MARITAL LOVE AND HATE

This one is about learning ""healthy hate"" to fortify our marriages and ""help us all love better in the simple old-fashioned sense of the word."" The way to do it is by discarding those dotty notions grandma had about marriage as a haven, fortress, island of security, etc. Bah! Dr. Charny wants marriages to be made of stronger stuff, like anger, because ""LOVE (hate) and HATE (love)"" are part of dialectical whole, gentle spouse, and marriage is intrinsically ""a hell of a natural-crisis process."" Charny even urges that old ""no-no,"" fighting in front of the kids, because how else will they learn what life/love/hate are all about? After laying down the ""psychophilosophy"" in Part I, he gives some dubiously practical hints on constructive marital-martial combat in Part II, advocating ""Psychotechnology"" with a nod of thanks to George Bach's The Intimate Enemy (1967) which said it much better and none at all to the encounter groups which have refined confrontation techniques beyond little homilies on the tonic effects of ""no-lose"" yelling and ""think-imaging"" your wrath while remembering always to ""keep your cotton-pickin' destroyin' hands off one another."" Best of all, just keep your cotton-pickin' destroyin' hands off this silly loudmouthed book.