Master the foundations of couple therapy with Dr. Robert Neuburger
Couple therapy
- The beginning of therapy
- The therapeutic setting
- In person or remote
- The adequacy of the request for therapy
- Inadequate requests
- Welcoming the request
- Understanding the problem
- Circularity
- The main difficulties of couples
- Couples without couple problems
- The system’s plasticity
- The question of separation
- Sexuality
- Physical contact
- Intervening in the sexual sphere
Interview simulations
- Pierre and Nathalie - First session
- Pierre and Nathalie - Second session
- Pierre and Nathalie - Debriefing
- Danielle and Julie - First session
- Danielle and Julie - Second session
- Juliette and Thomas - Second session
- Danielle and Julie - Third session
- Danielle and Julie - Fourth session
- Danielle and Julie - Fifth session
- Rachel and Jean-Baptiste
- Juliette and Thomas - First session
Why couple therapy?
The couple as the last intimate utopia
Thirty years ago, couple therapy was still a marginal territory, often confused with marriage counselling. Today it stands as a field of contemporary psychotherapy in its own right. This spectacular rise is not explained solely by the increase in conflicts or separations: it reveals a profound transformation of the couple’s status in our societies. Opening this journey, Robert Neuburger offers a systemic look at this paradigm shift.
An enthusiasm that reveals an identity shift
The multiplication of requests for couple therapy signals not so much a multiplication of conjugal failures as an increase in the expectations projected onto this form of bond. The couple has become central to the construction of the self. Once embedded in a larger, often patriarchal family unit, it formed a cell in the service of the clan. Today it has become autonomous.
This mutation is linked to a weakening of the other sources of identity: the extended family is fragmented, community belongings have faded, and the world of work — once a vector of social recognition — has lost its structuring power. Faced with this erosion of belongings, the couple becomes the last promise of an emotional and identity “home”.
The “couple-house”: a container for two
What Neuburger calls the couple-house is this symbolic and relational construction in which two individuals commit themselves in search of mutual recognition, security and belonging. The couple, according to Neuburger, becomes an institution — the smallest in the world — but an institution nonetheless, with its functions, its boundaries, its rituals and its crises.
What makes this “institution” so particular is that it mobilises paradoxical expectations: each partner seeks in it, at once, intimacy, freedom, support, differentiation and a form of emotional fusion. These contradictions are often at the heart of the conflicts that bring couples to therapy.
An increased structural fragility
If the average duration of a couple today oscillates between 4 and 5 years, it is perhaps less because of a deficit in relational competence than because of an excess of idealisation of the couple itself. This bond, presented as the ultimate space of personal fulfilment, is over-solicited: it is supposed to compensate for what neither family nor work guarantees any more. And this pressure weakens it.
In the past, separating when one had children was perceived as a major failure, almost a transgression. Today, separation is part of the conjugal landscape. But that does not mean individuals are better prepared for it. The loss of bearings about what “being a couple” means is one of the triggers for turning to therapy.
What this implies for the therapist
The couple therapist is not simply dealing with two people in difficulty. They are called upon to intervene in a system that concentrates contemporary social, generational, existential and emotional tensions. For Neuburger, this requires a gaze that is at once clinical, anthropological and systemic on this particular form of bond.
Therapy is not meant to repair an objective dysfunction, but to enable the partners to redefine together the frame of their “couple-house”, to revisit its foundations, and to reposition each one in relation to their expectations. The couple is thought of as a space of negotiation, symbolisation and reciprocal subjectivation.
How to be two when shared bearings collapse? By reading the couple as an open system, invested with new identity missions, Robert Neuburger invites the therapist to see themselves not as a repairer, but as the companion of a complex, moving, fragile and extraordinarily rich system.