ABSTRACT
Couple and family psychoanalytic psychotherapies are specific applications of psychoanalysis, just like group therapy and psychodrama. A significant evolution of the practices and their theoretical understanding has become manifest in family therapy as well as traditional individual psychoanalysis. Family therapists observed the repetition of different symptoms or reactions across many successive generations, thus questioning the phenomenon of their transmission. This joined forces with the criticism made by Enid Balint about a psychoanalytic practice too often reduced by some to a "one body psychology". Psychoanalysis was only later extended to individuals under development, or to individuals affected by serious pathologies that entail profound disorders of identity or of the feeling of identity. Thus, the identity question was mainly dealt with only after Sigmund Freud. Couple and family psychoanalytic therapies allow exploring very archaic psychic processes which left projective traces in the creation of "group-objects".
