[.ca] Intimate Partners: Patterns in Love and Marriage (ISBN 0345350707)

well-written by a non-clinician:
Good stories of partners and their conflicts.... As I've seen when doing couples therapy, we do indeed tend to carry each other's unacknowledged "stuff"...which of course is part (not all!) of the initial attraction, the unconscious logic asking: who can give this back to me? Krishnamurti had a nice image: relationships as mirrors.

limited to an upper class perspective:
I sat down with this book imagining that I'd gain some insight to use in my own marriage. But I could not find much that was pertinent to my own life. For one thing, the author traces most or all marital problems to personality and role conflicts in one's family of origin. Life experiences which may have occured before marriage but outside the family of origin are simply passed over, as if they were invisible and did not count. In the same way, there is silence about the multiple outside forces which may negatively impact the life of a family. Poverty, illness, layoffs, social injustice, none of these are discussed, probably because the couples in this book are financially cushioned against harsh troubles like these. The more worldly reader may wonder why these couples imagine they have "problems" if their biggest conflicts consists only of who will carry the toilet brush into the first of their THREE bathrooms! Why don't they just hire someone underprivileged so they can get on with their privileged lives? Anyway, there are a lot of words in this book, but in my opinion, they describe a fairly narrow set of experiences. I was particularly disappointed that more time was not spent on the massive changes that can take place in a marital relationship once children arrives. Especially when the weight of childcare and housework falls more heavily on the woman's shoulders. There are a lot of omissions which may make this book meaningless for readers outside a certain social class.

Valuable Insight:
MS Scarf writes a captivating, engaging, book using real life (they feel quite real) couples to illustrate many of the relationship dynamics she explains. The center piece of Intimate Partners is the examination and application of the notion of projective identification. This notion is common in the psychological discussions under different names. MS Scarf introduces the notion clearly. Other notions she uses are family of origin implications and genograms. The book heavily relies on acceptance of general psychological theories. This is not an easy read. It is worthwhile, valuable, contimplative and, most of all, useful in the context of daily life. If you are looking for spoonfed, formula solutions go somewhere else.

Psychoanalytic mumbo-jumbo:
I found this book to be flawed in its very nature. Scarf attempts to explain the problems of the couples in her book using categories and classifications of psychoanalytic theory that are utterly unfounded. She attributes the problems of mairrage to self-imposed psychoanalytic conventions that do not have a true basis in real life. Her explanations of things such as "projective identification" are almost comical to the reader with a critical eye. For example, she attributes the jealosy of one partner to the other partners, unexpressed, repressed feelings. This analysis seems to try to stretch a simply jealosy issue of one partner onto the other. The takes a simple problem and makes it complicated with carefully selected detail and over-zealous classification.

Carol Lambe - Career & Personal Development Coach:
I first read this book back in the late 80's - and I have never forgot the lessons I learned from it. I was also reading Harriet Lerner and Melody Beattie at the time and felt that Scarf's writings supported my self-development to understand: 1. Why I continued to attracted relationships that were toxic and unfulfilling, 2. How to recognize the patterns, and then 3. How to not make the same relationship mistakes masked in different people. It definitely made a huge impact on how I viewed my family of origin and it made me look at my own actions and behaviors with new insight. I have referred this book to my clients, as it is an engaging read with the case studies setting up Scarf's insights into the behaviors that transcend our own personal experiences. I highly recommend this book.