by Natasha Oxenburgh, Psy.D.

HOLDING A COUPLE STATE OF MIND: AN INTRO TO THE “TAVI” MODEL OF COUPLES THERAPY

In February, NCSPP hosted Dr. Ortal Kirson-Trilling, Psy.D., PCPG’s Director of Training, who taught a four-week course on the “Tavi” (Tavistock) model of couple therapy. The approach encourages therapists to move beyond understanding a couple’s observable dynamics (like the classic anxious/avoidant or pursue/withdraw pattern) to consider what a couple is up to unconsciously, and what it means to the couple to be in relationship. As a participant, I reflected on how popular consumption of attachment dynamics can lead to the idea that, for example, a pursuer need stop pursuing and a withdrawer need stop withdrawing to resolve a couple’s problematic relational dance. But, from the psychoanalytic perspective, this begs for a game of whack-a-mole, inviting behavioral solutions for unconscious problems that simply show up in different dance moves. Repetitive fights and rigid roles are surface expressions of deeper, co-created structures. 

In fact, the Tavi model posits that a couple becomes a psychic entity of its own, with a projective system that maintains shared unconscious phantasies. Disavowed aspects of the self are projected into the partner. These projections may represent attempts to repair the past while remaining connected to parts of the self that feel difficult to know or tolerate. Dr. Kirson-Trilling emphasized that an unconscious “fit” often exists in a couple. We might construe it thus: One partner says unconsciously to the other, “there’s something different enough in you that I can work through something from my past, but also something familiar enough that might eventually drive us up a wall, or into hiding...or into couples treatment!” What is initially revered in a partner may later become persecutory, for example, an admired stability that comes to feel rigid or controlling.

The concept I found most generative throughout was the “couple state of mind,” Mary Morgan’s idea that the therapist holds both partners’ individual, subjective experiences while also observing the couple itself. This means that the therapist stays close to the couple’s shared experience, tolerating the many transferences in the room, exploring with benign curiosity–and, over time, slowly gathering and organizing what has been co-created and helping the couple to recognize it. The therapist temporarily holds a psychological container for the couple, though ultimately it must become the couple’s; the container allows a couple to come back together after an argument, to reflect on their individual experiences and also on the relationship itself as something they jointly create and are responsible for.

The group participants engaged actively with the material and discussed how couples negotiate autonomy, intimacy, engulfment, and other ideas from Stanley Ruszczynski and Warren Colman. Importantly, debate emerged regarding how theory holds culture, identity, and non-normative relationships, such as ENM and polyamory. In the future, NCSPP plans to offer more accessible psychoanalytic couples courses to continue grappling with these ideas.