Couples and Family Psychoanalytical Therapy Models

A perspective from the Department of Family and Couple of the Buenos Aires Psychoanalytical Association (APdeBA)
Dr. Héctor A. Krakov (Buenos Aires)

I have been working, for about twenty years now, with a few colleagues from the Department of Family and Couple of APdeBA on what has been called link’s theory, and structuring it at the same time.
First I will try to describe my current way of thinking about couple theory and clinical work, and then the different nuances of meaning which were developed through our study group.
The notion of link has been originally put forward by Isidoro Berenstein and Janine Puget and was subject to some changes afterwards.
According to me, the link is an emergent result, a third agency which comes from the effective (meaning “that has an effect”) exchange within a couple.
This link has an unconscious status and institutes both parties in the couple as subjects of this particular link. It should be noted that the word “subject” can mean both subjectivity and the subjection to the other.
This link brings about a new source of meanings rather like a “symbolizing cover” produced by the couple, who is in turn constituted by it. Before the constitution of the couple, they were subjects, but within other links.
A person’s involvement in several different links with other people leaves behind remnants that could be taken as different psychical positions of the subject. The novelty of being involved in a new link stimulates previous subjective anchorages that manifest themselves in clinical work as link resistances. That is why couple analysts get unavoidably in touch with a “complex web” made up of original families, or from previous marriages, who “people” our consultation room as soon as a couple begins treatment.
In our study group, there are basically two theoretical cores giving these ideas the different nuances I have previously mentioned:

– One emphasizes what is radically new, what is new at the roots of the relationship to the other, and therefore the factor of presence, what grows in-between the subjects and is produced there.
– The other theoretical core emphasizes the fact that any couple weaves a delusional fabric that will necessarily unravel and be replaced by a new one, in an unending sequence of creation and collapse.