The Ways We Love ― A Developmental Approach to Treating Couples

This volume delineates a developmental theory of love relationships that provides a comprehensive approach to treating couples. Drawing on her 30 years of clinical experience, Sheila A. Sharpe conceptualizes marriage and other committed partnerships as comprising multiple patterns of relating that develop over time in a parallel, though interconnected, fashion. Seven universal patterns of intimate relating are identified: nurturing, merging, idealizing, devaluing, controlling, competing for superiority, and competing in love triangles. Sharpe demonstrates how these patterns originate in a person's early experience, are reworked in different ways throughout life, and express everyone's basic needs for both connection and separateness. Supplying vital insights and tools for therapeutic work, the volume offers the clinician a multifaceted perspective on how couple relationships grow and what happens when their growth becomes derailed.

Sheila A. Sharpe, Ph.D., teaches in the Advanced Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Program of the San Diego Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.