ABSTRACT
Avi Shmueli takes the image of the bird’s egg to help us understand his approach to conceptualising and working therapeutically with troubled couples whose future options might include separation and divorce. The therapist tries to understand how a previously functioning interactive system has broken down to the point that the system itself is threatened by the separation of the partners. Shmueli refers to his earlier work in order to provide a background context for understanding the ‘biology within the shell’. While it is the deeply unconscious individual experiences of both partners that are likely to shape the unique ways that any one couple contemplate a separation, Shmueli points out that their effects will surface at the boundary between preconscious and conscious experience. For most people, the capacity for change in an intimate adult partnership is strongly but not exclusively influenced by the quality of early childhood experiences, and Shmueli’s chapter directs our thinking to take this into account.
