The Single Woman-Married Man Syndrome
The book has wide application to developmental psychology and will be useful to the clinician, because it expands simplistic notions of extramarital affairs without vilifying either party. (Choice Magazine)This book is a much-needed detailed clinical investigation of a phenomenon that is usually hushed up. Finally, here is a clinician who has the courage and expertise to provide us with some useful wisdom about his all too common syndrome. (John M. Gottman, Ph.D.)Kudos are in order for Dr. Richard Tuch, who masterfully articulates to his professional audience the commonly encountered but rarely discussed syndrome—the single woman the married man. He approaches his subject with empathy and respectful curiosity, placing the reader in the couple's intersubjective field, which is characterized by obsessive longing, chronic ambivalence, and interchanging victimization. Drawing from plural psychodynamic paradigms, he artfully captures the nature of their interlocking but doomed relationship. It is a stellar, clinically rich work, reflecting Dr. Tuch's seasoned clinical acumen. (Carol Tosone, Ph.D.)In focusing on the single woman-married man syndrome, Dr. Richard Tuch has isolated and identified a discrete and highly complex piece of behavior with elegance and with unusual clinical precision, highlighting the uniqueness of this particular constellation. He studies it from the points of view of the irreducibility of its intersubjective nature, from the dynamics of interpersonal power and control issues, and from the aspect of the later ego of the married man that the affair with the single woman is able to evoke. He ably describes the mutual illusion of powerlessness in each of the participants. This is a highly unusual study of an often overlooked syndrome of behavior with which all therapists have had to deal. (James S. Grotstein, M.D.)