Customer Reviews

Intimate Partners: Patterns in Love and Marriage

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There are lots of books that address how external events such as illness or the loss of a loved one can affect one's marriage. This book explains in depth how patterns from your partner's family or your family of origin can impact your marriage without your even being aware of them. With the techniques Scarf describes it's possible to bring these to light and break the hold they have on your relationship. Not a really easy read but most definitely worth it. I have a copy but it's never on my bookshelf -- always loaned out!

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.

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.

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.

This book changed my life and the way that I look at my marriage. Scarf summarizes family therapy, but she does it with so much life that it's as riveting as a soap opera. Reading this book, I had dozens of "aha" moments when I finally recognized and understood what was going on in my marriage -- ahas that enabled me to break old destructive patterns

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.

OK, so she doesn't really have a Ph.D. -she writes as if she does. The upshot of this book, couched in much psycho-logical saltimbanquery (the author being well armed with such impressive sounding neologisms as "genograms" and "projective identification") is that we often relive the traumas of our childhood in our adult relationships. Sometimes people relive absurd tragicomedies that their parents or grandparents went through. Sometimes people continue a sibling rivalry with their marriage partner, or sometimes a relationship with a parent is the model for their marriage. I always found this observation to be sort of banal at best, painfully obvious at worst. Apparently this is news to most people. Certainly, this appears to be news to the neurotic lackwits whose stories make up the meaty innards of this thing. The doltish lack of self insight and the puerile neuroses of the protagonists will certainly provide the reader with some good belly laughs.

The first pair of specimens: an insanely jealous yuppie shrew who continues to obsess on her oaf of a husband's rather pathetic sounding, previous romantic dalliance. She's apparently worried that the little emotional engagement she's able to wring out of him isn't unique compared to what the bimbo who preceded her managed to get off him. She constantly grills the poor slob on the exact extent of his previous romance, accusing him of all manner of lies and dishonesty because he is sick of hearing about it. The second: a narcissistic adopted into wealth, former hippie, left-wingnut who decided to cheat on his doormat wife to get even with his cold German stepmother. The doormat was a "care giver" stuck in her care-giving relationship with her daddy who died of cancer while she went through puberty. She only gets along with her husband when he's a dependent ne'er do well, which is most of the time (thus mirroring her relationship with daddy). Now, Ms. Scarf makes her living trying to patch things up between such knuckleheads. I make a living advising people on investments. My advice to yuppiedude#1 is to dump the nut, and don't marry another one like her. My advice to caregiver#2 is to dump the nut, and don't marry another one like him. Yuppiedude1 and caregiver2 seemed like fundamentally sound people. Maybe they should date each other. The other two are broken, and should be given contraceptives and jobs in some kind of farm where they can't disturb fully formed members of the human race. Seriously folks: some people are basically bad people. Some of those people are attractive for reasons which you may not fully comprehend. My solution seems much more kind hearted than forcing decent people to deal with fruitcakes because your parents made a mistake.

Now that I'm done making fun of the book, which is as tasteless and horrible as any other "relationship book" I've read (I read lots of them because I enjoy the tasteless and horrible): the upside. If you know someone who keeps dating the "wrong person" or who is in some kind of doomed relationship described by this book, reading this might help them. I think a lot of the advice given is very bad advice for most people, but the fundamental idea that you might be living out someone else's unresolved trauma is an important one. I've bought three copies of the book for friends, and it was an eye opener for them. If people would just heed the old saw, "marry people from a good family," books like this probably wouldn't be necessary. Since nobody believes in common sense any more, books like this have a ready market.

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.