Couple

<p><em>The Couple: A pluridisciplinary story</em> asks two questions and endeavours to answer them: What is the couple? And what story are we talking about? </p><p>Éric Smadja presents his view of the couple as a composite sexual-bodily socio-cultural and psychic living reality in diverse and variable interrelationships unfolding within a complex temporality. Ambivalently invested in by each partner the couple is structurally and dynamically as conflictual as it is critical. </p><p>Smadja sees the couple as situated at the intersection of several histories: socio-cultural; epistemological (the construction of this object of knowledge and of psychoanalytic treatment); natural (that of the cycle of conjugal life marked out by critical and mutative stages); and therapeutic (that of the suffering couple that will consult a specialist and undergo psychoanalytic therapy). <em>The Couple: A pluridisciplinary story</em> follows the narrative division of these histories following a pluri- and interdisciplinary investigation combining historical anthropological sociological and psychoanalytic approaches. It enables the reader to structure the outline of a general but irreducibly heterogeneous picture of the couple and by so doing Smadja is able to develop new interdisciplinary concepts in particular those of <em>couple work</em> and <em>conjugal culture</em>. In the final part of the book he presents a full case study and introduces new technical aspects of this psychoanalytic work. </p><p>This unique approach to the study of the couple as a unit will appeal to psychoanalysts especially those working with couples psychologists psychotherapists psychiatrists medical doctors students and academics of psychoanalytic studies anthropology and sociology. </p>