Couple Relations: A Contemporary Introduction Mary Morgan, September 2025, [Routledge](https://www.routledge.com/Couple-Relations-A-Contemporary-Introduction/Morgan/p/book/9781032398341) ## Introduction Sets up the book's dual framework: the British object relations / Tavistock tradition (focused on internal worlds, projective identification, and the individual-within-the-couple) and the Latin American "link" perspective (Pichon-Rivière, Puget, Berenstein — focused on the couple bond as a new entity that shapes its members). Morgan argues these aren't rival logics but complementary lenses. She introduces two axes of the psyche: the vertical (developmental history, intrapsychic) and the horizontal (the present-tense encounter with a real, irreducibly different other). ## Chapter 1 — An Overview of the Field Historical survey of psychoanalytic couple thinking — from Dicks' "joint marital personality" at the Tavistock, through Klein, Bion, and Winnicott's contributions, to the Latin American link theorists. Maps the landscape of who has thought what about couples, including attachment theory (Bowlby), mentalization (Fonagy/Bateman), and self-psychology (Kohut). Establishes that this is a genuinely international field with distinct British, European, and South American traditions. ## Chapter 2 — The Intrapsychic and the Individual Within a Relationship The internal world each person brings. Covers Oedipal development, internal objects, the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions (Klein), and how early experiences of containment (or its failure) shape one's capacity to be in a relationship. The key point: every couple member is simultaneously an individual with their own psychic reality and a participant in the shared couple system. Neither level can be reduced to the other. ## Chapter 3 — The Interpersonal, Part 1: Unconscious Choice of Partner, Couple Projective System, Interference and Uncertainty Why this person? Morgan covers unconscious choice of partner — how we select someone who fits our internal object world, sometimes to repeat old patterns, sometimes to work them through. Central concept: projective identification in its communicative (Bion) vs. intrusive (Klein) forms, and how these create the couple projective system — a shared defensive/developmental structure. Also introduces the link perspective's concept of interference (the other's real presence disrupting our transferential expectations) and the fundamental uncertainty of what any two psyches will create together. ## Chapter 4 — The Interpersonal, Part 2: Shared Unconscious Phantasy and Beliefs, Unconscious Alliances, and Curiosity The heavyweight theoretical chapter. Distinguishes between shared unconscious phantasy (modifiable through contact with reality) and unconscious beliefs (Britton) — phantasies that have hardened into felt "facts" and resist all evidence. These beliefs are often about what being a couple means ("we must understand each other perfectly," "there can't be arguments in real love"). Introduces Fisher's proleptic imagination — where the image and the reality collapse into one, so the belief generates its own confirmation. Käes' unconscious alliances — the bond's self-protective structures. The antidote: curiosity (Stokoe), which Morgan frames as the essential counter-force to the fundamentalism of unconscious beliefs. ## Chapter 5 — The Interpersonal, Part 3: Narcissism and Alterity The central tension of intimate life: togetherness vs. separateness. Fisher's oscillation between narcissism and "marriage" (true object relating). Colman's dialectic of relating and non-relating — the legitimate need for psychic solitude within intimacy. Berenstein and Puget on the alienness of the other — there is always a part of the partner that cannot be inscribed into the self, and this is not pathology but the fundamental condition of the link. Morgan describes narcissistic pacts: projective gridlock (living psychically inside each other to maintain oneness), sado-masochistic pacts (one controls, the other cedes their mind), with a vivid clinical example of Mario and Lula where you can watch a separate mind being dismantled in real time. ## Chapter 6 — The Couple Relationship as a Third The relationship itself as an entity — not the sum of two people but something new. Surveys multiple versions of this idea: the link (Latin American tradition — once created, it shapes its creators); the analytic third (Ogden); transitional space (Winnicott, extended to couples by Friend and Joyce — regression to illusion can be creative if held safely); Britton's third position (the Oedipal capacity to observe one's own relationship); the couple projective system as a third; Kernberg's joint couple superego and ego ideal; Pickering's relational third and malignant third (unprocessed trauma taking up residence in the relationship). Morgan's own contributions: the couple state of mind and the creative couple. ## Chapter 7 — Sex and Sexuality in Couple Relations Sex as the site where all the book's themes converge — merger vs. separateness, love vs. hate, illusion vs. reality. Covers Freud on sexual fantasy as creative reworking of early experience, Glasser's core complex (intimacy desired but feared as engulfment, so managed through perverse defences), and desire as requiring separateness (you can't desire what you've merged with). Contemporary topics: internalised homophobia in same-sex couples (with a clinical example of Jim and Eric losing desire after moving toward monogamy because it triggered shame); open relationships and polyamory; the impact of pornography and social media on young people's developing sexuality and capacity to mentalize a partner's separate desire. ## Chapter 8 — Love, Hate and Creativity The culminating chapter. Distinguishes falling in love (idealization, merger, illusion, the "re-finding" of the primary object) from mature love (separateness combined with intimacy, Kernberg's trust/empathy/forgiveness/gratitude). The transition requires mourning — letting go of the idealised relationship, which recapitulates the Oedipal loss. Steiner on irony as the mature capacity to enjoy illusion while knowing it isn't real. Then the central argument: hate is not the opposite of love — indifference is (Freud). Bion's L, H, and K (Love, Hate, Knowledge) are all essential links. Suppressed hate kills desire and liveliness; knowing about hate alongside love deepens the relationship. On violence: Kelly & Johnson's taxonomy (coercive controlling vs. situational couple violence); Ruszczynski's "hurt people hurt people" and the role of failed containment/mentalization. Ends with the creative couple — one that can let its secure depressive-position relating come apart and be re-configured, again and again, because "yesterday's depressive position becomes tomorrow's defensive organisation" (Britton). The George Eliot quote from Middlemarch: "There is something even awful in the nearness it brings." --- The book in one sentence: Intimate life requires tolerating the irreducible strangeness of another mind — and the couples that thrive are the ones who stay curious about what they hate as well as what they love.