La coppia on the road. Il legame di coppia di fronte alle sfide del ciclo della vita

[Autom. eng. transl.] In this book we will so to speak a journey, we will metaphorically accompany - by borrowing the title of a recent volume by Scabini and Cigoli (2012) - the couple "in search" of his bond, to discover his qualities, fascinating destinations to whose aims, the main challenges and critical events that it encounters along its path, but also of the resources, of the riches that it has in itself to better face this journey. In undertaking this itinerary, we will be guided by the relational-symbolic model (Scabini and Cigoli, 2000; Scabini and Iafrate, 2003), a psychosocial and clinical model of research and intervention, a "compass" useful for orienting oneself in the knowledge of the family, of the its internal bonds and those with the community to which it belongs, and which also offers valuable indications for the care and promotion of the bonds themselves. At the base of this perspective we can trace a reading of the family as an "organization of relationships", to say of the coexistence and interdependence between the different relational areas that characterize it. Within this relational framework, the couple bond represents the backbone, the pivotal point of family history. In particular the couple - as we will deepen in the course of the book - is called to give life and maintain over time their marital pact, a treaty of reciprocity, which is not given once and for all and does not live by automatisms, but must be constantly nourished affectively and ethically (Cigoli and Scabini, 2006). We could say that couples are called to take care and renew their marital pact not only in the constitution phase, but throughout the life cycle, in response to daily challenges, as well as to critical regulatory and non-normative events. We have divided our journey into four phases. To begin with, we have thought of providing useful references starting from a sort of map that illustrates the reality of the couple's bond in our society. We then continued on the fundamental steps that the journey of the life of the couple goes through, to then face the challenges that the partners may encounter in their itinerary, be they predictable or not, choices or not choices. In the last phase we focused on useful interventions to help couples cope better with difficult times and to enrich their skills and abilities and self-awareness.