“I have never really understood this liking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment” (Alan Bennett, 1972, p. 40)

It is one of the most perplexing questions of life that ‘love’s executioner’ finds it fitting to hover incessantly in the wings of every love relationship, seemingly waiting to destroy the best stuff at its peak, to reduce love to hate and wreak untold misery on all who fall prey to its spell. Why does love invariably get contaminated by hate and anger, which apparently sets out to destroy the initial intimacies of almost every couple? Why does anger and emotional aggression seem so endemic to the intimate dance of every love relationship? It makes little intuitive sense that hate should be such a universal characteristic of love.

Aims vs Effects of Aggression

The answer to this question is assisted by an examination of what aggression is, and the strange quality of its Nature. Often, when visiting these phenomena in our personal relationships or in the consulting room, we notice first-off that aggression seems such a destructive energy. We observe around us its damaging effects. The yelling, attacking, vilifying. These effects are hard to miss because they dominate the therapeutic landscape of a couple in conflict and as Ruszinsky (2006) says, following Bion, and many other authors, that aggression, or the death drive, is destructive in that it ‘attacks and distorts the capacities for perception and judgement’ (p. 116). He argues it to be deadly in its attacks on meaning and difference, as a result of which ordinary developmental processes are retarded and undermined.

However, this view of aggression fails in one important aspect: that its effects differ from its aim. Differentiating its intent from its effects is a useful enhancement to deciphering this perplexing contaminant of love. Perhaps the most complex, controversial, and useful insight into the nature of aggression comes from Freud’s (1920) dual drive theory, and in particular his differentiation of the sexual drives from the death-drive, representing the forces of aggression in the mental realm. Whilst the full import of this masterful theoretical piece has been backgrounded in the period after Freud’s death, the lateral genius of his thinking assists us today to understand the paradoxical nature of the destructive processes inherent in human relatedness.

Whilst the sexual instincts are “perpetually attempting and achieving a renewal of life” (Freud, 1920, p. 46), a creative force aimed at energizing and stimulating, the death-drive aims for stasis and quiescence, tending towards “the restoration of an earlier state of things... a quiescent cathexis” (p. 34). The aim of the death-drive is hence primarily in the service of restoring or reinstating a state in which tension is reduced or eliminated. In this reading, alongside authors such as Mills (2006), we can view aggression as present in every vital process (Freud, 1933), the intent of which is to restore status when disequilibrium is created, whether in the physical or mental realm. This mechanism is integral to an organism’s ability to restore equilibrium when a transgression challenges its threshold of stasis and hence invites, from the subjective point of view of the organism, destruction. Without such a mechanism, the organism would quickly succumb to the inevitable encroachments and threats that impinge, whether they originate through neglect or by design. Aggression therefore can be understood as the key mechanism in the mental realm available for ensuring self-preservation. This highlights its paradoxical nature. Whereas the sexual drives converge in their aim and effects − cathexis of an object, the aggressive drives diverge in that aggressing is merely an attempt to restore equilibrium and if able, to go, as it were, silently into the night.

Interestingly, one might consider therefore that whilst the sexual drive may benefit from arousal without a trigger and then seeks an object on which to cathect, the aggressive drive seeks to be left alone and remain quiescent. It is only mobilized in the presence of a pathogen. The death-drive remains, says Freud, silent and only comes to our notice when it is directed outwards as an instinct of destruction, aimed at preserving the individual from threats both internal and external.

It may therefore be viewed that the death-drive is to the mind what the immune system is to the body, maintaining a ready but latent state until activated by a pathogenic trigger − infection in the body, emotional threat to the mind. This idea of a mental function being derived from a biological function is, of course, imbedded in the entire corpus of psychoanalytical thinking, including defence mechanisms emerging from underlying somatic foci in development. The ego itself, which emerges as the interface between the unconscious and the external environment, is as the mental projection of the surface of the body interfacing between the internal and external environment. Consciousness itself emerges, says Freud, instead of a memory trace, like the crust of a bread baked through by the impingements of the external environment.

