Affair Trade

A common precipitating event that brings couples to our attention is an extra-marital affair, from impulsive one-time flings in an otherwise faithful marriage, to long-term arrangements that go on for years. In some cases one affair or many affairs co-exist throughout a long-term marriage.

The morality of affairs has been debated for many years and in many different cultures. Some cultures implicitly support a man’s right to have affairs, or even several wives, while others have a moral stance against infidelity. Since this book’s focus is on therapy, I take the view that, from the standpoint of the clinician, an affair is a symptom of marital breakdown. It signals that the strain that led to breakdown has not stayed within the bounds of the marriage. Our job is to understand the meaning of the affair, the marital weaknesses to which it points, and whether there is a likelihood of being able to help repair the marriage. We also do well to think of the impact and meaning of affairs on the whole family.

As therapists with a couple state of mind ourselves, we try to understand events presented to us from the standpoint of the couple, even though we include individual meanings as well. Frequently one partner will come in blaming the other in a moralistic state of mind. "Then we want to understand what leads that partner to be so caught up in blaming her spouse. We try to make all roads lead to an understanding of the couple itself, because that is the overarching organisation that guides us.

We also see marriages that have come about because of affairs. Second marriages commonly arise after the partners had an affair while married to others, and many of these couples later get into trouble themselves. Frequently, the guilt one or both has about the way their marriage began, the animosity of the children of the first marriages, or the difficulty with attachment that led to the original meeting, may haunt this second or third marriage.

Types of affairs

There is an infinite variety in types of affairs. For example, the man who goes for regular genital massage from the beginning of his young marriage; the woman who had liaisons while travelling for business but was faithful at home; the woman who had an affair with her husband’s best friend; the man who then had an affair in reaction to the spouse’s affair; the affair by a woman whose husband became senile. "There is an infinite variety in the meaning and consequences of an affair, from the one-time opportunistic sexual liaison to the affair of many years duration. In a marriage that is already moribund, an affair may signal its death. It is not always best for a couple to stay together, so the question of whether the couple, or each partner, wants to stay married is important. In each case, it is learning the unconscious meaning of the affair that offers crucial help to couples, regardless of the outcome for the marriage itself.

When we begin to assess the meaning of an affair, we need to understand the context in which it has occurred. Does either the culture or the “contract” between the couple sanction affairs? Some cultures, such as the Latin or French cultures, seem to sanction affairs. Or it may be, as in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, that the marital agreement included permission for an open or “swinging” marriage. These permissive attitudes do not, however, safeguard a particular couple from the hurt of these arrangements. Even permissive cultures or contracts are only factors.

In our [North American] culture, with its agreement about monogamy and marital commitment, open marriages increase vulnerability to breakdown, loaded already with the introduction of third-party allegiances. This vulnerability is further tested whenever the marriage or partnership comes under strain from life developments, or from vulnerable individual character structure. Psychodynamically, affairs represent a splitting of issues in the interactions between the couple and the partners to include a third participant. Internally, affairs actualise splits in internal object relations in each of the spouses and in their shared unconscious organisation or link. What had been lived out unconsciously between them is now lived out with a third participant who becomes an object, consciously or unconsciously, for both of them, and who receives their projections. Marital difficulty between them is now spread into a wider field. When that couple comes to therapy, our role offers an opportunity to be a very different kind of third that offers healing in the place of divisiveness.

The internal split the affair presents has poignancy because it concretises the psychological issues in psychosomatic intimacy. "The body's role in intimacy resonates with the intimacy of mother–infant exchanges. Because of this resonance, bodily intimacy always has a special impact. (Scharff, 1982) When the affair is triggered by sexual failure, sexual intimacy may be vicariously expressed for both spouses.

Some affairs are unconscious attempts to inject love into a loveless marriage, an unconscious motive that we might consider on the benign side (Dicks, 1967). In these cases, if the betrayed spouse also comes to see that the deficit between her and her husband essentially pushed him into the arms of another, and that he was also expressing her own longing for love through projective identification, there is hope for repair. In some cases, such realisation may come too late. Other unconscious motivations have to do with protecting the spouse, for instance the Madonna/Whore split in which a man feels that his sexual object is dirtied by his desire, so he exports the unconscious sense of damage onto a third person while keeping his wife unsullied.

