Main description:

Psychoanalytic Work with Families and Couples rethinks the ways in which conflicts present today in psychoanalytic consulting rooms and the nature of suffering in family, couple, and sibling bonds.

Based on two major concepts, that of device (drawn from the philosophers Foucault, Deleuze, and Agamben) and that of link (developed by Berenstein and Puget), the authors have developed new approaches to clinical practice with families and couples that focus on the complexity, singularity, and immanence of patient-analyst interaction in the session. In thinking about link dynamics, moreover, they go beyond the consulting room to reflect on how these dynamics develop in other spaces, such as institutions, organizations, and the fraternal circle of colleagues.

Part I, Couples and Families Today, discusses changes undergone by families and couples in the last thirty years and their effects on psychoanalytic practice. Attributing a link logic to suffering and to the situations that condition it implies making significant decisions regarding our clinical strategy, our choice of a device and of an interpretive path. Faithful to the idea that the clinical dimension calls for transformations, the second part, Facing Clinical Challenges, includes clinical materials from manifold treatment devices that attest to changes both in contemporary paradigms and in the professional lives of psychoanalysts.

Psychoanalytic Work with Families and Couples will be of great interest to all practicing psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.

Contents:

Series Editor Foreword by Gabriela Legoretta Foreword by Virginia Ungar Prologue by Janine Puget Introduction Part I: Couples and Families Today 1: Clinical Devices 2: The Suffering of Couples and Families 3: Family Practice 4: Couples in Conflict 5: Thinking About Siblings 6: On Clinical Interventions 7: The Fraternal Dimension and Trauma 8: Deficit and Excess in Contemporary Life 9: Exploring Memory and Forgetting 10: Sexualities in The Plural: Conflicting Practices and Representations Part II: Facing Clinical Challenges 11: The Psychoanalyst's Writing Process 12: Creating A Link in The Supervision Space 13: Between Analysts