The Couple and its Instincts
❝The anatomy of the couple system, and the instinctual drivers that facilitate its emergence.❞
Abstract
This paper deals with the anatomy of the couple system, and the instinctual drivers that facilitate its emergence. This third entity that is generated is governed by prototypical experiences in development and the structural and content issues of these experiences, in particular, the role of the death instinct. How mental contents can be exchanged in the couple system is explored, based on the unique exchange that occurs in the mother-infant dyad. This projected content in the couple raises the issue of defence and its corollary, what is defended against – and argues that couples often share the same injury but defend against this in diverse ways. It is this diversity of defence that leads to couple conflict and the possibility of couple dissolution. “When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part” (G.B. Shaw, 1908).
Introduction
Shaw’s sentiment above brings to life the challenge that it takes to make, sustain, and survive being a couple. It tells of the impossible, the extra-ordinary, the supernatural. It seems a pipe dream the couple growing hoary in happiness. Yet, the couple is not immune from the normal laws of nature. It can be predictable and understood. This paper sets out to uncover those laws that govern the couple entity and to better understand the structures that underlie it. Whilst these explorations are by no means complete, they do aim to make clearer some of the mechanisms that are so central to psychological ‘reproduction’. Achieving insight into the unique dynamics of the couple system relies on returning to the basic anatomy that underlies it. In psychoanalysis , basic anatomy is Freud, and it is doubtful whether a full understanding of the couple can be gained without recourse to the fundamental building blocks that he introduced. In this paper, I will be returning to some of these basic ‘anatomical’ elements, not because there have been no developments in psychoanalysis but because our understanding of the couple remains underdeveloped, and is often based on what occurs in the consulting room between therapist and patient rather than on a foundation understood by the unique elements from which the couple is made.
This paper aims to therefore excavate and build some fundamental elements of the couple entity, and with specific reference to the instincts as an underlying force of development. Doing so enables a fuller picture to emerge of how objects and object relatedness are given life, and what the chemistry of the couple is, both in its structure and content.
Building on earlier theories of couple development, and supplementing them, a more contemporary model will hopefully be achieved which can account for anomalies not adequately accounted for. It is a work in progress but which hopefully begins to forge some links between the basic elements of a couple’s life and its generic and individual complexity. I intend to build on previous accounts of the attraction-repulsion hypothesis, addressing the notion of ‘shared injury-different defence’ as the underlying driver of conflict and dissolution in the couple. This natural tendency toward dissolution underpins these processes as the death instinct ascends, subjecting the couple to the same cyclical processes as the individual. In this paper, I will be developing these ideas and attempting to tie primary instincts, the building blocks of the psyche, into more evolved, emergent inter-psychic systems.
On ‘Emergence’ and the Third Psyche
The quantum jump from two individuals interacting simply, into a state of being a couple, represents the emerging of a new, elaborate system governed by its own regulating principles (Perkel, 2007). A couple is, in other words, something new. The complex exchange of mental projections enables a new layer of an interpersonal psychic space to be created, separate from its individual origins. The human body, for example, is made up of more primitive cellular structures, but cannot be reduced to them. The body contains essential cell energies, memory, and characteristics that influence and infiltrate the transcendent structure that is the body. The couple represents a system like this, carrying prototypical energies from its more ‘primitive’ components. The two participants that form the couple put these constituent elements into the inter-psychic space between them, to form a third entity. ‘Inter-psychic lacuna’ is a term I used to describe this entity, the inter-psychic space into which projections are placed, giving birth to a third, emergent entity with its own life (see Perkel, 1997).
Dealing with the ‘Third’ in psychoanalytic theory is not new - and in particular, it has received a thorough treatment from various theoretical positions trying to understand dyadic ‘two-ness’ and relational unconscious phenomena in the consulting room. A journal of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, for example, dedicated an entire volume to “the Third in Psychoanalysis” (2004). Insights into various approaches to understanding ‘thirdness’ were presented.
Concepts such as a “shared inter-subjective thirdness” (Benjamin, 2004), “triangular space” based on the earlier oedipal dramas (Britton, 2004), and the “relational unconscious”, built upon the mutual influence of unconscious minds upon one another (Gerson, 2004), all address core issues of a third entity transcending the subjectivity of dyadic two-ness. Green (2004) addresses some of these debates, beginning with Freud himself, on the relevance of transcendent interpersonal spaces, in which both object and subject are held – or, projection and reality intersect. As he concludes his paper, “All this leads me to a conclusion that many will consider radical; nevertheless, it is my opinion: it is an illusion to believe that one can grasp the nature of the psyche in all its facets without the third element, which carries with it an inevitably metaphoric dimension” (p. 134).
Much of the work around ‘thirdness’, or what I will refer to below as emergent structures, are rooted in furthering an understanding of the therapist-patient relationship and the intercourse to which this is subject, generating added layers of meaning. In particular, Gerson (2004) provides a thorough exposition of these developments, and the need to understand the “relational unconscious” as one of “a holding area whose contents await birth at a receptive moment in the contingencies of evolving experience” (p. 69). As useful as these developments are in their focus on the therapist-patient dyad, and in informing the nature of coupling in general, it also has limitations in its application to the relationship couple – a system made of an equal exchange in which therapeutic boundaries and asymmetry do not apply. The couple is unique and built of its own anatomy. In this paper, it is this unique anatomy I will be attempting to deconstruct, recognising that the therapeutic couple is not the same as the ‘the relationship couple’.
No matter how far a complex emergent structure evolves from its originating constituent components, it will carry core essential qualities of these components. This does not imply that an emergent structure will be recognisable as these simpler elements, nor does it mean that the chicken, once hatched, can be put back into the egg. Rather, an emergent system develops a relative autonomy with its own sets of principles according to which it can operate, but always carrying prototypical elements and energies that combine into higher systems under the ascendant pressures of the life instinct (Freud, 1940). This links to the intricate and elaborate way that nature enables systems to unfold from “primitive beginnings and progressing step by step to ever more elaborate and complex states” (Davies, 1995, p. 198). Like all systems in nature, “(t)here arises the possibility of self-organisation, in which systems suddenly and spontaneously leap into more elaborate forms” (Davies, 1995, p.198). Emergent systems do not, however, become entirely divorced from their constituent components and these greater levels of complexity are never void of an essential thread.
If this were true, would we then not expect such systems to behave in a manner consistent with its origins and yet, simultaneously, as Green (2000) says, go “beyond the two poles” (p. 21-22)? Would the couple not resemble the laws governing the internal psyche and yet transcend it – being a ‘third’ “realm that transcends the subjectivities of the two participants” (Gerson, 2004, p. 75)?
This principle of the prototype is everywhere in Freud’s theories upon which much of the mental apparatus rests. Consciousness, for example, “arises instead of a memory-trace” (Freud, 1920, p. 296-297) – analogous to the outer membrane of a primitive organism that develops to differentiate its inner structures from the outer environment. The organism must prioritise the protection of its own self against reception of stimuli that might change it or destroy it. A ‘membrane’ abutting the external world thus forms which serves to filter stimuli on their way into, or out from the inner world of the organism. Consciousness is this membrane on the mental level, which does not store impingements as does the internal systems of the organism, but serves as a “surface turned towards the external world will from its very situation be differentiated and will serve as an organ for receiving stimuli” (Freud, 1920, p. 297).
This capacity for differentiating internal from external will play an important part in the formation of the couple lacuna, and the development of its own ‘psychic skin’. Whilst Gerson differentiates his idea of the relational unconscious from the idea of the ‘third’ – “is not an object, a third, a triad, a field, or a space” (p. 81) – because each of these, he says, connotes an entity that can be separated from the two subjectivities – it is my view that this might make for an artificial distinction. The lacuna is clearly a third, but it remains entirely inseparable from its individual constituents. It is both riddled with subjectivity, as it is an object. It emerges from, and develops an added layer of meaning; yet it remains inseparable, carrying core components of its foundational elements.
This sort of link between more primitive mechanisms in nature and the emergent systems they give rise to are everywhere in the higher layers of psychic functioning and development, and are by no means new in psychoanalytic theory. In fact, in the origins of Freudian theory we find how in the developed layers of the mind, in much greater complexity, we can see emergence, such as defence mechanisms and defensive systems, based on early experiences of the somatic realm (Freud, 1905).
On the Anatomy of Instincts
Understanding this emergent third relies on understanding instincts, which is its basic anatomy. A brief detour into the instincts is therefore unavoidable. The psychic apparatus is not just impacted from the outer world; it is also impacted from the inner world since all impingement to the psyche are by way of the sensory apparatus. It therefore develops on more concrete experiences of the body and its functions. Since impingements from inside the body are to the psyche no different from impingements from the outside, it will form representations of the world through its own experiences of it (Freud, 1926).
Hunger pangs are indistinguishable for the infant from needle pricks – both generate impingements that elevate the arousal of the infant, reach the mental apparatus through the sensory apparatus, and generate a defensive response in an attempt to restore equilibrium. Even if bad experiences are felt to be external, said Klein (1946), “they become through introjection internal persecutors and thus reinforce the fear of the destructive impulse within” (p. 100).
This defender of the internal state of equilibrium of the psyche is not the domain of the life instinct which seeks growth, combining into ever larger unities, and prolonging life (Freud, 1920, 1923, 1930); rather, it is the death instinct whose aim is restoration to sameness, a return to quiescence. The death instinct, therefore, has that paradoxical quality of striving the organism to peace and quietude through the use of aggressive energies that are roused not to promote change, but to prevent it, not to energise procreative activity but to restore peace and rest. It is a conservative instinct designed to protect the organism from change triggered by impingements.
The ascendant power of the life instinct provides the trigger for that deep yearning to pair with another, to “bind together” (Freud, 1940, p. 379) and through that binding procreate. In opposition to this powerful life-instinct, the conservative death instinct seeks to simplify, to undo novelty, and to reconnect with ‘what was’ rather than ‘what could be’. As Shakespeare put it, “To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, ‘tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep” (Hamlet 3:1).
The idea of aggressive instincts being associated with peace and quiet engenders a strange paradox: how can the seeking of peace and quiet be represented by the death instinct, governed, as we know, by destructive and aggressive energies? Are peace and war not in opposition?
The death instinct, as has been indicated, is an energy that Freud (1920) has shown to be one striving to preserve the status quo, and restore an organism disturbed by external impingements to its prior resting state. The only mechanism available for this purpose is one that offers resistance to impingements, which defends the organism from pressures to change. Death instinct is aggression-based because aggression offers defence against impingements and a protection of the status quo – that is, a return to the resting state pertaining prior to the impingement.
An infant’s distressed cry does not, for example, aim to promote change, so much as a restoration of a state of satiation and quiescence. Discomfort in the infant leads to a penetrative “attack” on the environment, geared toward a de-elevation of its emotional state toward one of that “oceanic feeling” (Mahler, Pine, & Bergman, 1975) in which impingements are at bay and the infant’s sense of continuity is uninterrupted.
