Couple Work, Work with Couples provides a new exploration of psychoanalysis with couples. Éric Smadja takes two key approaches, first providing a metapsychological exploration of couple work – at intrapsychic-individual, intersubjective and group levels – and investigating love, being in love and the principal structural phases and psychic organisers of couples, then exploring the work of the choice of conjugal object and its historicity. He also introduces and develops useful notions such as intertransferential neurosis at work at the intersubjective level. Smadja continues by rethinking psychoanalytic work with couples, with reference to the work of leading French psychoanalysts, group analysts and couple analysts. The book highlights specific features of working with couples, such as the creation of a specific analytic situation – “the therapeutic group” – and then considers the benefits and expected effects of this kind of work.

With clinical material from the author’s work throughout, Couple Work, Work with Couples will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically informed clinicians working with couples.