Couple Space: The Look of Love

Presented by Mary Morgan

2 CEUs
Dates: December 11* 2026
Time: 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM EST
Fee: $225

Abstract

In this reading group entitled Couple Space, we will explore love, loss, sexuality, creativity, trauma, and repair through the lens of the Tavistock model of couple psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Beginning with Freud’s contributions to the psychology of love, including narcissism, object choice, sexuality, and “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love,” we will consider the ways love may become idealized, eroticized, spoiled, defended against, or attacked within intimate relationships.

Within the Tavistock framework, the Oedipal situation is understood not simply as a developmental phase, but as a lifelong internal configuration shaping how partners negotiate intimacy, separateness, dependency, rivalry, desire, and difference. We will examine how unconscious anxieties concerning exclusion, sameness and otherness, trauma, war, loss, sexuality, and emotional dependency emerge within couple relationships and within the therapeutic encounter itself.

Particular attention will be given to the interrelationship between love and hate, sexuality and aggression, creativity and destructiveness within couple life. We will explore how erotic life may become enlivened, inhibited, compulsively enacted, or foreclosed in the aftermath of trauma, mourning, narcissistic injury, and collective experiences of war and social rupture. The course will consider how trauma and loss shape the capacity to love, sustain intimacy, tolerate separateness, and maintain emotional and sexual vitality over time.

The Tavistock approach offers a way of thinking about how rigid or destructive relational configurations may gradually be transformed so that separateness can be tolerated, emotional reality recognized, erotic and creative life restored, and a more reflective couple state of mind achieved. Particular attention will be given to anxieties concerning displacement, exclusion, dependency, and loss within intimate relationships.

Clinical vignettes will be presented in this course.

Learning Objectives

• Discuss Freud’s contributions to the psychology of love, sexuality, narcissism, debasement, and object choice, and consider how these themes inform contemporary Tavistock couple psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

• Explore how unconscious configurations shape intimacy, sexuality, aggression, creativity, conflict, trauma, and repair within couple relationships.

• Identify the impact of trauma, mourning, war, and anxieties concerning displacement and loss on the capacity to love, sustain intimacy, and maintain emotional and creative couple life.