Couple Space
Presented by Vivian Eskin
8 CEUs
Dates: January 9, February 6, March 13, April 10 2026
Time: 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM EST
Fee: $320
Abstract
In our reading group entitled Couple Space, we will be exploring Oedipus and how we work with it within the Tavistock model of couple psychoanalytic therapy. In this framework, the Oedipus complex is understood as a lifelong internal configuration that shapes how partners negotiate intimacy, separateness, and emotional dependency. Britton’s concept of the third position highlights the developmental achievement of recognizing the reality of a relationship between two others—a capacity often strained in couples who re-enact early triangular anxieties of exclusion, rivalry, or fusion. Ludlam’s notion of the internal couple further shows how each partner’s internalized parental couple interacts with the lived partnership to generate powerful Oedipal fantasies and defensive patterns. We will examine how, in work with couples, children, and adults, these vicissitudes appear as jealousy, attacks on the partner’s separate mind, or anxieties about being displaced by a third. The Tavistock approach offers a way to revise these Oedipal configurations so that separateness can be tolerated, difference recognized, and a more generative couple state of mind restored.
Learning Objectives
Discuss the story of Oedipus and consider how its themes illuminate contemporary psychoanalytic thinking, particularly within the Tavistock model of couple work.
Explore Britton’s third position, Ludlam’s internal couple and the ways unconscious configurations can rigidify into projective systems that shape a couple’s emotional functioning.
Identify manifestations of the oedipal situation as they appear in clinical practice. in couple work, our work with children and adults and understand how these dynamics inform therapeutic intervention.