Or a man’s aging and that of his wife arouse fears of death, impelling him to seek a younger woman. In still other cases, one person’s uncertain sexual identity leads to a heterosexual affair that might be an attempt to shore up an unsure heterosexual identity, or it might be a homosexual affair that expresses the internal split in identity. What matters are the specific and particular unconscious reasons in the couple before us, the balance between individual factors, and shared unconscious issues. Some individual personality issues make fidelity unlikely or unvalued by a partner. In each case, the betrayed partner has to decide if she wants to live with the situation.

The role of secrets

Secrecy itself has a dynamic function. Sharing secrets develops intimacy. Children delight in secrecy to exclude others and build closeness. In marriage, partners share things that bring them closer and exclude those outside their relationship. Conversely, secrecy that excludes a marital partner supports a gap between them, whether it is a sexual secret or not. In this way, fantasy affairs or overly close work relationships may be as divisive as sexual ones.

Throughout her marriage, Mrs Thomas nursed a fantasy of love for a high school teacher she felt would always have been her ideal mate, never sharing this fantasy with her husband. Then, in community theater, she met a man who fit the same mould. In her unspoken fantasy love affair, he unconsciously represented the exciting but dangerous man of her dreams who would never look at her in real life. These secret fantasies formed a wall against a close relationship with her unexciting, reliable husband whom she had chosen precisely because he did not present the danger inherent in sexual excitement. She had been the apple of her father’s eye, a man who had many affairs that denigrated her mother. In her fantasy affair, she triumphed over her defeated mother through being desirable. At the same time, by not living out an affair, she protected herself from the internally dangerous, sexual man. The secret distance from her husband had much the same effect as an actual affair.

Secrecy from a spouse divides the two of them, while secrecy with the other man or woman unites them. The dynamic life of secrets occurs on several levels developmentally: splitting in the paranoid/schizoid mode, manically uniting in the mode of a depressive position triumph over a feared object; attachment to the new object, and a distancing attachment to the marital object; control of the object at what might be considered the anal level; and increasing intimacy at the oedipal level. All of these considerations need to be worked with in treating the secrecy in affairs.

Non-sexual, emotional affairs

Affairs that are intensely emotional but unconsummated may have much the same effect as affairs that are lived out, because of the degree of preoccupation and the distancing that leads to and results from them. It is not actual sexual infidelity but the emotional gap in the couple relationship accompanied by an emotional investment in another person that needs to be confronted. Sometimes the work is easier because an affair has not been concretised with physical sexuality, but other platonic affairs represent an emotional gulf that is just as difficult to bridge.

Internet affairs and secret use of pornography

Since the development of the internet, secretive use of pornography and internet affairs have become frequent reasons for referral. The two patterns are different, but often intertwined. A man or woman using the internet for sexual interest may be spending time on internet sites and finding heterosexual or homosexual internet partners for emotional exchange and/or for internet sex. Frequently these affairs are discovered because the partner sees clues left on the computer, but excessive time away, secretive behaviour, and a growing distance from the spouse are much the same. The investigation of this area involves the questions and techniques we are discussing throughout this chapter, but if a more addictive attitude emerges, that has to be confronted before dynamic exploration becomes possible.

Unconscious collusion

There is always the question of how much the betrayed partner supports the affair, either directly or unconsciously. A spouse uninterested in sex, for instance, may openly authorise her husband to seek sex elsewhere. Frequently, a spouse who keeps emotional distance will unconsciously support affairs, either by sending non-verbal signals or by standing by while knowing about them unconsciously. Diagnostically, we want to assess the degree to which the infidelity has been known but not acknowledged, and the degree to which it stems from other things known but unaddressed.