The relevance of this theory is that in the couple these two primary trends of the life and death instincts occupy a central place, in a state of constant fusion and defusion (Freud, 1940). Without these primitive, innate instincts there could not be object-relatedness. In the emergent couple with its interpersonal combining of two psyches, these instinctual trends will carry through into such a newly emergent system, creating an added layer of meaning. Many couple therapists, battle weary and bruised from encounters with interpersonal complexity, recognise that an understanding of the basic elements of the couple ‘contract’ is essential to survival in the therapy process, and for the prospects of assisting the couple to remain intact rather than assisting them “to return to the peace of the inorganic world” (Freud, 1920, p. 81).
The Nature of the Couple Exchange - Structural Compulsion to Repeat
Embedded in human life is the instinct to return to the peace of the inorganic world. It is structural, by which I mean that life itself is tuned towards its own demise - it has this tendency structurally in-built. The nature of the relationship lacuna itself - as an emergent entity - is tuned towards its own demise, with conflict embedded in its marrow. The “dust to dust” refrain at death has a clear meaning: life has a cycle. From ‘nothing’ to ‘nothing’ is the natural path of being in this world, the full circle of life giving way to the ultimate ascendance of the death instinct in which there is a cessation of struggle that life invariably involves. This implies of course, that life itself is structurally endowed with this inbuilt compulsion to repeat, to bring to full circle its procreative and libidinal drives.
In the couple, there are two levels of repetition to be distinguished: firstly, the structural repetition compulsion that creates conflict in every couple, between a life force that strives to keep it in a state of growth and a death one that strives toward dissolution and renewed quiescence; and secondly, the ‘compensation compulsion’ that each participant brings to bear from their personal histories and deposits into the couple space.
The first issue is about a general tendency that does not necessarily assist in understanding an individual couple’s dynamics, but is nonetheless important. When a relationship begins, there are projected into the newly evolving couple space a mix of instinctual energies that contain both life and death instinct-driven aspects. As will be discussed below, these are not simply raw energies but energies cathected to internal objects, based on that individual’s developmental history. The dominant energy, however, could fairly be characterised as driven by Eros, the life instincts, and their tendency to be copulative, creative, and striving to adding layers in new combinations.“We might suppose”, says Freud (1920), “that the life or sexual instincts which are active in each cell take the other cells as their object, that they partly neutralise the death instincts” (p. 323). In this ascendant stage of coupling, the compulsion to compensation is a central dimension of this, and is accompanied by the attempt to enable through the lacuna ‘disabled’ parts of the self. Mental energy cathected with repressed parts of self cannot be divested of their role and influence in the psyche, not even through denial or repression. The result of doing so is a compelling loneliness for what is lost and a demand for remedy.
Klein (1946) mentions loneliness as the by-product of ego-impoverishment, or the result of “an excessive weakening of the ego” (p. 104) derived from the projection of split-off parts. She recognises this as a general phenomenon, which applies particularly when there is no recipient to hold these projections; instead, the resulting sense of loneliness will prompt the object-seeking character of projection to search for a recipient (Perkel, 2001). Repressed parts of the psyche will seek a partner in whom they are or can be represented and thereby wholeness or psychic homeostasis can be restored, albeit in a psychic merger with another. Those parts of self that are repressed and require a ‘living space’ in which to be given expression in the other, tend to be cathected with large quantities of instinctual energy. This point is vital in deciphering which aspects of a person are projected into the couple space. Internal object representations are given life by cathexis of instinctual energies but are driven underground by developmental issues that have not enabled them to be fully ‘worked through’ in the normal course of development.
Unconscious ideation and its instinctive energy remains compellingly influential in the psyche – and it will by virtue of being a system have to account for it. It is this accountability to ‘balancing the books’ that facilitates the development of the projective function which strives to combine with another psyche through which this repressed instinct can be enabled – or compensated for. In fact, Freud (1915) behoves us to remember that repression does not hinder an instinctual representative from continuing to exist in the unconscious and put out derivatives – if anything, rather than disappear, “it proliferates in the dark” (p. 148), a point most significant with regards to coupling.The reasons for this repression are individual and important in determining the exact nature of a person’s attachments and choice of partner. But overall, the tendency of the initial attraction to a prospective partner and a possible psychological embrace with them is driven by libidinal, Eros-driven life instincts seeking proliferation, and combining into “ever greater unities” (Freud, 1920, 1930). It is a creative imperative, one prompting toward higher levels of development, of attachment, and of procreativity.
The life force therefore appears to be strongest at the beginning of a relationship, compelling merger and the evolution of another layer of interpersonal psychic system. Gerson (2004) might agree with this idea because of the view that “the presence of another mind is required for the registration, recognition, and articulation of the unconscious elements of the first” (p. 70). There is from the intersubjectivists' point of view, no such thing as an individual – “the boundary surrounds rather than separates the individual” (p. 70). These descriptions of intersubjective process beg certain questions, however, leaving us to ponder what might drive this tendency to activate and actualise this third. My view brings us back to the ascendant influence of the life force, under whose ‘directive’ those repressed parts of the psyche requiring compensation are projected outwardly in an exchange of mental contents.
Projection is destined to play a large part in the ‘causation’ of the couple. Repressed aspects of the psyche that cannot be disgorged through another substitutive mechanism or symptom, will be experienced by the psyche as a threat, a potential source of ‘unpleasure’. But this source cannot be expelled because these internal objects are internal and mental energy cannot simply be expelled. But it can be projected in a mental way into a space that enables exchange, or at least the realisation that ‘what has been lost can now be found’. This brings great relief to find a recipient willing to give expression for repressed parts of self. In this way they find a living space in which internal psychic and emotional balance can be restored, albeit temporarily.
