Repairing Intimacy: An Object Relations Approach to Couples Therapy (The Library of Object Relations)
This book will be especially useful to those working with narcissistically vulnerable couples, where a focus on communication and simple family-of-origin connections is not enough.Repairing Intimacyis an exciting addition to any couples therapist's library. It has already influenced my own couples work. (Judith Nelsen, Ph.D.)Siegel's description of work with borderline and narcissistic patients makes clear why short-term treatments do not work and why so many couples become treatment failures because therapists cannot handle their own countertransference reactions to the couples' projections. She shows the reader how to engage the couple, provide a holding environment through empathic listening, offer hope, and assess the degree of ego strength to determine how to proceed in treatment. (Marion F. Solomon, Ph.D.)This book advances our field. It gives thoughtful recognition to a group of major proponents of object relations whose work has so far been devoted to individual development and therapy. The lessons of these theorists are applied with clarity and clinical acumen. The book gives an original, creative formulation of treatment as a process aimed at stabilizing, informing,and renewing the couple. Inspired in depth by American object relations,Repairing Intimacyfills a gap in the clinical tradition and brings us important new experience in the art of repairing the wounds that beset marriage. (David E. Scharff, M.D.)