ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book deals with psychotherapists who work with couples and families. It describes the thinking and the theory that underpin psychotherapists’ practice, building on ideas that are already in the international discourse on couple and family psychoanalysis from an object relations perspective. The book discusses the primitive feelings in psychotherapists’ patients and in themselves, and makes clearer the family within that creates the dilemmas they are witnessing in the consulting room. It argues that the very intensity of family life, the anxiety that the intense feelings provoke and the defences than can be mobilised against safely experiencing and understanding the feelings, is at the very core of psychotherapists’ therapeutic work. The book provides case studies that illustrate the developmental model, and the work of the therapist in helping couples and families to move on.
