★★★★★ 3
Interesting, but not empirically validated, and written explicitly for straight people (why?!)
Format: Kindle
This one’s the 500-pound gorilla of the healthy-couple self-help genre, with thirty years in print, scores of Oprah appearances by the authors, thousands of therapists practicing the Imago framework.
The main thing that I need to tell you about this updated edition, from the year 2019, is that it does not mention or acknowledge the existence of queer or same-sex couples even one time. In fact, it really doubles down on the husband and wife stuff, takes gender roles pretty seriously, which is not a thing I realized we did anymore, except as a joke. Anyway, talking only to straight people is not too relevant to my interests, and while the conservative Christian viewpoint is pretty subtle in the advertising, just be aware of that PROBABLY NOT ACCIDENTAL omission going in, queer friends.
(This is made even more impressive by the fact that the heart of the Imago approach is based on childhood trauma, about the ways in which our parents caused us to suppress or hide or ignore parts of ourselves in order to be accepted and loved. Just let that sink in, because I’ve been reading this book for the past week and I am still reeling from the irony that people who have been thinking for the past three decades about the ways that parents cause trauma to kids by failing to accept parts of them have missed the VERY OBVIOUS AND RELEVANT EXAMPLE of queer folks.)
That aside, for me the book was a mixed-bag of some interesting and provocative ideas (I’d put these in the category of poetic notions, or interesting narrative ideas), alongside some really kooky 20th century neo-Freudian stuff (rooted in part in Freud’s theory of repetition compulsion.) I’m no fan of Freudian approaches, and after I started this book, I decided to see how empirically-validated this Imago approach is: based on what I found, there seems to be basically no evidence that this therapy is effective.
Am I glad I read it? I think so?? It was thought-provoking, with the pretty significant grain of salt that there’s not much evidence to support that Imago therapy is much better than doing nothing at all. Also, I feel a little gross giving my money to relationship experts who (in 2019!!)) won’t even acknowledge the existence of queer people, even when doing so would obviously strengthen their core arguments and provide better examples than some of the meek ones they give.
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Reviewed in the United States on November 18, 2021
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