Annie de Butler (Palaiseau, France)

The second part of the 20th century saw the birth of new listening and care techniques derived from psychoanalysis, at the service of the couple, the family and the group.

Psychoanalytic couple therapy focuses its listening technique on the functioning of the couple as a psychic entity. Its objective is to allow the couple in crisis to elaborate what is at stake in the disagreement that arose between the partners, in order to help them if possible to restore the bond they wove together and in order to allow them the evolution of their relationship. relationship.

The technique is called psychoanalytic to the extent that it takes into account in the marital relationship the manifestations of the unconscious, the dynamics of the psychic conflict with its defense mechanisms and its re-actualization in the transference relationship between partners and between the latter and the therapist. CPT can be conducted by two therapists.

More and more, and especially now when love is the monarch, living as a couple compromises the entire being; That is why marital crises are also identity crises. On the one hand, the choice of the partner is largely unconscious and, on the other hand, the love relationship is of all human relationships the one that most deeply involves the subjectivity of the subject. It should not surprise us then that the couple’s relationship quickly becomes a theater where certain old traumatic scenes, even transgenerational ones, are repeatedly represented, and the remains of psychic conflicts awaiting symbolization. It is what gives the marital crisis its tragic dimension, and it is also why it has always inspired poets.

Psychoanalytic couple therapy is therefore preferably aimed at those who, by living their marital relationship on a long-term basis, face its evolution, that is, change. The state of crisis makes dialogue difficult, considerably reducing the function of the imaginary, and from there interphantasmatization, accelerates the projection mechanisms, reducing emotional expression to impulsive, sometimes violent discharges, which quickly consume the couple’s narcissistic reserve. . The spouses are disappointed, distressed, disoriented. The request for therapy is in this context.

Psychoanalytic listening to a couple in crisis requires a therapeutic framework established with discernment and firmness. It is installed by the therapist in agreement with the patients after some preliminary interviews: patients and therapist then form a therapeutic group, which will become the place of deposits, after transformation of the conscious and unconscious elements that invade the marital relationship and paralyze its growth. The therapist is the keeper of the framework; It guarantees the containing function, no matter how intense the attacks, projections and multiple anxieties that are deposited in it. Like the mother who receives her child’s instinctual discharges into her psyche to transform them into thoughts and affection, the therapist facilitates the verbalization and representation by the spouses of certain unthinkable anxieties, organizers of the crisis, that belong to the past and that are collectively reactivated by the therapeutic situation.

Even when he is careful to maintain his neutrality, the therapist has an active role: to circulate the speech, to help each partner to discover the effect of his words and his mimicry on the other and to link the past of each with the now of the other. the crisis. Defining unconscious pacts, recognizing collective fantasies, restoring phantasmatic circulation in the couple are the objectives of therapy.

The face-to-face position of the couple and the therapist favors the deployment of the transference, while at the same time making its elaboration difficult. It is often in the  après-coup  of the session that a work of  self-analysis  will allow the therapist to place himself as close as possible to the patients’ experience and as far away as possible from his own emotions. During the session, it is thanks to his capacity for empathy that he comes into contact with the sometimes ignored childish part of the patients.

Psychoanalytic therapy stops when the couple themselves, feeling capable of regulating their conflicts themselves, are in a position to reestablish the future of the bond as they see fit. An analytical couples therapy is an experience to live that frequently reactivates the creative process in the relationship.