Couple Therapy and Intergenerational Change Dynamics
“The greatest tragedy of the family is the unlived lives of the parents”
C. G. Jung
Jung conveys the idea that children of unhappy parents are condemned to lead unhappy lives. He believed children were powerfully affected by the unconscious state of their parents which, in turn, informed their conscious interactions, and that family misunderstandings and conflicts had detrimental effects on their children. In ‘The Merchant of Venice’, Shakespeare comments, ‘the sins of the father are to be laid upon the children’. The idea that the ‘sins’ of parents are visited upon the next generation, which emerges within general popular culture, resonates with the psychological view that destructive parental conflict has deleterious psychological effects upon children which can be passed on from one generation to the next. Two psychology researchers, Gordon Harold and Leslie Leve, have provided us with good research-based evidence verifying the intergenerational ill-effects of relationship difficulties on adult partners, on families and on children (Harold and Leve, 2012). This evidence makes a case for investing in the couple relationship as a way of promoting positive outcomes for children within a family context, and influencing the intergenerational transmission of factors that lead to future family breakdown. So, how can couple therapy help break the intergenerational cycle of disadvantage?
Jack attended the initial consultation on his own, without his wife Lucy. He asked me to help him separate from her. The marriage was over for him, he knew that now, but somehow he could not free himself from the strong grip that he felt Lucy had on him. When they first met, he had been bewitched by Lucy’s beauty and charm and they had loved each other passionately. Then, after their daughter was born, Lucy seemed to change, becoming quieter and quieter as she gradually withdrew from Jack and their infant daughter and into herself. Jack explained he had tried hard to look after Lucy but she was out of his reach. Soon she began to take on lovers as he watched silently and helplessly from the sidelines. During the session Jack described Lucy as a whimsical woman who behaved callously towards him. He also portrayed her as an unreliable, neglectful mother who had left him to care singlehandedly for their now 10 year-old child.
This is a familiar scenario to couple psychotherapists, where individuals can approach us on their own and without their partners for help with marital difficulties. They convey a belief that couple psychotherapists can help them with problematic issues pertaining to their couple relationship without the need for their partner being involved. Generally, after a consultation such as the one described above, I try and arrange for a second consultation and suggest that it would be helpful if the absent partner attends too. I explored with Jack whether he wanted help for himself or whether he might like to bring his wife to a second consultation? Jack felt he had depicted his relationship accurately, his marriage to Lucy was over, and he needed me to help him extricate himself from it. He also felt that in inviting Lucy to the next session I was somehow prescribing the couple should stay together and not separate, and this made him anxious. Was he thinking that I thought it was always better to stay together for the sake of their child?
What kind of psychological relationship enables partners to function well, both as a couple and as parents to their children? In the book, Psychotherapy with Couples (Ruszczynksi, 1993), Warren Colman described marriage as a ‘psychological container’ in which ‘the relationship itself becomes the container, the creative outcome of the couple’s union, to which both partners can relate. It is an image of something the couple are continually in the process of creating, sustaining and maintaining, while at the same time feeling that they exist within it – are contained by it’ (Colman, 1993). This experience of feeling contained by the relationship is central to the couple’s ability to parent their children.
In 1998, at the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationship’s 50th Anniversary Conference, Stan Ruszczynski, along with Mary Morgan and Philip Stokoe, presented the idea of the ‘creative couple’. This concept applied Britton’s idea of ‘triangular space’, an important developmental step in the working through of the early Oedipal situation (Britton, 1989), to psychic development in adult couple relationships. In the creative couple the triangular configuration is one in which the relationship is held in mind by both partners and functions as Britton’s ‘third position’ (Britton, 1989): each partner has the capacity to move away from being solely preoccupied by their experience of the other, to occupying a position from where they can observe themselves interacting with the other. In this creative couple state of mind the couple are more able to ‘contain the regression that inevitably arises at life transitions, at points of crisis or of new learning, or just in trying to manage the ups and downs of everyday life, all of which are likely temporarily to undermine more mature relating’ (Morgan, 2005). With couples in therapy it is very noticeable when this third element is absent and when it begins to develop.
After the first session with Jack, I was left with quite a disturbed picture of his wife. This is a familiar occurrence in couple therapy and, as Andrew Balfour describes, ‘couple therapists are used to this, waiting for the monster to appear who then turns out to be a more complex human being, a separate entity from the figure one has been positioned to expect and to imagine’ (Balfour, 2012).
