of mentalization. The authors define mentalization as a “mental process by which an individual implicitly and explicitly interprets the actions of himself or herself and others as meaningful on the basis of intentional mental states such as personal