Mr and Mrs Brown, married thirty years, came with a history of marital and sexual unhappiness. Mrs Brown said she had known almost from the outset that her husband had multiple affairs. He said her sexual inadequacy forced him into them. She felt he always blamed her. Her resentment, a chip-on-her-shoulder attitude, was evident in every session and included an edge of resentment to me because she felt I took his side, although actually felt that his behaviour was abusive, and I worried about her continuing to suffer it. His condescension towards her and me was equally evident. He said he would stop the affairs and try to reconstitute the marriage, but when she found that he had again betrayed her during a trip, she told him not return home. He agreed the marriage was over. Now she panicked, begging him to return, becoming so depressed she had to be hospitalised. In individual therapy after the hospitalisation, Mrs Brown gradually came to terms with her collusion based on her fear that no one would love her. Therefore she was powerless to confront her husband for humiliating her throughout the marriage. The sources went back to rejection by her father that was never validated by her mother, and a well of feeling unlovable. I surmised that Mr Brown had stayed in a marriage of such mutual resentment and mistrust because he was narcissistically wounded by his own parents, and had identified deeply with his father who had numerous affairs, thereby denigrating his mother. To my mind, divorce in this case represented a good outcome, for the marriage was deeply unsatisfying to both parties. In individual treatment, Mrs Brown’s resentment entered the transference when she felt that I, like her mother, failed to confirm her humiliation. Working in the transference we confronted the life-long feeling of being unlovable that made her hostage to her husband.

Developmental causes of affairs

Assessing affairs is a matter of uncovering meanings in all possible dimensions.

Individual developmental causes

Developmental causes run the gamut from psychopathy in the erring partner to individual splitting of good objects from bad in which the exciting object has to be protected from the bad and rejecting object by being projected into two entirely different people. When the good, clean object has to be a different person from the exciting, dirty one as in the “Madonna/ Whore split,” a wife idealised as a saint needs to be protected from the fantasy of damage that sex unconsciously brings. Some patients carry a fear that attachment brings engulfment. For others, strains in sexual identity propel them into heterosexual affairs to shore up shaky sexual identity, or into same sex affairs that express ambivalence about their sexuality.

Mr Levine felt his wife’s relationship with her woman friend was squeezing their marriage. Her interest in her friend had the hallmarks of an affair, which she denied. After some weeks of evaluation, Mrs Levine said she was ending the marriage. She proceeded to construct a lesbian partnership. She had been ambivalent about the marriage and sexual object choice for years, and now moved to consolidate a homosexual identity.

Individuals who previously suppressed homosexual or bisexual inclinations in heterosexual marriages no longer feel the need to do so. We may see these affairs as the emergence of suppressed identifications, but on the other hand, some of these affairs represent strain in marriages expressed in this way. For many of these latter marriages, therapy to repair the marriage is enough for this alternate identity to fade.

Marital strain

Severe marital strain may precipitate extramarital liaisons or affairs. Frequent travel, overwork, sexual difficulty, or accumulating chronic anger all pose different risk factors from those stemming from individual developmental vulnerability. There are also issues in adult and marital life that increase risk, such as the birth of a child that unconsciously threatens a parent, whether a boy or a girl, or a child’s specific stage of development. For one couple, having a normal but oedipally sexualised child will feel like an attack on the same-sex parent, while for another couple the developmental sexualisation of a teenager threatens. Losses of virility or femininity inherent in aging, menopause, the death of a parent, or decline in career threatens others. Long-standing sexual difficulty or inactivity pose risks. These surface factors then trigger unconscious issues.

Affairs in homosexual marriages and partnerships

I have had only a few cases of homosexual partnerships in treatment over the years, presumably because I am identified as a straight therapist. There has been a perception that many homosexual patients have less secure attachments with fleeting sexual connections. That may hold for a subset of individual homosexual patients but, for those who are in a gay or lesbian couple, we find the same sense of loyalty, the same feeling of disaster on break up, the same need to mourn lost committed relationships. If a member of a gay or lesbian couple has a heterosexual affair, there is a feeling of betrayal similar to the feeling when a member of a heterosexual couple has a homosexual affair. The same principles apply for gay and lesbian couples as for heterosexual couples.