Prototype of Couple Exchange: Mother-infant Projections
This formulation raises the question: what enables such an exchange to take place of mental instincts and ideation? How can mental representations and energies be exchanged? Understanding this and hence the couple, rests on understanding mother-infant processes, as other couple authors such as Fisher (1999) have also pointed out.
It appears there is in life one time only during which there is an absence of a self-boundary. Driven by an absence of consciousness, there is no mechanism that can form “instead of a memory-trace” (Freud, 1920, p. 296-297) – no outward barrier that abuts the external environment. During pregnancy, an infant has no need to form a barrier against external impingements because there are none. The maternal host provides this barrier. Of course, immediately the infant emerges into the world, this is no longer true. In fact, that act of birth itself forces the intention to form a barrier against the world’s impingements, which gradually emerges as a psychic membrane, in a similar way a cell develops a membrane against the external environment. Freud (1920) makes this point that the surface of an organism turned towards the external world will become differentiated as the organ for receiving stimuli, the prototype for psychic consciousness. This is not in any way an immediate event – it is formed in response to impingements, like the crust of bread ‘bakes through’ in response to heat.
The mother forms, initially, this membrane for the infant and acts as its buffer against the environment. Without the mother, the infant is not able to metabolise its discomforts or survive emotionally. In the immediate post-partum period, the mother’s psyche will form an extension to the infant, creating a barrier for the infant against the environment. In this initially merged state she will be susceptible to an exchange of mental contents and impingements from her infant against which she cannot form a barrier. During her pregnancy there is no barrier against the merged physical ‘parasitic’ intrusions of the baby. This forms the prototype of the later psychic merger that takes place in the early post-partum period. As the mother cannot form a barrier against her infant physically, so too psychically she will be unable to form a barrier against the mental impingements that will invariably form part of their intimate exchange. It is possible that this brings us to the origins of projective identification (Klein, 1946), that elusive but powerful construct in which projections are ‘vacated’ from one person and ‘deposited’ into another, especially in the therapeutic transference.
The actual mechanism of transfer is a source of controversy, as if what occurs could be construed as some “metaphysical magic” involving “thought projectiles flying through interpersonal space…” (Harris, 1998 cited in Ivey, 2004, p. 5). On the other hand, there can be no clinical doubt that psyches do impact on each other. It seems to me that in the early mother-infant exchanges we can find one of the keys to the great mystery of psychic exchange in the adult couple without the theoretical dangers of what Ivey calls the “fallacy of psychic translocation” (Ivey, 2004, p. 5).In the early post-partum period, as we have discussed earlier, the infant’s distressed communications are driven by the aggressive instinct, which as Klein points out plays a role “from the beginning of life” (Klein, 1946, p. 100), aiming to restore equilibrium.
Its ‘attacks’ on caregivers are designed to elicit responsiveness, particularly in the mother, and to restore its own internal equilibrium, as if nature maximises the opportunity for an infant to elicit at least some attunement. But what of their effect on the mother, who is the external object upon whom the destructive impulse is attached, and as part of the projective process is forcefully entered and controlled (Klein, 1946)? For the mother these attacks are able to penetrate her psyche, colonising her in the equivalent of an emotionally parasitic manner, just as during pregnancy the infant does this physically. The effect of this are two-fold: toxic aggressive residues are left inside the mother that follow the attacks and return to homeostasis – the goodness inside the mother being to some extent syphoned off by the infant; and secondly, attack invariably solicits a defence (in the mother) – but one that cannot be expressed against the infant itself. This is not through a mysterious transfer of emotion but quite simply through the fact that the infant’s attacks will be an impingement in the mother’s psyche that will activate a restorative response, a defence, driven by her own ‘conservative’, death-instinct driven aggression. Since she cannot attack her infant in response, she will either attack herself through aggressive introjections or her spouse through mechanisms of auxiliary defence. These mechanisms of auxiliary defence are temporary manoeuvres that emerge in the specificity of the post-partum context and which enable the mother to direct hostile feelings away from her infant. Much of this aggression will be directed at the father, who represents the phallic container into which feelings of hate and aggression are put (see Perkel, 2006).
I should add a caveat, directly relevant to the issues of coupling: Nature appears to have built in vulnerability in mothers to their infant’s aggressive attacks. Because in her inability to attack her infant in response, she is forced to hold onto a certain amount of aggressive residue and in this will form the seeds of ‘adaptive paranoia’. Whilst some of this aggression is split and diverted into the phallic container, no doubt some of it will remain internal to the mother and in this dynamic will find an increase in paranoid concern for her infant. Nature has thereby found a route through which at least some retaliatory attacks are obviated in the mother and in its stead are formed adaptive paranoid feelings of concern. In many couples, mothers are particularly prone to feeling their husbands will not tend their babies adequately – an example of her aggression being put to adaptive use from the infant’s point of view but which can cause problems in the couple. In some respects, this is reality-based since fathers are not subject to a psychic merger with the infant and hence are not as attuned.
At a structural level too, this prototype is directly relevant to coupling. It would appear that in the mother-infant state of merger there is a temporary permeable boundary between the mother and her infant. The mother forms an external layer of consciousness for the infant, since an infant at the breast “does not as yet distinguish his ego from the external world as the source of the sensations flowing in upon him” (Freud, 1930, p. 254). This becomes like the membrane that emerges in the initial stages of coupling. The adult couple is like this early state of exchange, of unbounded diffusion of psychic energies, especially instinctual energies that are passed between the couple but within a membrane that abuts the external world. It is as if, therefore, around the couple forms a barrier that divides it from the external world and in which, like an organic cell, an entity can be formed that separates its inner contents from the outer environment.
