Couples - by Orna Guralnik (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

From the renowned clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst Dr. Orna Guralnik, of the acclaimed series Couples Therapy, a groundbreaking exploration of our most intimate relationships--and how understanding them can transform the way we see ourselves and the world

Falling in love changes everything. It opens us up--to hope, inspiration, and the possibility of caring deeply for another. Yet folded into this miracle is an unavoidable reality: Sooner or later, the central crisis of every relationship emerges--your partner is not you. What matters may not be a couple's perfect compatibility but their capacity to tolerate difference; can they stay curious when wounded, communicate truths, and forgive each other's failures? All qualities in perilously short supply in our contemporary world.

What are the forces that bring people together and then pull them apart? What does it take to choose love? In Couples, Dr. Orna Guralnik draws on decades as a psychologist, academic, and couples therapist to peel back the underlying layers of intimate relationships. Tensions over sex, money, parenting, and the division of labor are rooted in much deeper issues. In Couples, we learn a process grounded in psychoanalytic listening that allows us to break free from the repetitive patterns we reenact with one another.

Being alongside Dr. Guralnik in actual sessions with many of her couples, we see how moving from a furious state of blame to a place of empathy requires venturing into the unconscious--our childhoods, the traumas we bear, and the ways in which we are held hostage by deeper forces of culture and ideology. Following this path, we stand to gain not only a deeper bond with our partner but also the capacity to see the world through the eyes of another. The work we do in our most intimate relationships can reverberate far beyond them, joining the forces that mend this troubled world.

Riveting and revolutionary, Couples shows that the conflict and redemption inherent in relationships can be among the most profound opportunities of our lives.

Review Quotes

"As a Buddhist teacher once confided to me years ago, the secret to happiness in a long term relationship is 'letting go even when you know you're right.' Orna Guralnik's invaluable book shows us how. Many couples will be grateful for the help." --Mark Epstein MD, author of Going to Pieces without Falling Apart and The Zen of Therapy

"Dr. Guralnik's curiosity and compassion, like her talents, seem to know no limit: healer, philosopher, cultural icon, and now, author of a brilliant book of her profound work with couples. For those of us who've long felt 'Couple's Therapy' is the best show on TV, we now have its inner soundtrack. If you've ever watched Orna listen and wondered 'What is she thinking?'--well, now you'll know." --Ayad Akhtar, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and author of Homeland Elegies

"Coupling is knit by love and desire, just as love and desire unravel through hostilities, disappointments, socio-political strife, and lingering traumas. No one shows us how to hold love and trouble in mind better than Orna Guralnik. Her extraordinary devotion - alone - is a masterclass. Couples is destined to become a classic. It reads like a set of heartfelt short stories. You will look for Couples on a potential partner's bedside table. If you don't see it there, you'll know to head for the door." --Ken Corbett, author of Boyhoods and A Murder Over a Girl

Orna Guralnik's Couples is a ravishing, unrestrained journey to the very heart of love. She moves effortlessly from the down-and-dirty traumas of daily relationships to Freud and Winnicott, to Hegel, Proust, and beyond. She shows us not only that it's possible to walk a line between compassion and laser-eyed clarity, but that the line often doesn't exist at all. Couples should be required reading for everyone who's been in love, who's in love now, or who hopes to fall in love. It should, in brief, be required reading for every human being on the planet." --Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours

"This is an outstandingly good book taking us from understanding couples to trying to heal societies. Orna writes so well about these dilemmas and frozen conflicts as she points us towards compassion, connection and acceptance of ourselves and of our fellow humans." --Susie Orbach, author of In Therapy and Fat is a Feminist Issue

"For a book called Couples, this is ultimately a book about the self. Orna Guralnik shows us how our most intimate relationships become the place where we encounter not only another person, but ourselves--and how the real challenge is learning to see the person we love clearly, beyond the distortions of our own histories, defenses, and fears. With extraordinary intelligence, compassion, and psychological depth, Guralnik reveals how love can become a path toward greater self-knowledge, empathy, and connection." --Lori Gottlieb, bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

"Orna Guralnik's Couples arrives like a godsend into a world strangely saturated with both 'therapy speak' and growing feelings of disconnection and dissatisfaction. By drawing on multiple models and methods at once - as well as on riveting real-life examples - Guralnik offers us a read that feels omnivorous, lucid, and most of all, supremely helpful (I couldn't stop highlighting!). A must-read for those of us struggling to 'land together on earth' and love one another - which is to say, all of us." --Maggie Nelson, author of Bluets and The Argonauts

About the Author

Dr. Orna Guralnik is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, widely known for her work in the critically acclaimed docuseries Couples Therapy. She is on faculty at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis in New York City, where she lectures and publishes on the topics of psychoanalysis and the sociopolitical, couples' treatment, and dissociation and depersonalization.