ABSTRACT
Psychoanalytic approaches to couple and family therapy emphasize listening for and responding to unconscious material, understanding the role of early relationships in partner selection and family communication, identifying intergenerational contributions to family difficulties, exploring shared familial defensive strategies, employing interpretation to foster the development of insight about family patterns and projective processes, and working with transference and countertransference reactions to illuminate family dynamics. Unlike individual psychoanalysis, the “patient” is the family system as a whole, comprising combined individual histories and sets of interpersonal relationships that support and inhibit family growth across each family’s unique developmental trajectory. In the family therapy setting, repressed feelings and behavior rooted in earlier experiences with families of origin are repeated. As family members together develop conscious understanding of these past experiences, fixed projective processes can become more adaptive and fluid, unresolved painful feelings can be expressed and addressed, and problematic internal representations can be reworked in a manner that facilitates improved family functioning.
