Master the foundations of couple therapy with Dr. Robert Neuburger

Expectations and intimate territory

We first discover the fundamental expectations underlying conjugal commitment, often asymmetrical or silent, yet decisive. The couple is built as an intimate territory, whose cartography is as emotional as it is symbolic — with the six forms of intimacy that each relationship articulates in its own way: emotional, creative, everyday, intellectual, existential and sexual.

The essential dimensions of couple functioning

• The question of the couple’s boundaries, between openness to the world and protection of the bond.
• The role of functional myths in the identity construction of the duo.
• Money management as a revealer of power relations, values and solidarity.
• The capital importance of rituals, which can strengthen or reinvent the relationship at key moments of its life cycle.

This chapter also offers an exclusive deep dive: an original typology of conjugal rituals in three categories (ordinary, constitutive, performative), developed by Julien Besse and presented in the training “Rituals in the couple: Resources, Repairs and Reinventions”.

Two specific contexts

• Same-sex couples, who raise particular issues, notably around parenthood or the social gaze, but whose conjugal dynamics do not fundamentally differ.
• Blended couples, where loyalty conflicts, territorial issues and family entanglements demand an attentive and often differentiated systemic gaze.

The major stages we will go through together

• The beginning of therapy: how to receive a couple? What to do from the first phone call? What elements to explore to build a secure frame?
• The therapeutic setting: therapist alone or in co-therapy? In the office or remotely? What stance to adopt towards out-of-session intrusions?
• Requests for therapy: how to differentiate a request for help from an attempt at manipulation? What are the therapist’s prejudices and how do they influence the reception of the request?
• Forms of problems: from the passionless “rational” couple to the fusional couple that has fallen out of love, via parental conflicts or existential crises.
• The system’s plasticity: can it still change? How to assess the possibilities of evolution? What rituals to prescribe to test a couple’s flexibility?
• Key concepts: notably circularity, a central lever of understanding and intervention, thought of as a genuine technique of systemic decoding.
• And when separation becomes inevitable? How to accompany the end of a bond with dignity, without failure or illusion? How to protect the children and support the transition?

A panorama of clinical devices

This chapter offers a panorama of clinical devices from the systemic tradition, tested and proven in couple or family therapy. Some have become classics of the systemic practitioner’s toolbox (coat of arms, sculpture, problem basket), others are bold contemporary creations, such as the crossed-beliefs game or the Systemic Cartouche.

Each tool is presented in its theoretical anchoring and its practical use, through demonstrations, clinical examples and adaptation proposals — insisting on the conditions under which each tool can prove powerful, relevant, or on the contrary counter-productive.

“Floating” objects

All these objects have in common that they are floating: they circulate in the therapeutic space, escape the sole logic of the verbal, and allow a symbolic co-construction of meaning, through play, gesture, image or metaphor.