Esther Perel’s Business Is Your Business

The community could be divided, roughly, into two groups, Ms. Perel said: those who talked about their experiences, and those who didn’t. And there were two kinds of talkers, “the people who emphasized the victimization, and the people who emphasized the heroism and the resilience,” she said. Her parents belonged to that last group.

“They didn’t just survive, and they didn’t just fight to live,” she said. “They were going to live life at its fullest. And in that sense, they experienced the erotic as an antidote to death.” One night a week, they took the train to Brussels to go ballroom dancing.

Ms. Perel studied education and theater at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. To help support herself, she did improvisational puppet theater for children and ran workshops for teenage girls using movement and drama therapy. This led her to a master’s program in expressive arts therapy at Lesley College (now Lesley University) in Cambridge, Mass. Initially she planned to return home, but she was hungry for further training and stayed in the United States.

She has a way of collecting mentors, and mentees, and studied with the pioneering family therapist Salvador Minuchin. For decades, her clinical practice focused on mixed couples — interracial, intercultural, interreligious — and couples in cultural transition. She wrote papers; she spoke at conferences; she taught at symposiums; she conducted workshops. Her reputation grew. She and her husband had two sons, now both adults.

It was the late 1990s. “And then one day comes the Clinton scandal,” Ms. Perel recalled. What struck her was how it was also a scandal for Hillary Clinton — and a Rorschach test for attitudes toward fidelity in marriage. Publicly humiliated, Mrs. Clinton faced a stark choice: Should she stay, or should she go?

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/26/business/esther-perels-couples-therapy.html