What is This Thing Called Love?: A Guide to Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy with Couples

What is This Thing Called Love? provides a clear how-to guide for carrying out psychotherapy with couples from a psychoanalytic perspective. The book draws on both early and contemporary psychoanalytic knowledge, explaining how each theory described is useful in formulating couple dynamics and in working with them. The result is an extremely practical approach, with detailed step-by-step instructions on technique, illuminated throughout by vivid case studies.

The book focuses on several key areas including:

• An initial discussion about theories of love.
• Progression of therapy from beginning to termination.
• Transference and countertransference and their unique manifestations in couples therapy.
• Comparisons between couples therapy and individual therapy.
• Step-by-step instruction on technique.

What is This Thing Called Love? is enlivened with humour and humanness. It is crucial reading for psychoanalytic therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, couples therapists and students who want to learn about—or augment their skills in—this challenging modality.

What is This Thing Called Love? provides a clear how-to guide for carrying out psychotherapy with couples from a psychoanalytic perspective. The book draws on both early and contemporary psychoanalytic knowledge, explaining how each theory described is useful in formulating couple dynamics and in working with them. The result is an extremely practical approach, with detailed step-by-step instructions on technique, illuminated throughout by vivid case studies.

The book focuses on several key areas including:

• An initial discussion about theories of love.


• Progression of therapy from beginning to termination.


• Transference and countertransference and their unique manifestations in couples therapy.


• Comparisons between couples therapy and individual therapy.


• Step-by-step instruction on technique.

What is This Thing Called Love? is enlivened with humour and humanness. It is crucial reading for psychoanalytic therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, couples therapists and students who want to learn about—or augment their skills in—this challenging modality.

Sarah Fels Usher is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Toronto. She is the President of the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society, founding director of the Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Program and a faculty member of the Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis. Her first book, Introduction to Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Technique, is a psychotherapy guide for students and beginning therapists. Sarah Usher is also book editor of the Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis.