Janet Reibstein

‘All my worldly goods I share with you’? Managing money at the transition to heterosexual marriage

Studies in the 1980s and 1990s revealed that financial arrangements in marriage tended to disadvantage women, especially those with young children. However, much of that research focused upon relatively well-established married (or remarried) couples, and we have little insight into the choices that todays newly-weds are making, or what influences their choices. To address this gap in our understanding, in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with forty-two heterosexual couples on the brink of their first marriage. We explored their monetary practices and the way that they thought about money in the relationship. The results of a grounded theory analysis showed that six couples were pooling all or most of their money, fifteen were using a partial-pooling system, twenty were using an independent management system (with separate accounts), and one couple had an arrangement where all the money was controlled and managed by one partner. A key factor was perceived ownership of money, and this influenced the extent to which finances were being merged and treated as a collective resource. Other factors included the couples current living arrangements and beliefs about the importance of sharing and independence within the relationship.

Exploring the process of family interventions for psychosis in relation to attachment, attributions and problem‐maintaining cycles: an IPA study

This study sought to understand how the experience of family interventions (FI) for psychosis helped family members to develop their thinking about their attachment experiences and the attributions made about a relative, and how these discussions helped to inform their understanding about problem-maintaining cycles, that is, the interactional way in which difficulties could be maintained. Ten individuals who had attended an FI service participated in a semi-structured interview. The transcript analysis used interpretative phenomenological analysis. The analysis yielded four themes: a supportive therapeutic relationship and safe therapeutic space; understanding patterns of relating and identifying when family interactions become unhelpful; making sense of psychosis and developing a sense of agency. The FI was experienced as helpful in bringing about changes in the way family members construed each other and psychosis, and this influenced patterns of relating. Practitioner points A safe therapeutic space for both client and family can help them discuss sensitive issues, restore emotional connections and reach better understandings of psychosis. Exploring family relational experiences, attachment and attributions can be helpful in gaining understanding of how problems in psychosis are maintained. Family intervention can help families identify helpful versus unhelpful interactions and make positive changes.

Bewitched, bothered and bewildered: how couples really work

This book sets itself out as a primer for all people who want to understand couple relationships psychologically, as well as for beginners working in the field of couple therapy. It sets out its wares in the opening pages. It will, it says, deconstruct psychodynamic thinking for the layperson, translating its underlying precepts into common language; it will do so because the book’s fundamental claim is that if you want not only to understand but also to improve relationship functioning you must also understand ‘‘depth psychology’’. The book is unequivocal in defining this as, emphatically, psychodynamic psychology. To maintain this, the author must also claim – and she does – that other approaches to ameliorating functioning are only ‘‘salves’’. At the outset, then, this book begs to be challenged by opposing views – i.e. there are other ways of understanding couple functioning in depth and that other treatments are effective. At the same time, it beguiles: can it set out to make the case that the only way to understand and also treat relationships is psychodynamically? Can the author manage to take psychodynamic concepts into the real world of lived experience so the lay reader can immediately resonate with them? As someone who has both researched and treated couples and also tried to write about how to think about relationships in depth for the layperson, I welcomed reading about a different approach. I hoped that, coming clearly and explicitly from a particular camp (the psychodynamic) it might augment those attempts, such as my own, and those of others, such as John Gottman or Howard Markman and their colleagues in the USA. We are, of course, faced with rashes of books about relationships that purport to do this. Many fail mainly because of the superficiality that results when trying to address a more general public than clinical or academic audiences. So, while this book also qualifies its aims by trying to address itself to people who are just beginning to do clinical work, does it succeed? Or is the book really serving only those who wish to be recruited into a psychodynamic explanation and is it valuable in that regard? The book succeeds intermittently in its aims. It is very engagingly written and, indeed, does make the language of psychodynamic thinking fairly accessible. Its examples, most notably the clinical stories it uses well and liberally, and which are part of the book’s considerable liveliness, show that the author is a gifted communicator and also teacher. One imagines her to be a responsive, sensitive and engaged clinician. For, whatever quibbles one might have with her psychodynamic stance (and I do, as will become clear), another of the book’s virtues is that Wyn Bramley shows a real generosity of spirit toward couples in general and what they are trying to achieve together, if failing in too many cases, and also toward the ones she chooses to dramatize in her clinical examples. An admirable wisdom emanates. An example of this is that she is not doctrinaire about the variety of forms in which we now find coupledom (although only one of her clinical anecdotes concerns a homosexual couple and that is a lesbian one), nor is she pushing a Sexual and Relationship Therapy Vol. 23, No. 4, November 2008, 433–440