ABSTRACT
The therapist’s capacity of containment with difficult patients and couples serves as a model for alternative identifications and helps to liberate them from pathological links. The therapists also thought that as a therapeutic couple they could facilitate change in the couple’s identifications, the conflict between them as a couple and between them and their parental figures. The couple, when asked if they could afford the fee, looked at each other and agreed with the therapists that they could. The therapists asked the couple to think about it and let them know their decision in order to organise a schedule for the sessions. Through the continuous work of clarification, confrontation and interpretation, the therapists were able to access less damaged internal objects. In many sessions, the therapists witnessed a real battle between the linking madness that threatened to consolidate this cycle and the work of therapeutic elaboration that deactivated it.
