ABSTRACT
All sorts of couples seek out psychoanalytical intervention for their conflicts, yet most are probably unaware of the many theoretical and clinical challenges their presentations pose to our discipline. The psychoanalytic tradition since Sigmund Freud has used the term interpretation to designate the participation of the analyst, who aspires to make conscious the unconscious and to unravel the coordinates of the patient’s desires. In couple therapy, the focus to work on is how both partners co-construct the suffering that brings them to consultation, how what one of them does feeds back on what the other does. Interpretation, according to most of Freud’s descriptions of neurotic disorders, centres on infantile neurosis and repetition compulsion whereas the intervention in couple psychotherapy centres on the intersubjective dynamics; these are two supplementary, albeit different perspectives. The appropriate intervention, in psychoanalytical clinical work with couples, results from the intersection of numerous perspectives, and their hierarchical order stems from the way the therapeutic project is conceived.