What is exchanged within this ‘membrane’ is not through some paranormal telepathic process - since this would violate our understanding of psychological process. Rather, it would seem that ‘activation’ occurs of some part in the other, which is similar to some part in the self. In the mother, this activation by the infant provokes an attempt to return to quiescence. The infant’s helplessness is likely to provoke helpless feelings in the mother – not through “metaphysical magic” (Ivey, 2004, p. 5) but through the mother’s inability to always respond accurately to her infant’s needs and the ongoing and accumulative ‘attacks’ this can promote in the infant. Accordingly, these unboundaried impingements permeating the mother will create disequilibrium and a rupture of her own homeostasis. It is in this dual process that the psychic contents of the infant appear to form in the psychic landscape of the mother as if she is carrying intolerable projected parts of the infant. This process probably forms the prototypical basis for the projective identification mechanisms we see in the couple.
Defence and Defended Against
This notion of couple exchange is a phenomenon we see clinically. A person projects repressed parts of self into the other, which is taken up by them and represented. This apparent ‘opposite’ becomes a great source of attraction because of its capacity to provide compensation for the lost part. It assists in the restoration of psychic equilibrium lost through projective evacuation. With time, the representatives of this repressed part in the other become increasingly a point of irritation, and a reflection of something undesirable. Fisher (1999) cites Klein’s formulations around the expelling of “dangerous substances” (excrements) activated by urethral and anal impulses out of the self and into the mother as central to the projective process in coupling.
Couple conflict usually rests on this process of projection no longer being able to fulfil its compensatory function as individuation emerges developmentally over time, and as formulated above, the structural death instinct becomes ascendant (Perkel, 2001, 2007). The power of this explanation runs into difficulties, however, as we face the often stark reality that what couples conflict so intensely around, is not only their differences (albeit projected ones) but the underlying injuries they share. In this observation, it would seem our original formulations have run partially aground.
In peeling away the manifest conflict, to borrow Freud’s phrase, we find that the latent injuries are usually virtually the same.In the couple, it is as if what is projected outwardly into the partner, is more like an activation of aspects of the partner that represent repressed parts of self. These parts are unconsciously ‘known’ to be carried in the other and repressed in the self. By ‘attacking’ the other through a phase of relating that is largely unboundaried, when at “the height of being in love the boundary between the ego and the object threatens to melt away” (Freud, 1930, p. 253), a synergy can be created. This is between what is projected outwardly from self and the other’s receptive capacity to be activated in particular respect to this. This might look like an exchange, but more accurately represents a shared psychic injury being activated in the other that is the same in the self.If so, what then of the common observation opposites attract, finding compensation through their partner carrying their own split-off parts? By way of a simplistic example, the sadist marries the masochist because in each other there is compensation and balance to be found. But we also know that masochism may represent a defence against sadistic impulses, “(t)he turning round of an instinct upon the subject’s own self is made plausible by the reflection that masochism is actually sadism turned round upon the subject’s own ego…” (Freud, 1915b, p. 124).
The sadistic partner in a couple might therefore reflect an activation of a repressed violent instinct in the other. Sadism in turn might be a reflection of an unfettered aggressive instinct, a defence against the enfeebled, helpless self. And so an added layer of complexity emerges. It seems that there is a duality at work in the nature of coupling. Couples do attract their opposites – and couples do attract those who share something similar. When ideational content, representing an instinct, is denied access to consciousness, this repressed aspect becomes a fixation which “persists unaltered from then onwards and the instinct remains attached to it” (Freud, 1915a, p. 147).
This brings us to awareness that there are parts that are repressed (that is, defended against), and there are mechanisms doing the defending. Repression is, we know, aided by various substitutive mechanisms to deal with untoward affects, and “by means of the whole defensive mechanism thus set in action a projection outward of instinctual danger has been achieved” (Freud 1915c, p. 187). This collaborative intimate relationship between what is defended against and the defence itself is so self-evident that it begs the question how we can speak of an interpersonal activation of repressed parts in the couple without including both aspects. To have done so now strikes me as odd. Whatever ‘exchange’ is enabled in the couple must, it would seem, encompass both that which is defended against and that doing the defending. Which of these represents the perceived opposite to self, the compensatory aspects, and which the shared unconscious can only be established clinically.
What is defended against refers to fixated instinctual energy that has become attached to ideation representing internalisation of parental objects, prototypes or “imagos” of later object choices (to use Freud’s term for the prototype of parental objects – Freud, 1921, p. 171; see also, 1924, p. 423). Fisher (1999) speaks of objects that are “internal to the self” (p. 140-141), being both subjective (they are my internal objects), and the internal objects (unconscious) which constitute the self as a totality, and which provide the substance for couple exchange. Adult choice of objects will be deeply influenced by these infantile ones. “These new objects”, Freud (1912) argues, “will still be chosen on the model (imago) of the infantile ones…” (p. 249).The latter, that is the mechanism doing the defending, refers to those dominant defensive constellations that accompany repression in that person’s psyche. We have come to see in couple work that when the layers of the defensive conflicts are peeled away, we often come ‘home’ to injuries that are common to both parties. What usually differ are the mechanisms of defence against those injuries. Most often, it emerges that each person has mobilised a defensive constellation that represents an opposite to the other’s defensive constellation.
