A perspective from the Couple and Family Department of the Psychoanalytic Association of Buenos Aires (APdeBA)

Dr. Héctor A. Krakov (Buenos Aires)

For about twenty years, several of the colleagues who make up the Couples and Families Department of APdeBA have been working on, and simultaneously deconstructing, the so-called  linking theorization .
I will try to explain, initially, what is my current way of conceiving theory and clinical practice with couples, and then try to locate the different nuances that populate the developments of our group.
The notion of  link  has been modified since it was initially proposed by Drs. Isidoro Berenstein and Janine Puget.
In my case, I conceive the  bond  as an emerging product, a third term that is a consequence of the effective exchange (that is, with “effect”) between the members that make up a couple.
It is the  bond , of unconscious status, that establishes those who make up the couple as  subjects of that  particular bond. It is worth noting that  subject implies both subjectivity and subjection to the other.
In this way it can be conceived as a new area of ​​meaning, a “symbolizing umbrella”, which the couple produces and from which they are simultaneously constituted.
Before this constitution there were subjects, but they were subjects of other ties.
While I consider that participation in different bonds with others leaves remains, which can be considered as  different  positions of the subject  at a psychic level, the novelty of forming a new one will stimulate previous subjective anchors, which appear in the clinic as  resistances of bonding . It is for this reason that couples analysts make unavoidable contact with the “cloud” made up of families of origin, or previous marriages, which immediately “populate” the office of a couple undergoing treatment.
Our group basically includes two cores of theorization that provide different nuances to these ideas:
-One hierarchizes the radical novelty, the new at its roots that the relationship with another supposes, and therefore the presentational factor,  the “between”  the subjects and the that  occurs there .
-The other core emphasizes that every couple creates an illusory plot that will necessarily fall, until a new one is formed, in an incessant sequence of creation and collapse.