ABSTRACT
As both an editor and a writer, Francis Grier has explored the impediments to creative couple life. In his influential paper No Sex Couples, Catastrophic Change, and the Primal Scene, Grier builds on Britton's thinking and addresses the central importance for couple life of coming to some terms with Oedipal reality, and of navigating triadic relating. In the couples Grier takes as his focus in this chapter, the couple ideals function predominantly defensively, and might more accurately be described as ideologies, because they operate as fixed, doctrinaire rules for relating that must be adhered to and that have a fundamentalist feel. Grier also shows us ways that the difficulties couples can have facing parts of reality are revealed in the couple's relationship to time. Time is a complex and rich subject in psychoanalysis, and there is much that can be thought about in regard to couple functioning and couple psychotherapy.
