Couples Therapy

Couples therapy

Couples often seek therapy because they find themselves returning to the same painful conflicts, even when both partners sincerely want things to be different. An argument may appear to be about communication, sex, trust, parenting, or practical decisions, yet its intensity and persistence can be difficult to explain by the immediate disagreement alone. My approach is psychoanalytic: we work to understand not only what happens between partners, but why these particular experiences and reactions have become so compelling, familiar, and difficult to change.

Understanding the relationship, not assigning blame

Each partner enters a relationship with a personal history: experiences of love and loss, attachment and separation, recognition and disappointment; characteristic ways of managing dependency, aggression, shame, vulnerability, and desire; and often-unconscious expectations of what intimacy will require or threaten. These histories matter, but neither person’s psychology by itself explains the relationship.

A couple also develops patterns that neither partner could produce alone. A wish for reassurance may be experienced as a demand; a need for distance as rejection; a protective silence as indifference; an attempt to clarify as criticism. Each person’s response becomes part of the situation to which the other must respond. Over time, the sequence can come to feel inevitable.

Two inner worlds—and a third, shared psychological reality

Psychoanalytic couples therapy attends to the unconscious conflicts and defenses of each partner, the ways those conflicts and defenses meet and reinforce one another, and the organization of the relationship that gradually emerges from their interaction. A couple may, for example, settle into a pattern in which one person carries the anger neither feels permitted to acknowledge, while the other becomes responsible for maintaining distance or composure. Such arrangements can protect both partners from painful feelings even as they create suffering.

In this sense, the relationship has a psychological life of its own. Its routines, roles, implicit rules, prohibitions, and recurring crises may serve defensive functions that cannot be understood simply by identifying who started an argument. We become interested in what the relationship helps each person avoid, what it makes possible, and what it has come to demand of both.

Why patterns become entrenched

Relational difficulties are often overdetermined: the same recurring conflict may express several different wishes, fears, memories, and compromises at once. An argument about time together may also concern autonomy, abandonment, resentment, sexual desire, or the fear of needing another person. Repeated interactions then accumulate their own history. Each disappointment becomes evidence for an established expectation, and each defensive response helps recreate the very experience it was meant to prevent.

Over years, these arrangements can become reified—experienced as fixed truths about a partner or the relationship rather than as patterns with a history. Therapy offers an opportunity to recognize their development and function, and to find room for responses that once felt unavailable.

What happens in couples therapy?

We begin by trying to understand what brings you in and how each of you experiences the difficulty. I pay attention to the content of disagreements, but also to the emotional meanings they carry, the sequence of interactions, the ways each partner protects themselves, and what unfolds between us in the room. The aim is not to determine which person is right or to prescribe a universal set of communication rules. It is to develop a fuller, more accurate understanding of the relationship and the possibilities for change.

This work can involve clarifying misunderstandings and helping partners speak and listen differently. But those changes are most durable when we also understand what makes speaking, hearing, trusting, depending, or disagreeing so difficult in the first place.

What kinds of difficulties bring couples to therapy?

Couples may come with recurring arguments, emotional distance, struggles around intimacy or sexuality, jealousy, resentment, betrayal, transitions in family life, or uncertainty about whether to remain together. Others experience no single crisis but feel trapped in roles that leave both partners lonely or misunderstood. The work is tailored to the particular relationship rather than organized around a standardized explanation.

Individual histories and shared responsibility

Understanding the contribution of childhood and earlier relationships does not mean reducing present difficulties to the past, excusing hurtful behavior, or distributing blame equally. Present-day conduct and its consequences matter. We can consider each person’s responsibility while also examining how the relationship’s established organization shapes what becomes thinkable, sayable, and emotionally possible.

Is psychoanalytic couples therapy right for us?

This approach may appeal to partners who want more than short-term advice and are curious about the deeper meanings of their conflicts. It asks for a willingness to consider one’s own contribution, including feelings or motives that may not be immediately conscious. It does not require agreement about the causes of the problem at the outset.

Practicalities and getting started

I offer psychoanalytically informed couples therapy in New York City. Sessions are generally 45 minutes (but sometimes up to 90 minutes), at least weekly, with in-person and remote arrangements considered as appropriate. I offer a no-charge initial consultation to hear about the relationship and discuss whether working together might be a good fit.