Psychoanalytic Couple Therapy

Psychoanalytic Couple Therapy is an advanced programme for clinicians who have completed object relations training or equivalent psychodynamic foundation, and who wish to develop specialist expertise in the psychoanalytic treatment of couples and families. It draws on the influential British tradition of the Tavistock Couple Relationships service and on the North American developments of the International Psychotherapy Institute tradition.

Couple therapy, in the psychoanalytic tradition, takes as its central object not the individuals but the unconscious shared life of the couple — the organised, often defensive way in which two separate internal worlds have interlocked to create a jointly authored relational pattern. This shared unconscious life is not the sum of two individual psychologies; it is an emergent third, with its own history, its own defences, its own resistances and its own possibilities for growth.

The programme addresses the distinctive technical demands of this form of work: maintaining analytic neutrality with two patients who are actively pulling for alliance; recognising and naming the couple's projective system as it unfolds live in the room; interpreting at the level of the couple rather than the individual; holding the analytic frame when each partner offers reasons to break it.

Particular emphasis is placed on the clinical management of three common and difficult situations: the affair, which restructures the couple's unconscious geometry and demands careful handling of secrets and disclosures; the impasse, in which the couple has stabilised at a level of dysfunction that neither partner can unilaterally shift; and the transition to three-person dynamics — the arrival of children, the involvement of extended family, the emergence of rivalry and exclusion.

Teaching combines theoretical seminars on the primary literature (Teruel, Ruszczynski, Morgan, Ludlam, Clulow) with live supervision of clinical material. Participants present a couple case in each seminar of the second half of the programme, and submit a final case study of approximately eight thousand words. The IPAS Certificate in Psychoanalytic Couple Therapy is awarded on successful completion.