A Relational Psychoanalytic Approach to Couples Psychotherapy

This outstanding new book is, to put it simply, the best book out there on the application of cutting-edge psychoanalytic thinking to couples therapy. Ringstrom writes in a nonjudgmental, even-handed way about the joint contributions to conflict from both partners. The problems of blame, failure of mutual recognition, and difficulties in self-actualization are clearly laid out. He recognizes the power of unconscious repetitions in intimate relationships, but he writes with an optimism that offers hope to the therapist and to the couple that their conflicts are not etched in granite and ultimately can be negotiated and managed in the service of a more fulfilling relationship. Most of all, he offers a clear and clinically useful road map to guide both the beginning therapist and the experienced clinician. I highly recommend it to all clinicians since even those patients in individual treatments must learn to live in dyads. - Glen O. Gabbard, MD, Author, Love and Hate in the Analytic Setting Dr. Ringstrom's book, A Relational Psychoanalytic Approach to Couples Therapy, perfectly lives up to the promise inherent in its title. It provides not only a step by step, organized model of the clinical process fundamental to Ringstrom's approach to working with couples, replete with rich case illustrations; its opening chapter also offers a deeply comprehensive, yet eminently readable, theoretical explanation for the Relational framework itself. But the book goes even further than the promise it makes. It is about couples treatment, to be sure, but more, it provides a basis for understanding and conducting treatment in any modality: adult, child, adolescent, and family. What a gift to the clinician! - Estelle Shane, is Founding Member, Training and Supervising Analyst, and Faculty Member of Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and Training and Supervising Analyst and Faculty Member of New Center for Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles Ringstrom approaches couples therapy not with a narrow view of resolving psychological conflict, but with the conviction that we enter couple relations with the hope of a fuller self-development and creativity that can only emerge in robust, mutually recognizing engagement. In this theoretically wide-ranging and ambitious account he offers both a concise guide to relational thought and a vivid account of work in the consulting room that brings theory to life. In a voice that is at once remarkably clear and humane he depicts the core struggle in which two human beings strive to awaken one another, caught between repeating the dreaded past and the hope for fulfillment of deep longings. A Relational Psychoanalytic Approach to Couples Therapy is a book imbued with deep empathy and thoughtfulness about the purposes and perplexities of love. - Jessica Benjamin, author, Shadow of the Other, Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis, (Routledge, 1998); Supervising Faculty, New York University Postdoctoral Psychology Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis