Name of Intervention
Psychodynamic couple therapy
Introduction
This essay reviews what I believe are the most important psychodynamic contributions to the field of couple therapy. It is a whirlwind tour condensing material covered in six chapters and more than 100 pages in my earlier book (Nielsen 2016), which, itself, distills the work of many clinicians and researchers. I will discuss four central psychoanalytic domains – underlying issues, divergent subjective experiences, transference hopes and fears, and self and partner acceptance – and apply them to couple problems and therapy. The additional, important, topic of projective identification as applied to couple therapy is covered in a separate article in this encyclopedia.
Specific schools of psychoanalysis – modern ego psychology, object relations theory, self-psychology, relational psychoanalysis, mentalization, or attachment-based treatment – have genuine differences and emphases, but this essay is not an exercise in compare...
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Nielsen, A.C. (2017). Psychodynamic Couple Therapy. In: Lebow, J., Chambers, A., Breunlin, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Couple and Family Therapy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15877-8_19-1
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