ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the shared components of psychodynamic approaches to couple and family therapy, describes a contemporary object relations perspective on couple and family treatment, and provides clinical vignettes. It discusses the potential benefits and common challenges for families and therapists working from a psychodynamic perspective. As family members together develop conscious understanding of the experiences, fixed projective processes can become more adaptive and fluid, unresolved painful feelings can be expressed and addressed, and problematic internal representations can be reworked in a manner that facilitates improved family functioning. In psychoanalytic couple therapy, couples are often trapped in a rigid paranoid-schizoid position, bringing the partner for the therapist to fix and blaming the other for the source of the problem. From a psychoanalytic couple therapy perspective, couples typically enter treatment when the containing function of their couple relationship has broken down. The therapist can become polarized, seeing only one point of view and colluding with a dysfunctional couple dynamic.
