Marriage and Couples Therapy with Steven Herrmann, Ph.D., MF

Jungian Marriage and Couples psychotherapy is a clinical method that is used by practitioners world-wide who utilize Jungian or post-Jungian concepts to guide their analytical practices. Jungian analysts have an ear for affect-attunement and affect-mis-attunements and the aim of the analyst is to listen to and identify emotional tones in the relational communication patterns between the couple, married pair, or partnership, and trace the health or illness of these styles of communication back to their emotional sources in the family of origin, in light of the current relational conflicts. Once couples can see how they are attempting either to master or perpetuate old styles of relating arising from their families of origin, sometimes going back beyond the parents to the grandparents, they can begin to let go of dysfunctional ways of relating to one another in the interests of the larger needs for individual transformation in each person. The most commonly used technique in couples work is the teaching of active listening skills, which increases emotional intelligence, and the therapist’s use of him or herself as a witness to help change dysfunctional cognitive, behavioral, and emotional patterns. Often this requires a stripping away of defenses and a painful sacrifice of the heroic ego through the therapist’s confrontation of neurotic styles of relating in the couple. By returning patients in treatment to childhood through regressive work, patients may be enabled to allow personal complexes to surface along with creative patterns of destiny, which have been neglected, or split off from the Self’s total functioning, and this may happen through the therapist’s directing the patients to keep a careful record of their dreams. As a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (MFT), I provide a compassionate and respectful attitude to dyadic work and a safe container for difficult issues to be communicated and confronted for therapeutic change to occur.