To illustrate this clinically: A couple I saw had become polarised in immense conflict and acting out. It occurred to me that they could be characterised respectively, to keep it simple, as “thin-” and “thick-skinned” narcissists. I use these terms after Rosenfield (1987), who employed them to describe a particular personality constellation first noticed by Abraham (1919), who were particularly difficult to analyse because of their defensive structure. Rosenfeld (1987), cited in Britton (2004), pointed out that some narcissistic patients have such a “thick skin” they become detached and insensitive to deeper feelings, whereas the “thin-skinned” patients are hypersensitive and easily hurt (p. 52). The thick-skinned narcissist is, to use Britton’s formulation, “hyperobjective, with narcissistic detachment, and the second is hypersubjective with narcissistic adherence” (p. 52). This usefully represents the presentation of this couple, which in opposite ways were finding compensation for “lost parts” of their respective psyches. The ‘thick-skinned’ husband presented as impervious, confident, outgoing, and perhaps even sadistic. His ‘thin-skinned’ wife presented as depressed, easily slighted, dependent, masochistic.
With time, I noticed that despite his insensitivity he was likeable and easy to get along with, and despite her heightened sensitivity she increasingly left toxic residues and anger in her wake, both in him and in me. Both patients were defending against narcissistic injury – albeit in opposite ways. They were attracted to each other because the thick-skinned partner activated a compensatory need in the other and assisted her in finding completion for her repressed rage and hate. This repression had contributed to an enfeebled self that she compensated for through her husbands highly successful professional status and career. With time, the structural imperative of the death instinct reverted and so the exchange became less tenable. In its wake were left irritations at the very points of initial attraction and conflict increased. The added hate generated in her post-partum period amplified this tendency considerably.
The ascending of the death instinct meant a rising rejection of what was initially attractive. In general, this leads to resistance and a manifest pushing away of these activated parts. In this case, she began to hate his travel, increasingly found him boorish and unfeeling, and began to manifest a frightening degree of ice-cold hate. In short, the thick-skinned aspects of him now left her with cold, deep hate. The initial latent ‘borrowing’ of his confidence and successes as compensation for her enfeebled self now became the manifest curse. In turn, her soft, caring sides and initial devotion to him as a masochistic narcissistic object began to turn to contempt of her enfeebledness. When she began to assert her own sense of self, he began to baulk at it, attacking her verbally, and occasionally physically. Her increasing resistance to being his object, and his resistance to being her hero left them both bereft in narcissistic rages and conflagrations.
What is interesting to note, is that they shared narcissistic injury and were both very abandoned and hurt people. The key difference in their development was that he developed an impervious defence against his injuries, whereas she became enfeebled through isolation of her hate. They did not exchange injury – they shared it – and what they activated in each other was this injury through leaning on but subsequent rejection of their respective defensive structures.
Common Injury – Different Defence
In the couple exchange it is as if each person tends to defend against something, a shared something, in opposite ways. The underlying synergy of what is repressed will be defended against differently in the couple, and it this difference that becomes the major source of conflict. It tends also to be unbearable because of the original reason for that defensive structure’s evolution. By way of another simple example, a couple I saw conflicted terribly in a spiral of despair and rage as the husband would withdraw into an impervious shell, pushing his wife’s deepest nerves with “acupuncture-like” accuracy. His withdrawal would send her into an orbit of anxiety, tension, and desperation from which she would with increasing volume and aggression attack him to break through his impervious wall. This derived from her own family history of parental conditionality and narcissism and made her feel awful. These attacks would consolidate his defensive withdrawal as he sought to distance himself from his own neediness, which he saw in her desperation. And thus the cycle would become gridlocked. What was interesting to notice, was that his withdrawal connected to those moments when he felt threatened by loss, having been brought up in a family and country where the threat of losing everything at any time was omnipresent.
The common injury, as can be seen, is that both these people were extremely sensitive to abandonment and loss – the main difference between them being that whereas he would withdraw into an uncommunicative shell to survive impending loss, she would become desperate and increasingly vocal – setting off a cycle of defence that was fuel to their fire of injury. He carried her angry withdrawal – a feature of her early life; she carried his terrible neediness.
The exchange of contents in this case shows not that parts of self are projected into a non-receptive container, but that the parts repressed and projected outwardly activated a similar existing injury in the other – with the important difference that they defended against this injury in different ways. This tendency was what fuelled their destructive cycles. The homeostasis in each was threatened by an activation of their repressed injury and vulnerability – in this case abandonment anxiety and loss.Something internal that threatens to impinge on the ego will be encapsulated and projected outwardly so that it is felt to belong to the external world rather the internal one (Freud, 1930). This dynamic will be familiar to those grappling with concepts of projection and projective identification, as Klein formulated with regards to projective identification, that “(m)uch of the hatred against parts of the self is now directed towards the mother. This leads to a particular kind of identification which establishes the prototype of an aggressive object relation” (p. 102). Her formulation is not unlike Freud’s, as she described identification by projection as a “combination of splitting off parts of self and projecting them on to another person…” (p. 110). Whilst this is more obvious in pathological cases, in the course of everyday relationships this mechanism is less so.
Nevertheless, Klein makes the point that the “processes of splitting off parts of the self and projecting them into objects are thus of vital importance for normal development as well as for abnormal object relations” (p. 103). It is a manoeuvre that can only be successful if it can find a recipient in which it can be taken up. In a couple, the recipient is the other, chosen because they hold within their own psyches something similar to the repressed and projected part, a shared injury ‘warranting’ repression. Through a process of activation, this repressed part in the other gets activated and in this way carried as if ownership rests with them, as in part it does, and it is vacated from the other, which it is not. This gives rise to the ping-pong effect between couples when a particular sensitivity gets activated. However, it is not only the injury that gets activated – it is also the defence against it – so that what each senses in the other provokes their own characteristic defence against it. This defence aims to maintain familiarity, and to preserve stasis of the successful repression of the injury. The tremendous anger we see in couples emanates from when this equilibrium is challenged, and like the frustrated infant, an aggressive death instinct-driven defence will be mounted aimed not at change but preservation, aimed not at incorporation of the projected part but at a continued and successful repression of it.
