A groundbreaking, definitive, once-in-a generation book about why couples fall in love, how they find themselves in inevitable crisis, and why it’s important—not just for them—how these crises are resolved.
COUPLES:
The Crisis of Intimacy and the Influence of Big History
by Dr. Orna Guralnik
Penguin Press, 2027
(via The Gernert Company)
You may know Orna Guralnik from Showtime’s docuseries Couples Therapy, or from her excellent New York Times Magazine piece « I’m a Couples Therapist. Something New is Happening in Relationships ». Before Guralnik was a television star, however, she was a revered, influential academic—in fact, this was why the producers of the show approached her. Guralnik is part of a groundbreaking psychoanalytic movement which sees the self as nested in one’s community—collectives, as she terms it—as opposed to in conflict with civilization (as Freud thought), and understands that the unconscious cannot be set aside from the influence of history and politics (so goes much present-day thinking). As she has written in the New York Times, « psychoanalytic exploration is just as much about our deep ethical dilemmas regarding how to live with one another, and our environment, as it is about our early family dramas; my patients’ repressed experiences with the ghosts of their country’s history are as interesting as with their mothers. »
Following several couples along their dramatic developmental arcs, we learn that the person who is most important to us, who we depend on the most, is also the exact person who is destined to fail and misunderstand us. Crisis is set into motion when differences become unbearable; couples find themselves caught up in maddening, repetitive cycles. They must then move from black-and-white thinking and blame to an understanding of the unconscious forces that guide them. The knowledge that these unconscious forces can be generational—a mother’s immigration trauma, say, or a father’s childhood poverty—enables us all to better understand personal conflicts in the context of shared history. Analysis that leads to the understanding of difference and the acceptance of multiple perspectives can heal the relationship with one’s partner—and also those in the world at large. The roots of Big History touch us all.
Dr. Orna Guralnik is a Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. She is on faculty at NYU Postdoctoral Institute for Psychoanalysis and at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies in New York City, where she lectures and publishes on the topics of couples treatment and culture, dissociation and depersonalization, as well as culture and psychoanalysis. She is co-founder of the Center for the Study of Dissociation and Depersonalization at the Mount Sinai Medical School. Dr. Guralnik is a graduate of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis. She has completed the filming of several seasons of Showtime’s documentary series Couples Therapy.
At the height of the Great Depression, Los Angeles oil mogul George Allan Hancock and his crew of Smithsonian scientists came upon a gruesome scene: two bodies, mummified by the searing heat, on the shore of a remote Galápagos island. For the past four years Hancock and other American elites had traveled the South Seas to collect specimens for scientific research. On one trip to the Galápagos, Hancock was surprised to discover an equally exotic group of humans: European exiles who had fled political and economic unrest, hoping to create a utopian paradise. One was so devoted to a life of isolation that he’d had his teeth extracted and replaced with a set of steel dentures.
Many of us experience periods in our lives when something feels “off”: when we struggle to find joy in happy moments, and take little pleasure in things we used to enjoy. We might be motivated and productive at work, pulling our weight at home, and conducting a normal social life—but behind that façade we are barely surviving, and certainly not thriving.
With the wit of a comedian and the observational skills of a sociologist surveying a new subculture, Becky Barnicoat writes about her first few years of parenthood with warmth, sharp insight, and uproarious humor in her debut graphic memoir. Barnicoat’s prose is always relatable, smart, and so funny while discussing everything from how ignoring women’s pain is baked into the practice of obstetrics to the impossibility of putting a child down drowsy but awake while you are permanently drowsy but awake, to the tyranny of gentle parenting, and more. Barnicoat gives us permission to cry when the baby cries, and also laugh, snort, lie on the floor naked, drool, and revel in a deeply strange new world ruled by a tyrannical tiny leader, growing bigger and more cherished by the day.