Freud never wrote a dedicated book about couples, but some of his most classical insights can be effectively applied to couples in a most profound and practical manner. We will begin with a review of some familiar concepts and expand on Freudian object relation theory. We will discuss how object relations are established and developed in order to scrutinize why psychotherapy with couples is so complicated. Additionally, we will acknowledge why couples so often erupt with conflicts and why it is so difficult, but so important, to tolerate the otherness of our dearest others– children, spouse, parents and of our clients as well. We will disclose why respecting the autonomy of others, their separateness and maintaining love relationships –is challenging, and yet so vital.

In this course, we will explore why are we so attracted to the familiar in our partners but resist their strangeness and why it is so easy to destroy love relations and so difficult to re-establish them? We will cover a lively illustration using 2 or more case studies.

This course will help participants acknowledge why we, the therapists, tend so easily to project our own familiarities. It will help us find ways to help our couples-patients to understand that their tendency to destroy love relationships is linked to reverberations of childhood memory traces that overrule their life, facing frustrations, narcissistic injuries, and trauma. We will explore what is needed for and from each partner in a relationship, like patient and therapist, parent and child, as well as between spouses, in order to establish the Art of Couplehood. Case studies demonstrate the principles of psychoanalytic-psychodynamic theory can help psychotherapists and patients to re-create better couplehood relations.

Part 1: Foundations of couples, conflicts and insights
Part 2: Case studies; Q & A