Couple Work, Work with Couples provides a new exploration of psychoanalysis with couples. Éric Smadja takes two key approaches, first providing a metapsychological exploration of couple work – at intrapsychic-individual, intersubjective and group levels – and investigating love, being in love and the principal structural phases and psychic organisers of couples, then exploring the work of the choice of conjugal object and its historicity. He also introduces and develops useful notions such as intertransferential neurosis at work at the intersubjective level. Smadja continues by rethinking psychoanalytic work with couples, with reference to the work of leading French psychoanalysts, group analysts and couple analysts. The book highlights specific features of working with couples, such as the creation of a specific analytic situation – “the therapeutic group” – and then considers the benefits and expected effects of this kind of work.
With clinical material from the author’s work throughout, Couple Work, Work with Couples will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically informed clinicians working with couples.
Series editor foreword Introduction Part I: Couple work Introduction: Recalling the concept of couple work Chapter 1: Love, being in love, structural phases and psychic organisers of couples, and the work of the choice of conjugal object and its historicity Chapter 2: Couple work on the intrapsychic-individual level Chapter 3: Couple work on the intersubjective level: Constitution of an inter-transferential neurosis Chapter 4: Couple work on the groupal level Chapter 5: Couple work and temporality Part II: Work with couples Some introductory considerations Chapter 6: Suffering couples and the circumstances of consultation Chapter 7: The preliminary interviews or the “encounter” with the couple Chapter 8: The work and its technical aspects Concluding reflections and perspectives
Éric Smadja is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst (working with adults and couples) based in Paris, France. He is a member of the Société psychanalytique de Paris and of the International Psychoanalytical Association. He is also the founder of a specific training in psychoanalysis with couples and an anthropologist. In 2007, he was awarded the IPA Prize for “Exceptional Contribution made to Psychoanalytical Research”.
