Psychotherapy With Couples

Stanley Ruszczynski is a senior Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist with the British Association of Psychotherapists and a Direct Member of the International Psychoanalytic Association. He is the Clinical Director of the Portman Clinic and a Consultant Adult Psychotherapist.

'Beginners will learn something of the demands and complexity of marital work, but will be encouraged rather than dissuaded; those more experienced will readily recognize some of their own dilemmas and will be challenged to different ways of thinking. It offers an important reminder of how essential is the therapist's capacity to think. I can confidently recommend it as a book at once engaging and thought provoking, quietly persuasive and challenging and above all, practical.'- J. Douglas Haldane'The papers in this book have been written and edited with care and sensitivity. [I would] recommend it to practitioners of individual therapy as well, who might benefit from a broader understanding of the transferences between partners.'- Ruth Berkowitz, Journal of the British Association of Psychotherapists'Psychotherapy with Couples is a valuable addition to the couples therapy literature and deserves to become a classic text...Anyone interested in extending their understanding of interactional elements between partners, and between couples and therapists, will find this book absorbing reading.'- Janice Hiller, British Journal of Medical Psychology'[This book] is readable, very well organized with each of the four parts introduced by the editor, and full of clear illustrations that clinicians of differing levels of experience will find moving and useful.'- Polly Young-Eisendrath, The Journal of Analytical Psychology'The book is indeed rich in its understanding of marriage, an understanding derived both from clinical practice and from psychodynamic theory. For other professions working with families and marriage the description of the way the Tavistock Institute of Marital Studies has developed and adapted psychotherapeutic techniques to the needs of marital therapy should prove very enlightening and helpful. The book must be of interest to the many people who directly or indirectly encounter marriages and their problems in the course of their own work.'- Isabel Menzies Lyth'This is an excellent book, a good read for all of us who work with marriages.'- Emanuel Lewis, Tavistock Gazette, Summer 1993

• Foreword -- Preface -- The Institutional Context -- The theory and practice of the Tavistock Institute of Marital Studies -- The Unconscious Contract in the Couple Relationship -- Introduction -- Unconscious communications between husband and wife -- Husbands and wives: the mysterious choice -- Relationships: interaction, defences, and transformation -- Marriage as a psychological container -- The Couple and the Individual -- Introduction -- Individuation in marriage -- The individual and the couple -- The impenetrable other: ambivalence and the oedipal conflict in work with couples -- Betrayal of troth -- A Therapeutic Approach to the Couple Relationship -- Introduction -- Therapeutic intervention in relation to the institution of marriage -- Thinking about and working with couples