Routledge Psychoanalytic Approaches to Loss: Mourning, Melancholia and Couples (The Library of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis)

Psychoanalytic Approaches to Loss: Mourning, Melancholia and Couplesapplies psychoanalytic ideas to the clinically complex issue of loss in couples and families and outlines a new model for the treatment of associated unresolved grief. In line with contemporary approaches to couple and family psychoanalysis, this integrated object relations and link theory model provides a clear framework and approach for assessing and treating this clinical presentation.The book brings together contributions from internationally known and respected clinicians and authors who focus on loss, including repeated pregnancy loss, the loss of a child or parent and the loss of a relationship itself. These psychoanalytic couple therapists take the reader inside their consulting rooms, enabling observation of their approaches to the treatment of couples experiencing loss and associated unresolved grief.Psychoanalytic Approaches to Loss: Mourning, Melancholia and Coupleswill make an important contribution to the literature on grief and mourning and the application of psychoanalytic thinking to couples presenting with difficulties linked to unresolved grief, following loss. It represents an essential resource to psychotherapists, counsellors, family therapists, mental health professionals and many others supporting those experiencing loss. Review This book focuses on the impact of loss in couples and families where persistent grief leads to a chronic form of melancholic depression and sense of hopelessness, referred to diagnostically as complicated grief. Drawing on clinical and theoretical developments in couple and family psychoanalysis over the last several decades, this text, the first of its kind, provides the reader with a range of contemporary and innovative contributions concerning this clinical presentation, one hundred years after Freud’s original text Mourning and Melancholia (1917). The extensive clinical experience of the internationally known authors has allowed them to develop and illustrate an integrated object relations and link theory framework, which opens new perspectives in the understanding of complicated grief as it, manifests in couples and families. The editors propose an original approach to the assessment of this problem and a short-term intervention model for its treatment, underpinned by this framework. Their clinical approach allows a questioning of the method, the metapsychology and the epistemological pedestal of contemporary psychoanalysis and in doing so, opens up a new field of research. This new way of listening to psychic suffering, which focuses on the inter-subjectivity of the couple relationship, also highlights the potential preventive mental health value of such an approach to diagnosis and treatment. From this vertex the book also examines the effects of the intergenerational transmission of un-mourned loss, which not only affects the couple (family) as a whole, but also has consequences for the broader social and cultural contexts in which they live. Moreover, the book addresses a clinical issue of immense contemporary relevance considering the suffering and adverse implication un-mourned loss can cause in individuals, couples and families and thus our world. The book, whose authors are recognised by the IPA and the IACFP, therefore represents a significant contribution to the field of couple and family psychoanalysis. Rosa Jaitin President, International Association of Couple and Family PsychoanalysisLoss, grief and mourning are universal human experiences. Over the centuries, tradition, culture, religion, philosophy, direct interpersonal sensitivity, generosity and intergenerational wisdom have provided human beings help and support in facing these painful experiences. This book demonstrates, however, that when complicated grief occurs, such supports are often not enough and darkness and despair can dominate the internal psychic landscape. In these circumstances medication i