Susanna Abse - Tell Me the Truth About Love: 13 Tales from Couple Therapy

Susanna Abse has been a psychoanalytic psychotherapist for over 30 years. She specialises in helping couples and was CEO of the charity Tavistock Relationships from 2006 to 2016 and Chair of the British Psychoanalytic Council from 2018 to 2021.

Alongside her professional writing on couples therapy, she has contributed articles on wider social and political issues to the Guardian, the New Statesman and Open Democracy. In 2019, she presented a series of films called Britain on the Couch for Channel 4 News. She is co-editor of The Library of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis for Routledge Books and is a trustee of the Freud Museum, London.

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First published in the United Kingdom by Ebury Press in 2022

Copyright Susanna Abse 2022

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Married Love by Kuan Tao-Sheng, translated by Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung, from Women Poets of China, copyright 1973 by Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

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ISBN: 978-1-473-58146-3

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For Paul, my fellow truth seeker.

We do as we have been done by.

John Bowlby

The couple relationship is at the centre of this book, just as it is at the centre of our lives. We are born wanting to reach out and relate to others, and each of us, whilst not necessarily growing up with two parents, has a deep internal structure rooted in the idea of intimate connection. Despite technological advances, there is always a sperm and an egg, a nipple and a mouth two bodies and two minds coming together. For humans, we cannot make babies single-handed and even if we could, the drive for intercourse and human interaction would remain. We are hardwired for love.

This sense of connection lies at the heart of many of our dreams and fantasies and drives the narrative of fairy tales, which Carl Jung believed revealed something about the basis of human nature. It is for this reason that I have written this book in the form of a series of psychoanalytic allegories, with fairy tale-like titles, through which I try to shed light on some of the universal themes and eternal dilemmas we face in relationships, and which draw couples together and, all too often, tear them apart.

The longing for transformation is at the heart of what often brings people to therapy, just as it is at the heart of the fairy tale, where a happy outcome is achieved only after the central character overcomes huge obstacles and adversity. Clearly, psychotherapy doesnt transform the frog into a prince; however, it does attempt to take the patient on a journey where they come to understand that the frog and the prince are two halves of the same person and transformation perhaps then comes from accepting this. Yet some patients seek a quick fix a magic potion and are disappointed when they find that there isnt one.

The case histories in this book are inspired and informed by more than 35 years of practice and tens of thousands of sessions with many hundreds of living, breathing patients. The importance of any patient feeling safe in the knowledge that what they tell me is confidential means that I havent written about any specific individuals. Readers will ask, But then are these stories true? The answer is that they are true in the same way that fairy tales are true. They aim to tell a deeper truth about the human condition. Each chapter tells a story that represents problems and patterns of behaviour I have witnessed in different forms over and over again. Though they are not about any specific patient they offer truths about the human need for others and the reality of our vulnerability, about the inevitability of dependence and the fear of it.

When exploring love relationships, its vital to question what is truth? Philosophers describe truth as that which accords with reality, but reality is subjective: my reality will be different from yours and yours from mine. I point this out because this question goes to the heart of couple therapy. In treatment, many discover that not only have they hidden the truth from others but that they have also been lying to themselves because being honest with oneself usually means facing up to painful truths which we often avoid. Thus, there are two aspects to truth between a couple: the first involves facing ones own feelings and knowing about your own experiences; the second involves facing your partners feelings and understanding their experience. The challenge is whether these two truths can co-exist without one threatening to obliterate the other.

Most couples take a little time to become curious to become interested in how their inner truth may not reflect some objective reality but is, at least in part, a reflection of their own family experience. But when partners do become curious, less defensive and open up about their feelings, they can rediscover each other and a different kind of truth emerges one that is shared and which creates a new narrative. This is not simply an intellectual or cognitive knowing but rather an emotional process. As Jung said, We should not pretend to understand the world only by intellect. We apprehend it just as much by feeling. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.

Jung was wise as a psychotherapist, I have learnt that all our experience is suffused with and shaped by our previous experiences. We approach every new event or relationship full of preconceptions we are never free of these influences; though we may imagine ourselves to be impartial, objective witnesses to our lives, we are not. The past lives on in the present.

In couple therapy, then, the aim is to seek truth but not to possess it. Rather it is a process of unfolding something between a couple that leads to discoveries which in turn lead to understanding and, sometimes, to transformation. I hope that in writing this book I may help readers reach a deeper and richer insight into themselves and their own relationships. Couple therapy is largely about getting to know things about yourself and your partner that have been hidden from view behind our assumptions. Its about letting go of one set of truths and becoming open to a more shared understanding of each other that is the truth about love.