The effect of affairs on the family

Often we see individual or couple patients, or children, whose parents have had affairs. Almost invariably, the children are deeply injured. They identify with the hurt of the betrayed parent or feel betrayed themselves. Or they may unconsciously identify with the parent having the affair, feeling that it was justified because of anger or misbehaviour in the marriage.

A woman’s father had many affairs throughout the parents’ marriage, including one that was still going on. Her devastated mother had stood waiting with the children outside the woman’s apartment building. The mother wailed at her plight, oblivious to the children. This picture became part of my patient’s adult suicidal depression. She married a completely faithful man, but the family denigrated him as not successful or attractive. Meanwhile, her brothers had flagrant affairs in identification with the father, and her sister-in-laws complained to my patient in much the same way as her mother continued to do.

The other man or woman

This summary cannot be complete without considering the affair's other man or woman. From the standpoint of the marriage, we see this person as the recipient of projections, a repository of split-off unconscious issues of marriage. But as individual therapists, we see “other women” as patients. Many are drawn to unavailable partners for unconscious reasons that come from all developmental levels issues of insecurity, needing to avoid feeling trapped or engulfed in a fully available relationship, and oedipal attraction to a parental object. Some of these relationships eventuate in marriages, many of which are successful, so we cannot say that all the relationships in which such a person engages are pathological or faulty. But for many, the relationships result in a developmental dead end for which they seek our help. While this perspective is not our principal focus in this chapter, it is one to keep in mind (Tuch, 2002). There is another point that brings us back to the couples with affairs: As we help them toward an empathic yet dispassionate stance in relation to the third party, we also help them develop a capacity for concern and reparation towards each other.

Assessment and treatment of affairs

When we evaluate marriages with an affair, we need to look more at the meaning of the affair itself (Table 3). We explore the strength of the marriage, the degree of love and desire for the marriage that still exists, and the hurt that either led to the affair or that resulted from it. We explore the strengths of the marriage and the family as a whole, the meaning of the affair, and fault lines that existed before the affair. We ask about the strains over the years and immediately preceding the affair. We explore the role of the secrecy, but also the degree of trust and mistrust that surrounded it and that characterise their relationship now. Early on, we address the hurt in the betrayed spouse, because without recognising that, nothing else is possible. This includes the hurt of being denied information from the secrecy.

Revelation of secrets

At times in evaluating a marriage, say for sexual difficulty, we discover unrevealed affairs in individual interviews. My policy in these cases is to have a careful individual discussion with the one having the affair about revealing it. An affair usually poses a crisis that threatens the destruction of the marriage. We hope to turn the crisis into one with positive possibilities. If the betraying husband tells his wife, she may decide to leave now that she has full information. If he does not, they will be attempting to reconstruct their flawed marriage on a flawed foundation. While the decision whether to reveal has to remain with the individual, it may not be possible to offer effective treatment without revelation. On the other hand, revelation may make the facts of her situation clear to the spouse who has been in the dark and may catalyse treatment. In any event, I do not think it is possible to work effectively in marital therapy while there is an ongoing affair. If one partner refuses to end an affair, I would generally withdraw from that treatment. Revelation of the full facts is the best basis for work with trust, and more often than not, it sets a firmer floor on which to begin to rebuild (D. Scharff & J. Scharff, 1991).

Once we have looked into hurt intrinsic to the affair, I try to move to dealing with the strain leading to it, including the role of secrets. Rebuilding of trust by exploring issues that have sapped it always takes time. Such work increases the strain of the moment as painful issues resurface. The therapist’s capacity for holding can be severely tried while helping the couple build stronger holding for themselves.

The role of transference

As in all couple therapy, transference to the therapist is an important factor. The therapist takes on projections similar to ones previously put onto the third person in the affair. This offers a principal opportunity for the couple to relive issues that had previously been exported into the affair. Anger at the therapist for seeming to take sides, feelings of being misunderstood or not being cared for, or feeling hurt by the therapist all come into this category. (See the case of Mrs Brown above.) The therapist’s countertransference offers further first-hand information about the couple’s unconscious life. Work with these transference and countertransference issues is the everyday work of the marital therapist.

The course of treatment

Once we have begun work on the issues I have been discussing, treatment moves to become like any other which is to say it is unique for each couple in ways we are used to. I think of myself as a marital therapist, not a divorce therapist. Most couples that come to me with affairs have been able to reconstruct a better marriage. Nevertheless, some marriages are best ended, as with two examples above. While we must be open to that outcome, we usually find that in most marital therapy the healing forces intrinsic to marriage will help couples overcome their difficulties.

I close with an example of analytic work with a couple, in which both partners had affairs, but who were eventually able to reconstruct their marriage.

Shared fear of intimacy after infidelity

Robert and Diane, in their mid forties, were referred to me on the brink of divorce. (D. Scharff & J. Scharff, 2011) Robert travelled constantly with a multinational corporation, while Diane cared for their children at home. Diane broke off their college romance, met another man, got engaged, and became pregnant by him. When she realised that she did not respect her fiancé, she terminated the engagement and the pregnancy. She returned to Robert who still adored her. They soon married, but he remained hurt over the earlier break up and her pregnancy with another man. Their sex was always more perfunctory than passionate. Diane seemed physically and emotionally uninvolved, and Robert had periodic difficulty with his erection. She doubted Robert’s love; he doubted her love and his potency. Nevertheless they wanted to renew the marriage.

In individual meetings, each told me about undisclosed affairs. Early in the marriage, Diane had had an affair in which she enjoyed sex more than with Robert. Two years ago she had another affair in which she enjoyed terrific sex including her first orgasm in intercourse. Robert had used prostitutes on frequent business trips. Six months before the consultation, he had a brief passionate affair with a friend of Diane’s, feeling loved as never before. Robert and Diane warily revealed their affairs to each other, and began to explore their meaning, realising that emptiness in their marriage was connected to the fullness in the affairs. Each felt more sinned against than sinning. Expressing hurt and outrage, they then opened up to each other emotionally and sexually with newfound passion, until, as usually happens, passion gradually faded in the ordinary light of day. The couple continued slowly to rebuild their relationship in couple therapy.

A month later, Robert reported a dream. “I’m in a restaurant with Diane and her ex-fiancé. Diane ate part of my roast beef sandwich, and he started to eat it, too. Our housekeeper, who brought the sandwich, was there but with horrible black spots on her face. We wound up in my old Mercedes, the ex-fiancé driving and Diane rubbing his arm. I threw punches at him from the back seat, but I couldn’t hit him hard. I also hit out at Diane but without power. He said, ‘Hit me if you can. Perhaps I deserve it, but you’re not strong enough to hurt me.’ I felt that it was really my penis that didn’t have enough power.”

Robert said that when Diane had angrily threatened divorce the previous week, he remembered how devastated he was when she had left him thirty years earlier for that fiancé. He remembered how humiliated he felt during a time of extended impotence when she had no sympathy. Associating to the spots on the housekeeper’s face, he said that the marriage seemed poisoned. Associating to Diane and the fiancé sharing his sandwich, he remembered how he had cringed last week when she yelled at him that he could eat his lover’s vagina if that was what he wanted.

Diane associated to the restaurant as the place where she saw Robert’s lover occasionally. The spots on the housekeeper’s face made her think that Robert thought she, Diane, was ugly.

Robert had two more brief dreams:

“A big guy wanted to beat me up. I told another man I would give him $2,500 to defend me, and he did.” And, “I was at a motel where people go with lovers. I was in the bathroom there with Diane and an Indian man. We were naked, measuring our penises. I had a strong erection. His was stronger with a better angle." He associated to a woman who had an affair with an Indian man. Afterwards her husband forgave her. Perhaps he could forgive Diane, too.

