ABSTRACT
An attitude of curiosity or research mindedness has always been central in the clinicians at Tavistock Relationships. In order to help couples, it is necessary to understand the couple relationship, and the early therapists, while offering ‘family casework’ to the couples they saw, also learnt from them, drawing on psychoanalysis and developing a model of theory and practice that today has a national and international influence. Couple relationships provide the conditions for intimacy that are different from a mother–baby intimacy or intimacy between friends, but this can be hard for a couple to negotiate and maintain. Couple therapists, by helping the couple become aware of their hostile feelings and revealing how these can be contained within a relationship that is fundamentally loving, can reconnect a couple with lively, including sexual, feelings. The setting of couple psychotherapy, which, of course, comprises the two individual partners plus the therapist, offers a uniquely important, ‘triangular’ frame.