Jack was convinced Lucy would not come but he would ask her anyway. But she came. As the couple sat side by side, I thought Lucy looked very sad. Jack radiated apprehension. As the partners talked they each described how having a child had thrown their relationship into a crisis from which it became very difficult to recover. In talking about their childhoods they each described how in different ways both had grown up with ill mothers and absent fathers. Jack had been born to a mother who had a lifelong debilitating illness; Lucy’s mother had suffered from untreated chronic depression throughout her life. Jack’s father had died when Jack was very young; Lucy had been born and brought up in a single-parent family, her father was not known to her. Lucy said she had never wanted children whereas Jack said he had wanted many. During Lucy’s pregnancy, Jack seemed to form a close bond with their unborn baby and Lucy had felt edged out of Jack’s mind. Lucy recounted how after their daughter’s birth she felt Jack began to look after her as if she were an invalid and unable to look after their baby, how frustrated she felt at being unable to get through to him and how she eventually stopped trying and withdrew from him.
The story of Jack and Lucy illustrates how useful it can be to see the couple. By shifting from the focus on the individual to seeing the couple together I was led away from the possibility of being drawn into Jack’s internal world to forming a fuller picture of the true complexity of their relationship. We now had an opportunity to address their shared experiences of growing up within their respective families, notably that each had a relationship with mothers where the roles were reversed and they had to care for illness or depression and that neither had experienced a well-functioning parental couple as both their fathers had gone missing.
The exploration of unconscious defences in the couple, as in any branch of psychoanalysis, takes time, but as internal representations of relationships begin to shift, change can be profound. In couple therapy the element of change comes from creating a forum in which partners can think about their joint history and not repeat it.
Cases like Jack and Lucy help us recognise the impact of unconscious beliefs on parenting practices, and alert us to the risk of intergenerational transmission of mental health difficulties like depression. We have evidence that couple therapy is an important alternative to medication in treating intergenerational transmission of mental health problems like depression especially in preventing further relapses (Leff, Asen and Schwarzenbach, 2012), and Hewison, Clulow and Drake (2014) have recently provided us with an evidence-based manual for using couple therapy to treat depression. I think it is now time for an intergenerational transmission of what has been learnt through more than sixty years of research and clinical practice at the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships, and other organisations like it, to acknowledge what we know: that psychotherapeutic work with couples, as Brett Kahr (2012) so fittingly describes, ‘has the potential to make giant strides in the area of psychological development, offering us so many tools and insights that can help us facilitate a brighter future for our intimate partnerships, for the well-being of our children, for our nation’s finances, and for our nation’s health’.
* Jack and Lucy are pseudonyms for a couple whose histories and circumstances have been heavily disguised in order to protect their identities and to render them unrecognizable to themselves and to others who might know them.
References
Balfour, A. (2012). Couple Therapy – Social Engineering or Psychological Treatment? In: A. Balfour, M. Morgan and C. Vincent (Eds.), How Couple Relationships Shape Our World. Clinical Practice, Research, and Policy Perspectives. London: Karnac.
Britton, R. (1989). The missing link: parental sexuality in the Oedipus complex. In J. Steiner (Ed.), The Oedipus Complex Today: Cinical Implications. London: Karnac.
Colman, W. (1993). Marriage as a psychological container. In: S. Ruszczynski (Ed.), Psychotherapy with Couples: Theory and Practice at the Tavistock Institute of Marigal Studies. London: Karnac.
Hewison, D., Clulow, C., & Drake, H. (2014). Couple Therapy for Depression. A Clinicians Guide to Integrative Practice. Oxford University Press.
Harold, G.T., and Leve, L.D. (2012). Parents as Partners: how the parental relationship affects children’s psychological development. In: A. Balfour, M. Morgan and C. Vincent (Eds.), How Couple Relationships Shape Our World. Clinical Practice, Research, and Policy Perspectives. London: Karnac.
Kahr, B. (2012). Foreword. In: A. Balfour, M. Morgan and C. Vincent (Eds.), How Couple Relationships Shape Our World. Clinical Practice, Research, and Policy Perspectives. London: Karnac.
Leff, J., Asen, Eia., and Schwarzenback, F. (2012). Depression, Couple Therapy, Research, and Government Policy. In: A. Balfour, M. Morgan and C. Vincent (Eds.), How Couple Relationships Shape Our World. Clinical Practice, Research, and Policy Perspectives. London: Karnac.
Morgan, M. (2005). On being able to be a couple: the importance of a “creative couple” in psychic life. In: F. Grier (Ed.), Oedipus and the Couple. London: Karnac.
