Psychoanalysts are highly trained professionals who help couples learn to understand each other’s hopes, needs and desires, as well as recognize how childhood experience contributes to patterns of behavior in marriage or love relationships. With the therapist’s assistance and greater awareness, couples modify patterns in the relationship and achieve satisfaction with each other.
Most marriages include periods of strain when partners feel unhappy or dissatisfied with each other or with their relationship. Sometimes, a particular family crisis can be identified as the source of the strain. A wife or husband loses a job or becomes ill, a parent dies; even a child’s birth can present unexpected psychological and physical demands, leaving spouses feeling overwhelmed and uncertain. Couples treatment is useful in situational crises. The therapist helps partners understand the reasons for their distress and facilitates behavioral changes to help them deal with current difficulties. Other couples seek treatment for longstanding problems, where the causes are more deep-rooted and complex. These couples can benefit from more intensive treatment over an extended period of time. Couples seek treatment for a spectrum of problems. Some partners long for greater intimacy with spouse or lover, the ability to freely share private thoughts and feelings, enriching closeness. Other major concerns include: Loss of sexual pleasure, or of sexual relations altogether Difficulties in expressing anger to each other and in tolerating the expression of anger Inability to empathize with one’s partner’s experience Difficulties in working as a team, as in parenting Couples often enter treatment aware that destructive patterns have developed in the relationship, which both are unable to understand or prevent. In treatment, partners examine and explore how each childhood history, the history of love relations, has shaped their marriage, how each has been influenced by what she or he observed in his or her parent’s marriage. New patterns of relating are possible as each becomes better able to understand and identify with his/her partner as well as him/herself, allowing new experiences of warmth, security, and comfort in the relationship. The goal of couples therapy is the modification or elimination of psychological roadblocks so partners can achieve greater satisfaction of mutual needs for closeness and intimacy, including sexual intimacy. For further information on couple and family therapy, see the website for the Psychoanalytic Couple and Family Institute of New England.