From Application to Approach: A Systematic Review of 50 Years of Psychoanalytic Couple Therapy

ABSTRACT

This systematic review of contributions to peer-reviewed journals in the area of couple interventions aims to provide a comprehensive and intensive overview of this evolving field, within psychoanalysis. Using a pan theoretical systematic review methodology, 113 peer-reviewed journal articles were reviewed, dated between 1963 and 2014, addressing the topic of couple therapy and psychoanalysis. This article addresses a number of specific questions including, where authors have published their work, what methodologies they have used, with which couples psychoanalysts have been working, how writers from within different theoretical orientations talk about their work with couples, and how the field has changed over time. It also explores emerging themes of the relationship between couple and individual therapy, sex, and co-therapy. This review of writing over the past 50 years suggests that although Classical contributions have waned over time, couple psychoanalysts from within Object Relations, Self Psychology, Intersubjectivity, and Relational orientations have evolved in their discourse about couple distress, from an application of psychoanalytic concepts to full-bodied, well-articulated, clear, and concise approaches to diagnosis and treatment. The first 50 years of writing in the field of couple psychoanalysis has brought us distinct treatment models, which have opened the door for greater communication and sharing within and between orientations.

Notes

¹ * following a word or term denotes that the search engine will search for any variation on these words, e.g., couple* and psychoanalysis* will search for all variations on both words in all possible orders—couple, couples, psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic, etc.

² It should be noted that Virginia Goldner did write extensively in the area of conjugal IPV from a psychoanalytic vantage point (1991, 1998, 1999). However, this 2004 paper is the only one of these identified in our search to directly address clinical work utilizing an explicitly psychoanalytic perspective.

³ Although it does not conform to APA guidelines, I have utilized capital letters for labeling each of these theoretical orientations to ensure discrimination from the words classical and relational in common parlance. Additionally, I am referencing 113 articles, and so each section will provide a summary of the contributions of the articles in that field, which is available in a bibliography, and will not be cited in text to avoid huge and overwhelming in-text citations.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Heather B. MacIntosh

Dr. Heather B. MacIntosh is Associate Professor in the MScA Couple and Family Therapy in the School of Social Work at McGill University. She is a graduate of the Clinical Psychology doctoral programme at the University of Ottawa and a post-academic candidate in psychoanalysis at the Institute for the Advancement of Self Psychology in Toronto. She maintains a small private practice focused on working with individuals and couples who have experienced trauma.