The mounting cycles of anger in couples follows this defence against change, against a challenge to the maintenance of the status quo. So what looks initially like a telepathic exchange of psychic bits, is a process of activation of what is there already but defended against. When the infant impinges into the unboundaried mother, for example, her own helplessness gets activated which provokes a rage in defence. In this scenario, though, the mother must protect her infant from her destructive instincts and so she will split and divert them away from the source of her hate (Perkel, 2006). But in the couple, there is no mechanism of defence support that can emerge in this temporary phase to protect the couple, and hence no diversion of aggression is available. The impingements of the partner that threaten the defence against the repressed and projected parts, will therefore mobilise an aggressive attempt to maintain the defence, and with it the status-quo of the repression-projection mechanism.
Ascendance of the Death Instinct
Initially, falling in love represents a collusory state, one in which there is an unconscious agreement to facilitate the ‘exchange’ of repressed parts and avoid challenging the defence. But time forces differentiation, a developmental imperative like the individuation that occurs between a mother and her infant, that is driven by the death instinct ascending to claim its rightful place in the couple unity. Initially, the life instinct is ascendant and the coupling itself represents a powerful emergence of the “ever greater unities” (Freud, 1920, 1923, 1930) that are prompted by it. The death instinct, representing stasis, is forced to be a junior partner, relegated to the sidelines of a powerful and magical show. The status quo is challenged by the full stride of Eros, which brings to bear an enormous positive pressure towards novelty, combining and procreativity.
Under this influence, repressed parts of self are accepted in an exchange, since the conservative instinct is in abeyance and intrusive activations can take place, much like the infant’s access to its mother’s mind can take place. There is combining of what Freud referred to as instincts “inhibited in their aim” (Freud, 1921, pp. 141-142) (that being instincts once cathected to parental objects but since repressed) and those unbridled instincts with their sensual currents whose aim is sexual satisfaction. Whereas those instincts that are inhibited in their aim provide the foundation for lasting ties between people, “it is the fate of sensual love to become extinguished when it is satisfied” (Freud, 1921, p. 146). To put this differently, the sensual currents are, in their more pure form, self-limiting and will by definition lose their intensity through repeated discharge. In its place will either emerge more and more of those instincts ‘inhibited in their aim’, those repressed internal objects cathected with infantile sexuality and parental representations, or the sexual attachment will simply fizzle out over time.
As time brings balance back into Eros’ decidedly ascendant stride, the psyche will come increasingly under the influence of a need to restore the conservative state of the psyche – and impingements that activate repressed parts will begin to meet their match in a barrier against the impingements. This aggressive, reactionary force reacts against Eros’s activating influences and strives to put up a barrier against being reminded of what is repressed – and ‘expelled’ through projection. In this process, those initially charming and compensatory sides of the partner, felt as complimentary, will come to represent the dark repressed side of self and hence become increasingly unpalatable. From here, conflict and anger will ascend and replace the dominance of Eros and its combining ‘at-all-costs’ influence. Instead, there will be a reversionary pressure to the internal status-quo and the repression of internal objects – and so what is projected outwardly, and as an activator in the other, will become increasingly resisted by them, forcing a return to a defensive constellation, “an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or other departed and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous paths along which its development leads” (Freud, 1920, p. 310).
The death instinct of the individual, like the other mental processes, infiltrates the higher emerging systems. The lacuna is therefore bound by similar trends – a creative one and a dissolving one. Unless added dimensions are in place to sustain the novelty and developmental requirements of the life instinct, and to thereby preserve it as the dominant force, such as having children, and other dimensions that add growth, the natural trend of the dyad is towards a state of dissolution, or renewed quiescence. This is a structural compulsion to repeat, driven by the repetition compulsion. As an emergent system carrying earlier characteristics of its more primitive contributing elements, the ascendance of the death instinct over time leads the lacuna towards a destiny of undoing, unless a balance between its two instinctual trends is found.
The Compulsion to Compensation
In this section, I want to briefly examine how internal objects endowed with instinctual energy are projected into the lacuna through the compulsion to compensation. The lacuna is not simply a structural entity, just like the body is not. There are many different kinds of bodies, characterised by different shapes, looks, colours, and sizes. And of course, at a more subtle level of complexity, the variability of content is infinite. The lacuna too has general characteristics, a general anatomy, but the variability of what gives it life and character is individualised. Still driven by underlying instincts, each individual in a dyad contributes a personal psychic history that facilitates the emergence of the dyadic system. The unconscious has the distinct capacity of being filled with internal representations of past objects, the “replacement of external by psychic reality” (Freud, 1915c, p. 191).
Unconscious objects are dominated by parental representations because these objects are cathected with enormous quantities of raw emotional and instinctual energy.Developmental stages will determine the precise nature of emerging defences that might become more dominant than others, or force a ‘counter-cathexis’ against these instinctual energies. They will be full of nuances and contradictions, of love and hate representing the primary instincts of Eros and the death instinct, which are constantly in flux - “hate changes into love and love into hate” (Freud, 1920, p. 383). Freud points out that in complex object attachments these trends are manifest. The great opposition between the life and death instincts manifests in object-love itself, which “presents us with a second example of a similar polarity – that between love (or affection) and hate (or aggressiveness)” (p. 327), keeping in mind that, as Ruszczynski (2006) points out, the death instinct, at its strongest, “attacks and distorts the capacities for perception and judgement” (p. 116) in the couple.In early defining object experiences instincts are central – in fact, says Klein (1946), "(t)hese processes are inextricably linked with instinctual development, and with the anxieties to which instinctual desires give rise” (p. 109). Internal object representations are determined by the extent to which they are endowed with such energy.
