Coming Together – Coming Apart: The Play of Opposites in Love Relationships

Relationships are hard enough to negotiate without advice from outsiders who don’t know you at all. This book is not a “how-to” aimed at attaining the ideal. Rather, it is a how-it-is, an exploration of how relationships are, how they develop, how they deteriorate, how they may end and how they may even revive. Strange as it may seem, it is not a book about how individual human beings are. It doesn’t concern  itself with individual human failings. Those failings are given in being human. Instead, it describes the potentials for joy, disappointment and burden that are intrinsic to relationship and by extension to the process of becoming fully human. In a world obsessed with attaining an illusory ideal, becoming fully human is the greatest threat.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preamble

Preface

Acknowledgements

Chapter One—Introduction

Chapter Two—Animation

Chapter Three—The Psyche: Structure and Contents

Chapter Four—How We Animate

Chapter Five—Dreams

Chapter Six—Marriage and Separation

Chapter Seven—Reunion

Chapter Eight—The Symbolic Life

Epilogue

Bibliography

Index