If You Love Me, Don't Love Me: Undoing Reciprocal Double Binds and Other Methods of Change in Couple and Family Therapy [Paperback]

Mony Elkaim (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1997 | ISBN-10: 0765700484 | ISBN-13: 978-0765700483

This work presents clinical examples to reveal a fresh understanding of the therapist's feelings within the content of treatment. At the heart of Elkaim's technique is self-reference. He demonstrates how therapists can use their own experiences as powerful tools of intervention. Elkaim also shows how to work with crippling reciprocal double binds, when, for example, someone wants to be loved but pushes his loved ones away out of fear that love is followed by loss. The book should be of use to anyone who works with couples or families.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Jason Aronson, Inc. (June 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765700484
• ISBN-13: 978-0765700483
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,682,227 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars fabulous text, April 23, 2004

By 

Nikolay Karkov "Nik Karkov" (Binghamton, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: If You Love Me, Don't Love Me: Undoing Reciprocal Double Binds and Other Methods of Change in Couple and Family Therapy (Paperback)

This is to my knowledge the only translated text of book-length by French family therapist Mony Elkaim. and I would add, unfortunately so, as it is an amazing and extremely rich work, important both in its theoretical implications and in its purely practical side. Elkaim was a close friend of Guattari's, through whom I came across his name (Guattari mentions him in his Three Ecologies). in fact, the final chapter of the book is a roundtable discussion between Elkaim, Guattari, Stengers, and Prigogine, on the relations between the natural sciences, analysis and the social.

roughly, Elkaim's theories can be traced to the work of precisely the chemist Prigogine, Chilean biologists Varela and Maturana, and Felix Guattari. from Guattari he borrows concepts such as assemblages, resonance, and others; from the other three, ideas of self-references and self-organizing systems. just as in nature matter exhibits an enormous capacity of self-organization, i.e. the attainment of internal consistency without transcendental models, so also Elkaim, in his work, is trying to unblock desiring impasses in the self-referencial relationship between therapist and families. at stake here is not the attainment of truth, but the opening up of new possibilities, often for the therapist also. and even if language is the primary mode of communication, it functions not so much through the elaboration of meaning, but rather by creating ruptures in established significations and codified modes of behavior. in other words, by creating a-signifying breaks, as Guattari would say.

the text is highly original and at the same time accessible, and can shed additional light both on non-traditional methods of theorization (bridging the gap between the human and the natural sciences) and of practical work (opting for experimental meta-modelization, rather than for dogmatic models). also, in contrast to Guattari, where one rarely finds practical cases of treatment, at least in teh English translations, Elkaim's book provides a dozen of these, with consequent theoretical elaborations.

overall, a highly recommendable book!

5.0 out of 5 stars helpful read, April 1, 2010

By 

GSI "Truth seeker" (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: If You Love Me, Don't Love Me: Undoing Reciprocal Double Binds and Other Methods of Change in Couple and Family Therapy (Paperback)

i wrote a paper for school on the double bind and found this work excellent and helpful