Conversation: Psychoanalysis with Couples
While psychoanalysis with couples seems something new to many clinicians in the United States, mental health clinicians from other countries, specifically in England, have used a psychoanalytic approach for many years. Freud realized that we could not study an individual on his own; we must consider his conflict and difficulties with another person. Understandably, it is difficult to deal with varied conflicted forces and fantasies in only one person. At the same time, in couple therapy, the clinician must study how they communicate with one another. Furthermore, therapists have their unique counter-transference reactions to the marital pair.