One to One: Understanding Personal Relationships

I'm glad this book is still in print. Although it was written some time ago, and no doubt, professional psychologists have moved beyond its insights, for a layman the book is incredibly useful in day-to-day relating, especially with romantic partners. The basic insights revolve around types of relating (towards others, against them, or away from them) and models of relating (creative, cooperative, adversarial and antagonistic). One of the more disturbing thoughts in the book is that 99% of relations have some elements of sadomasochism! (Of course, sadism and masochism are defined technically in the book.) More important, it explains why. A subtext is that romance isn't what you should be looking for in a stable partnership. Compassion towards self and partner tends to be the dominant message. There is an odd last chapter about a therapeutic game that all readers can attempt to play with their partners. It's a game focusing on verbalising emotions (immature narcissists, however, cannot play). The book would have been better with examples of some couples engaging in the rules of the game, contending with the weaknesses of their dominant means of adapting to reality. Some dialogue of actual people trying to improve their ways of relating is lacking, so the book comes to a kind of abrupt halt. The book sometimes reads as an ad for the psychoanalysis industry. Non-American readers might be wondering what all this business of "talking cures" is all about. There is, fortunately enough, little about Freud, and the author (Rubin) claims little debt to Freud for most of the insights he has. Karen Horne is mentioned numerous times in the text as an important colleague. I read the book in conjunction with a more up-to-date text, Robyn Skinner's _Families and How to Survive Them_, which also explains how family and interpersonal dynamics can be understood with the help of recent developments in psychology. What is needed is a new edition of _One-to-One_ with comments and an introduction by professionals in the field, to let the layman know whether or not Rubin's insights are still useful by their standards (if they ever were). I have no idea whether counsellors find this book useful at all. But in my experience, the book has proven beneficial. I plan next to read Rubin's other book _Reconciliations_. Before reading this one, I also stumbled across Rubin's book _Overcoming indecisiveness_.