Jason Aronson, Inc.
Pages: 202
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜
978-0-7657-0894-6 • Hardback • November 2012 • $114.00 • (£88.00)
978-0-7657-0895-3 • eBook • November 2012 • $108.00 • (£83.00)
James L. Poulton, PhD, is a psychologist in private practice in Salt Lake City, and is an adjunct assistant professor in psychology and a clinical instructor in psychiatry at the University of Utah.
Acknowledgments
Preface
1Shared Ground: Commonalities in Object Relations and Relational Approaches to Couple Therapy
2Negotiating Individual and Joint Transferences in Couple Therapy
3Shared Objects, Amplified Fear
4The Uses and Misuses of Self-Disclosure: The Value of Countertransference in a Relational World
5The Narcissistic Couple, Disillusion and Shared Resistances
6Crypts, Phantoms and Desire: Intergenerational Trauma in a Marital Relationship
7Violence and Sacrifice in a Marital Relationship
8The Cultural Third: Integrating Cultural Issues in Couple Therapy
9Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: Postmodern Lessons in Truth, Illusion and the Couple
References
Index
About the Author
This book is a truly excellent example of what I believe to be a vital trend for the future of psychoanalytic therapy—the integration of different analytic orientations. James Poulton offers a masterful synthesis of object relations and relational approaches to couple therapy, blending the intrapsychic, the intersubjective, and the cultural. Object Relations and Relationality in Couple Therapy is filled with extensive case material illustrating how such a synthesis enhances clinical practice and also includes thorough examinations of timely topics such as trauma and hostility in couples, the nature and types of truth, shared internal objects, transference-countertransference entanglements, and therapist self-disclosure. Experienced therapists will deepen their couple work and new therapists will learn how to productively move the treatment to focus at times on the individuals, at times on the couple, and at times on the couple’s relationship with the therapist.
— Michael Stadter
An exceptionally clear, theoretically and clinically acute application of cutting-edge relational theory, focused on treating couples. Object Relations and Relationality in Couple Therapy has joined my collection of key reference sources.
— Richard Billow, postgraduate, Derner Institute
Authoritative and highly engaging, James Poulton navigates the choppy waters of intersubjectivity in therapeutic work with couples in a manner that will appeal to therapists of different persuasions and levels of experience. Applying a clear exposition of concepts from object relations and relational theories to detailed clinical vignettes he makes a compelling and illuminating case for valuing uncertainty in therapeutic practice.
— Christopher Clulow, Tavistock Centre of Couple Relationships, London