Couple Relations: A Contemporary Introduction

In this book, Mary Morgan provides a comprehensive understanding of couple relations. Taking a psychoanalytic perspective, Morgan explores some of the fundamental tensions in being part of a couple: between being an individual and a couple, relating, non-relating, and the narcissistic problem in tolerating the otherness and alienness of one’s partner. She guides the reader through managing feelings of both separateness and intimacy, issues around sex and sexuality, the tension between love and hate, and the importance of curiosity. She also elucidates key discoveries of unconscious processes in a couple relationship made by couple psychoanalysts, including unconscious choice of partner, the couple projective system, shared unconscious phantasy and beliefs, unconscious alliances, the couple’s own transference relationship and how the real "presence" of an other is seen as an "interference" acting on the preconceptions of the other subject. Through Morgan’s accessible and holistic approach, drawing on decades of clinical experience, this book is an essential resource for all psychoanalytic and psychodynamic psychotherapists, counsellors working with couples, and researchers and students in Gender Studies, social sciences, psychology and the humanities.