A Relational Psychoanalytic Approach to Couples Psychotherapy

Winner of the 2014 Goethe Award for Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Scholarship!

A Relational Psychoanalytic Approach to Couples Psychotherapy presents an original model of couples treatment integrating ideas from a host of authors in relational psychoanalysis. It also includes other psychoanalytic traditions as well as ideas from other social sciences. This book addresses a vacuum in contemporary psychoanalysis devoid of a comprehensively relational way to think about the practice of psychoanalytically oriented couples treatment.

In this book,Philip Ringstrom sets out a theory of practice that is based on three broad themes:

The actualization of self experience in an intimate relationship

The partners'' capacity for mutual recognition versus mutual negation

The relationship having a mind of its own

Based on these three themes, Ringstrom''s model of treatment is articulated in six non-linear, non-hierarchic