The dreams reminded Diane that Robert had told her that his lover had once caressed his penis as they drove to a motel. Perhaps he wondered if she, Diane, had done this to another man. She thought Robert, being the youngest in his family, felt inferior to other men, and so had to make his affair less bad than hers. Robert thought that Diane’s affair was worse because she is a woman. She said that he could not forgive her for being with a sexually effective man because it meant accepting his weakness and inferiority. Robert began to cry, “We had so much to look forward to. We both did something terrible. I’ve failed in the most important task in my life.” I said, “I noticed today that you, Diane, were initially fairly silent, leaving Robert exposed while you hid behind him. Then you stressed his weakness and humiliation—which you may also feel.” Robert said, “I feel humiliated and angry.” “What occurs to you about paying someone $2,500 to defend you?” I asked. Diane said, “$2,500 is a lot to pay for defense.” Robert said, “It’s to buy my way out of inadequacy. I paid prostitutes to make me feel better.”, “It’s to buy my way out of inadequacy. I paid prostitutes to make me feel better.”

“How do you feel about paying me to defend your marriage?” I said. In response, Robert said, “I want my marriage to work. So I buy your help. You protect us from having more affairs.” Diane then said to Robert, “Or maybe he’d protect you from disclosing an affair if you went back to that woman.” I said, “You each disclosed affairs with my encouragement. You felt threatened and beaten, yet also protected and helped. Is there a fantasy I penetrate the depths of your marriage at a more effective angle than you can do yourselves? Do I humiliate you?”

Robert replied, “You made me reveal the affair when I didn’t want to, but you did it to turn our relationship onto a positive track, instead of a race about who could humiliate the other more.” I said, “Diane, you felt I beat you up too?” Diane said, “I feel both, you beat me up but also that you’re helping me.”

Diane’s dream

Two weeks later, Diane reported a dream that began in a swimming pool—a link to the pool near my office as well as to a previous discussion of being in a pool. “I was swimming with other people in a gorgeous pool below a waterfall, wearing a white bikini that looked great. It was time to go home. A guy got out of the water with me. As we walked up a hill, over some rough spots, he placed his hand on my shoulder. I said he was abusing me, and he reacted like, ‘You’re a stupid woman to think I did something wrong!’ We got in the car. Another guy sat next to me. It was crowded, and his legs touching mine felt awful. Now the white bikini seemed more like underwear. I felt naked, exposed, but not vulgar. I had to tip the driver, so I looked for a dollar bill. In my purse, there was money from all over the world in various denominations of 500, 800, 1,000, but no dollars. I said, 'These other currencies are worthless.’ I didn’t feel good. These men were taking advantage of me.”

Diane said that she felt uncomfortable wearing clothes like underwear in the company of these men, reminding her of the discomfort of her affairs. The money reminded her of her husband’s use of prostitutes all over the world. Robert countered that the dream suggested she felt like a prostitute.

“I hate to think I feel like a prostitute,” Diane said. “I never had sex for money. I looked better in the dream than I feel, but I felt vulnerable.”

I said Diane felt undressed by therapy. She agreed. I asked about the threatening man who put his hand on her shoulder. She remembered a time when a man had called her repeatedly, and then denied sexual intentions. She said, “There’s a sense of fear as I walked to the car, fear about the way the floor has fallen out from under my life.”

Robert said, “The two guys stand for her two affairs. The money is cheap currency.”

Diane said, “I feel cheap. I wound up acting like a prostitute. I’m so sorry.”

Robert added in an unempathic, self-serving way, “I feel like a good part of me has gone out of the window. I was bad to her by having my own affair, but I spent twenty-five years being good, begging her for love. Look what my love got me!”

I said, “The sexual woman alive in the affairs and in the pool feels uncomfortable in underwear with the men in the dream just as Diane feels reluctant to bare herself at home with Robert and to expose her feelings in therapy.” (I also had the thought that, unlike a prostitute who takes money from a man for sex, Diane takes money from Robert while not having sex.) I asked, “What might it mean that you were searching for a dollar bill for the driver?”

Diane said, “The car is therapy, which feels too close for comfort. You touch me uncomfortably when you remind me of unpleasant things. In the dream, I couldn’t pay the driver. If we couldn’t pay you, we couldn’t see you. You only see us for money.”

