ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the play of T. S. Eliot's, neither as an amateur literary critic nor amateur biographer of this complex poet, but as a story of a couple, two couples in fact, their troubled relationships, and the intervention in that relationship by someone, the uninvited guest. The fact that it is fiction gives us a certain liberty to allow these vivid characters to dramatize for us dynamics familiar to all therapists. In thinking about The Cocktail Party, would do well to have in mind some things about the origin of the Uninvited Guest, if only to help us decide to what extent to allow this caricature to affect our image of ourselves as therapists. From the perspective of contemporary psychoanalytic therapy with couples, it is an uncanny experience to enter the world of Eliot's The Cocktail Party.