Whilst libidinal energies are very pleasurable and are strongly sought out, the mental apparatus does not have a say in whether it is capable of discarding either stream of instincts or the more complex emotions derived from them. In other words, the life and death instincts are not privileged by the psyche – and cannot, by their very nature, be discarded. On the contrary, both streams of instincts are critical in the development of internal object representations and those aspects endowed with greater instinctual energy will dominate the template upon which later adult attachments will be formed.Earlier, I made the point that repressed parts of self are given life through outward projection into the lacuna where they are involved in a mutual exchange with a partner. Repressed parts of the psyche, split off parts, must be taken up since no parts of the psyche can be eradicated, even by repression. Early repression aims at creating adaptation to whatever pathological circumstances existed during nodal points in development. In this respect, those defences that emerged were intended to facilitate equilibrium, a return to a psychic state that was tolerable.
Repression is accompanied by projection, where repressed elements “are treated by the psyche as if they were originating from the outside, rather than the inside, as a means of defending against them” (Freud 1920, p. 301) – a mechanism of not just ascribing to, but in phantasy ‘putting’ into the outside world, as if they actually belonged there, aspects of the inner world that cannot be tolerated. The defence against them is therefore to create a kind of capsule against them, and this encapsulation of parts the psyche can be put into an interpersonal space where they are taken up by another, indirectly restoring what Klein (1963) would call that ‘lost part’ to a viable place in the psyche-system.
There are always parts of the mind that are split-off into the unconscious. Whilst these defensive manoeuvres likely had an adaptive function initially, time invariably shows them to be only partially helpful –without a full accounting of psychic parts a state of dis-equilibrium begins to exert itself. An ‘item of personality’ that is repressed, and which is bound up with a great deal of instinctual energy, is more likely to require compensation through an external object, where it can handed over as a lost part and found again through projecting it into the lacuna exchange.Since internalised representations of love objects are cathected with high levels of the instincts, when a couple begins forming those elements projected outwardly in the exchange carry an enormous emotional charge – both loved and (later) hated in the other. This exchange is driven by the ‘compulsion for compensation’, the requirement to restore equilibrium to the psyche that has become unbalanced due to repressing representations of its relationships and the vast quantities of instinctual energy bound up with these representations.
We are here touching upon the individualised character of the internal compulsion to repeat that Freud demonstrated at both the individual and structural levels of life. This term ‘structural’ I use deliberately to reflect the notion that, as discussed earlier, life itself, and relationship life itself, is geared toward repetition, irrespective of its individual character. On an individual level, however, this repetition compulsion manifests in the psyche’s attempt at working through what is not worked through. It repeats patterns that are familiar, not so much to take the mind forward so much as to take it back to the ‘known’. The choice of marital partner extends out from this tendency, in that lost parts of the psyche must be accounted for since these lost parts are endowed with a great deal of instinctual energy, simply by definition that what is repressed must be bound up with a great quota of energy to have earned the need to be repressed. The restoration of balance to the internal psyche, the enabling of wholeness, is made possible by the exchange of mental contents in the lacuna.
This compensatory function is therefore also driven by a need to return to a state of quiescence and balance - and might help explain why to every couple there is a struggle against dissolution, and conflict of a greater or lesser extent appears endemic in every couple. Time enables the ascendance of the death instinct component in the couple, and the deep yearning, as an energy of the lacuna, to revert back to quietude, to reclaim those repressed parts of the psyche that have been handed over to enable them. The conflict between the ascendance of the life instinct and its creative energies with that of the death instinct and its conservative, destructive ones is ongoing.
The lacuna is initially driven by the libidinal instincts and its erotic components, but is met with time by a balancing energy that is developmentally driven and which pits itself against the procreative stream of instinctual energy. This is a fantastic feature of nature that inhabits every element - the polarisation of opposites in the service of balance. For every creative force there is one of undoing, and for every destructive one a creative rebound – or as Pickering (2006) put it, “a fluid inter-relational space in which aspects which might seem incompatible, contradictory or opposed are understood as co-requisites” (p. 38). The blocking of the enterprise of finding a recipient for repressed fragments though projection will create a situation of paralysis within the mind, a sort of emotional fibrillation that is accompanied by loneliness. This loneliness seems to drive a remedy, to charge the psyche with an object-seeking imperative (see Perkel, 2001) to find a recipient for mental exchange and a return to equilibrium and subjective completion.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the creation-dissolution cycle of the couple, with its attendant tensions of opposites and exchange of what is defended against and what is doing the defending, represents one of those complex, intriguing, and intelligent facets of Nature’s enterprise. As with most things in nature, a superficial rendering of what ‘is’ will invariably fail to do justice to the awesome ingenuity of its systems. A quick insight in the area of couples is not attainable, for with each layer we uncover, we find a dozen more. Perhaps this richness mimics all of nature, even though it does not make relationship life easy. Or as Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), the German poet wrote, “Here’s to matrimony, the high sea for which no compass has yet been invented!”
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due Marcelle Biderman-Pam, Gavin Ivey, and two anonymous referees for comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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About The Author
“Individual adult & couple psychotherapy and assessment. Specialises in couple psychotherapy.”
Adrian Perkel is a qualified Clinical Psychologist, based in Gardens, Cape Town, South Africa. With a commitment to mental health, Adrian provides services in , including Relationship Counseling and Individual Therapy. Adrian has expertise in .
