The dilemma of how to be emotionally dependent on another without losing oneself underlies many issues that couples bring to therapy and is the stuff of many love songs. Its management results in different dynamics, which the chapters of this book identify. An understanding of the unconscious connections between early, primary relationships and those formed in adulthood sheds light on the experiences of couples, whether or not they enter therapy.
Written in an accessible and relatable style, Perrine Moran brings psychoanalytic concepts to couple relationships through the medium of music. In her clinical work as a couple therapist, she often found herself thinking of a specific song that encapsulated something at the core of a couple. At other times, a song came to mind that captured a pattern repeated in a number of couples. Intrigued, Moran began to explore in depth the link between love songs and couples. The result is a book that focuses on different types of couple dynamics, such as disappointment, enmeshment, and difference, and the songs and case vignettes that best illustrate them.
A playlist, Love Songs. Listening to Couples, is available on digital streaming services, for readers to enjoy as they turn the pages of the relevant chapters (Spotify, Amazon Music).
Love Songs: Listening to Couples is ideal for practitioners and trainees working with couples and will appeal to a wide range of readers who enjoy popular music and are curious, for personal, academic or professional reasons, about couple dynamics and problematic interactions.
Perrine Moran, MA, is a psychodynamic psychotherapist and a couple psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She is a visiting lecturer and supervisor at Tavistock Relationships. She has taught psychoanalytic couple theory internationally as well as on two master’s programmes at Tavistock Relationships. She was a supervisor at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. She is the arts editor for Couple and Family Psychoanalysis, and a member of the editorial board of the Revue of the International Association for Couple and Family Psychoanalysis. She is bilingual, works with individuals and couples in English and in French, and has a private practice in London.
Madeleine Renouard, academic, writer, and art critic –
‘Why is it so difficult to live and stay together? This is a question that Perrine Moran explores in an original and challenging book where psychoanalysis meets popular culture. The narrative that unfolds is anchored in real-life stories of relationships and framed by the love songs that epitomise them. This is not a soundtrack or an illustration but a shared imaginary landscape that the readers of Love Songs: Listening to Couples are invited to navigate by ear.’
Christopher Clulow, PhD, Consultant Couple Psychotherapist and Senior Fellow of the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology –
‘Perrine Moran has written an original and engaging book that takes seriously insights provided by songs from different musical traditions into the ubiquitous experience of love and loss. An experienced couple psychotherapist, she provides a deft psychoanalytic analysis of the themes they portray alongside detailed illustrations of how they have surfaced in her clinical practice. This is a book to deepen an appreciation and understanding of how the need to love and be loved plays out in human relationships, fortified, of course, by a playlist. It is a reminder that the arts can speak more directly and poignantly than the best of therapy textbooks.’
Mary Morgan, Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, Couple Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist, Senior Fellow of Tavistock Relationships, and author of A Couple State of Mind –
‘Perrine Moran’s Love Songs: Listening to Couples is a beautifully crafted book. She explores the music and lyrics of iconic love songs to highlight experiences of love in all its forms. Through a psychoanalytic lens, she articulates clearly why the songs strike powerful chords in all of us. Moran seamlessly links the songs to the experiences of couples she has worked with therapeutically. Here we see the depth of her knowledge in understanding couple dynamics – from early life experiences of the vicissitudes of love, through to the inherent tensions and challenges of adult love. This book will be valuable to those who want to know more about love as it manifests and is understood in the process of couple therapy. However, I would recommend this highly accessible book to anyone who wants to think further about love in all its complexities, and joys.’
Mary Hepworth, Emeritus Professor, University College London Psychoanalysis Unit –
‘Perrine Moran’s long experience as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist is shared with sensibility, compassion, and open-mindedness, listening for what else is true, and what has happened to love. She illuminates the connections between couple conflicts and the development of the self in infancy, and in families and cultures of origin. We are shown the baby and child still active in the feelings and unconscious hopes and fears of adults in relationships, and hence we see psychoanalytic theory creatively at work in very skilled hands. I was not sure beforehand how well the pairing with love songs would work, much as I love most of the songs, but, actually, this really brought the couples in distress alive, and allows us, the reader, to get better into the therapist’s chair. Clinicians are used to reading case histories and vignettes from sessions. It is interesting but it is work … In this book, the passion, longings, and heartbreak these songs may re-evoke from our personal lives complement the clinical and theoretical descriptions of the couples’ predicaments. Just as the therapist’s musical associations helped to pinpoint the affects with which each couple needed her help, they allow us to re-find how sharp and unbearable those predicaments are.’