Between partnering and parenting: psychoanalytic approaches to working with parental couples

Abstract

This paper explores the link between parenting difficulties and couple relationship issues in psychotherapeutic work with parental couples. Initially, the discussion focusses on the social policy context of couple psychotherapy and the resistances it can evoke, which has led to an emphasis on ‘parenting’ rather than ‘couple’ interventions in the historic development of family service provision in the UK. Some developmental challenges facing couples who are parents are then discussed, focussing on a clinical case and drawing on the concepts of shared unconscious phantasy and enactment in the analytic session, to elucidate defensive and developmental possibilities of working at the interface between ‘parenting’ and ‘partnering’.