For half a century, close to half of all American marriages crash and burn. Of those couples who stay together, how many do so happily and passionately? Why do so many men and women start off in love and end up in misery? Why is it that the field of couple's therapy has done far too little to alter these grim statistics? In this presentation, Terry Real will introduce a radical new couple's therapy approach that aims to empower the woman, and reconnect the man with a startling and liberating therapeutic truthfulness.
Dr. Fisher will present an fMRI study of intense romantic love, a primary mating drive, and the impact of this brain circuitry on human sexuality, human marital stability and therapy using SSRI antidepressants.
It is said that men are afraid of intimacy. Love-avoidant men don't know what intimacy is; what they fear is subjugation - being drained, used, entrapped. These men most often have histories of enmeshment with either one or both parents. That enmeshment can be positive (e.g. the caretaker} or negative (e.g. the scapegoat), but it always leaves the person with both shame and grandiosity.
Anthropologist Helen Fisher discusses the brain networks associated with romantic love to explain frustration, attraction, abandonment, rage, the despair response, love, addiction, stalking, love, suicide, and other phenomena associated with romantic rejection. She concludes that long term use of serotonin-enhancing antidepressants can jeopardize romantic love and attachment to a mate.
Anthropologist Helen Fisher discusses the brain networks associated with romantic love to explain frustration attraction, abandonment, rage, the despair response, love, addiction, stalking, love, suicide and other phenomena associated with romantic rejection. She concludes that long term use of serotonin-enhancing antidepressants can jeopardize romantic love and attachment to a mate.
This presentation will explore the expression of basic conflicts between love and aggression in a couple’s sexual life, their daily interactions, and their value systems. The analysis of chronic couples’ conflicts will be followed by the outline of an essentially psychoanalytic approach to their diagnostic assessment, and the characteristics of analytic and supportive strategies of treatment.