ABSTRACT
This chapter describes some of the salient features of the creative couple. The couple therapist has painstaking work to do before relating can be experienced as potentially creative rather than persecutory. Many couples struggle to relate in a creative way in which their relationship is potentially a resource to them, emotionally, cognitively, and physically. In order to function as a creative couple there needs to have been some favourable psychic development, particularly those developments in the early relationship to the primary object, oedipal development and adolescence. These developments come together later in a way that makes a creative couple relationship possible. The chapter presents a clinical vignette which illustrates two difficulties in relating: one is the level of anxiety they have about relating to another; the other is a difficulty with being able to be truly curious about each other.