I began to see that I was also the prostitute, working intimately only for money. In this way I was linked to their degradation. I said, “Robert, you feel inappropriate when you approach Diane, and Diane, you feel accosted by Robert’s sexual advances. Perhaps you feel that about my comments. Do you think using money to ‘tip’ me demeans me like you demean each other to lessen the pain of needing my help, just as you try to lessen the pain of needing each other?”

Diane said, “Robert can’t reach out to me, he’s so busy flying around the world, making money that won’t buy what we need most. "That's why we need you. Partly I don’t like needing your help, but I also do feel good about coming here.”

In this session, the couple worked analytically to explore the stresses that had led to the affairs, the individual issues that made them vulnerable, their unconscious dynamics, and the way the transference to me recreated feelings that had been part of the affairs. These matters stemmed both from their own individual histories and from strains in their marriage. The secrecy about affairs became part of the problem that they now dealt with as they explored their unconscious worlds, thereby reconstructing in the transference—and in my countertransference reception of their shared situation the unconscious origins and meanings of the affairs.

In working through these matters over and over again, we work to integrate all these forces towards reconstructing trust and building new marital bonds. Eventually, this couple achieved repair and have continued to have a better sexual life and mutually satisfying marriage.

Affairs constitute an important presenting problem for any couple therapist. When they do, our work to understand their role in everything else we do. Affairs do not represent a single symptom, but a complex condensation of forces from individual, couple, and social dynamics that require all our skills to decode and work with.

This was originally published in Psychoanalytic Couple Therapy: Foundations of Theory and Practice, edited by David E. Scharf and Jill Savege Scharf (published by Karnac Books in 2014), and is reprinted by kind permission of Karnac Books and the author.

References

Dicks, H. V. (1967). Marital Tensions. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Fisher, H. (1992). Why Adultery? In: Anatomy of Love: "e Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery and Divorce (pp. 75–97). New York: Norton.

Levine, S. (2010). Infidelity. In: S. Levine., C. Risen., & S. Althof (Ed.), Handbook of Clinical Sexuality for Mental Health Professionals (pp. 57–74). New York: Routledge.

Scharff, D. E. (1982). "e Sexual Relationship: An Object Relations View of Sex and the Family. London: Routledge. Reissued in paperback with new introduction, 1998. Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson.

Scharff, D. E. & Scharff, J. S. (1991). Object Relations Couple Therapy. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.

Scharff, D. E. & Scharff, J. S. (2011). The Interpersonal Unconscious. Lanham MD: Jason Aronson.

Tuch, R. (2002). "e Single Woman-Married Man Syndrome. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.

About the Author

David E. Scharf, M.D. is Former Director, International Psychotherapy Institute; Vice-President, International Association for Couple and Family Psychoanalysis; Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and Georgetown University; Supervising Analyst, the International Institute for Psychoanalytic Training; Teaching Analyst, Washington Psychoanalytic Institute; former president, American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists; and member, American and International Psychoanalytic Associations. His more than thirty books (many co-authored with Jill Savege Scharf) include The Sexual Relationship, Object Relations Family Therapy, Object Relations Couple Therapy, Object Relations Individual therapy, Object Relations Therapy of Physical and Sexual Trauma, From Instinct to Self: Selected Papers of Ronald Fairbairn, The Psychoanalytic Century: Freud’s Legacy for the Future, and New Paradigms for Treating Relationships. The Sexual Relationship, and Object Relations Couple Therapy, and The Primer of Object Relations Therapy, 2nd Edition have recently been published in Chinese. His books have also been published in Russian, Korean, German, French, Spanish and Italian. The Scharfs’ newest book (2011) is The Interpersonal Unconscious.

Resources

Wikipedia - Examines the causes, emotional consequences, and impact of affairs on relationships.

Mayo Clinic - Covers the emotional impact of infidelity and how it affects relationships, providing insights into causes like unmet needs and offering advice on healing, such as seeking counseling.

WebMD - outlines the behavioral signs of infidelity, such as emotional withdrawal or changes in communication. It suggests open communication and seeking professional help if necessary.