How Couple Relationships Shape our World

This book is about the importance of the couple relationship in the broadest terms. It draws on clinical researches into the inner lived world of adult couples, empirical developmental research into children and parenting, as well as the legal setting when relationships break down. It aims to bridge the inner and outer worlds, showing how our most intimate relationships have vital importance at all levels, from the individual and the family, to the social setting - and explores the implications for practice and policy. Above all, it is a book about applications of clinical thinking linked with research knowledge, as tools for front line workers and policy makers alike. It draws on the tradition of applied clinical thinking and research of the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships, linking current thinking with the history of ideas in each area it covers, as well as considering implications for the future.

Andrew Balfour is director of clinical services at the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships. He originally studied English Literature before going on to train as a clinical psychologist at University College London and then as an adult psychotherapist at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, and as a couple psychotherapist at the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships (TCCR). He worked for many years in the adult department of the Tavistock Clinic where he specialised in old age and he has also been a staff member at TCCR since 2001. He has published a number of papers and has taught and lectured widely both in Britain and abroad. Mary Morgan is a couple psychoanalytic psychotherapist, psychoanalyst and member of the British Psychoanalytical Society. She has worked at the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships for over twenty years, where she currently holds the readership in couple psychoanalytic psychotherapy. She is head of the couple psychoanalytic psychotherapy training, MA and PD. She has a particular interest in the psychoanalytic understanding of couple relationships and the technique of couple psychoanalytic psychotherapy, about which she has published many papers. Christopher Vincent is a couple psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice. He was formerly a senior staff member and is now a visiting lecturer at the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships where he developed a research and clinical interest in couples who are divorcing. His current clinical practice is combined with a research project looking at the impact of a diagnosis of early onset dementia on couple relationships.