The lamp of tragedy past: traumatic intergenerational loss and the couple 1

This chapter examines the impact of unconscious intergenerational loss on couple functioning. The clinical case material offered demonstrates a number of salient points. These include the fact that a couple’s clinical presentation does not always immediately reveal the relevance of unresolved loss to their difficulties. It also highlights particular ways of working with unconscious material, in this case working with analytic “reverie” and countertransference responses concerning the couple, in order to access what Bion calls the “selected fact” (Bion, 1967, after Henri Poincaré) or, in the context of couple therapy, the “conjoint selected fact” (Pickering, 2006, 2008).