If the death-drive is that part of the mind that as the representative of mental immunity remains latent until an activating trigger provokes an aggressive response, the question is raised as to why more often than not we notice that aggressive reactions in couples are disproportionate to any objective provocation or malice. Sometimes, even, it is as if there is no provocation at all and yet an emotionally violent reaction is observed to some perceived experience of hurt. This takes us onto the issue of what triggers − and the function of narcissistic injury.

Narcissistic Injury

Narcissism is often associated with being a distasteful description of undesirable traits, usually best avoided. Yet this concept describes a normative part of development and is not simply about pathology. It is also about integrity of a core self, or mental cohesion that differentiates oneself from another and provides identity. Freud (1914) explained that narcissism is not simply about pathology or perversion ‘but the libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation, a measure of which may justifiably be attributed to every living creature’ (p. 74).

If it is true that aggression remains latent until activated by some impingement, this begs the question of what the mind, and any specific individual mind, interprets as pathogenic and inviting of disequilibrium. Clinical evidence is compelling in demonstrating that one person’s elixir is another’s poison − implicating subjectivity in the perception of what is hurtful or noxious. Inputs that are interpreted emotionally as injurious, create internal disequilibrium and hence mental immunity is activated. Anger begins to simmer. Since narcissism is constantly being battered by reality, says Freud, our inner core self is always threatened with in-cohesion. Alongside Solan (1999) we can see that aggression serves to restore subjectivity and cohesion by expelling the threat to the outside (using projection, for example). It is a mechanism aimed at restoring self-cohesion, even where to the outside observer the impingement and the emotional response may not seem proportional. Yet, from an intrapsychic point of view, the experience of hurt, no matter how subjective, is likely to lead to the mobilization of an aggressive response. Lubbe (2011) makes the point that normal development itself carries huge and “terrifying” risks of emotional injury since the love object, on whom we depend, “could die, or run away, or fall out of love with you, in other words the object as separate obeys irreducible laws of the external world’ (p. 14).

Like in infancy, the intimate couple in adulthood is a cesspool of provocations, losses and disappointments driven by hope and expectations, and all manner of unconscious projection. Whilst unconscious projections, based on personal history, are the necessary glue for any intimate bond and the driver of attraction, they are also the nuclei of later dissolution. Attraction and repulsion are strange but inevitable bed-fellows caught in a powerful tension between the wish to idealize and find compensation, as occurs in the initial flushes of romance, and the inevitability of disappointment and hence denigration that seems to follow.

Erotic life, which is embedded in the complex mix of intrapsychic issues and unconscious associations, itself has a complex and convoluted foundation in a psychobiological and intrapsychic matrix, coloured by experiences of childhood, effected by experiences and memories, and subject to the crazy vicissitudes of hormones and embodiment. Incest taboos and its barriers have to be surmounted as unconscious associations to oedipal triumphs and failures influence adult attachments and repetitions of early emotions finding themselves evoked again in the reality of a present partner. Without these, no sexual life is possible. And yet, embedded in these associations are the inevitable reawakening of old injuries, and the frustrating vicissitudes of life itself.

Sources of Injury

I want to identify two broad sources of narcissistic injury, the one belonging to the individual and their personal history and the other to factors that appear universal in their trends. As Barratt (2012) importantly reminds us, recognition of the embodiment of the mind is a crucial aspect of understanding it. The mind is an embodied mind, and this concept is central to the corpus of Freudian thinking. He laments the fact that, ‘Although Freud stands at the head of somatic psychology and his theorizing is a bodymind approach to the erotic, the discipline that bears his name has all too frequently become the ‘science’ of the disembodied subject’ (p. 87). Barratt argues that, ‘Indeed, what the holistic notion of libidinal energies asserts is that the entirety of our embodied experience is ‘sexual’, in that it is sensually endowed and is the foundation of our psychic realities’ (p. 67). That is, in the couple space we are not only confronted by two people in the room exchanging unconscious projections. We are confronted by two embodied people whose embodied divergence itself promotes tension. Whilst these differences were invariably part of the initial attraction and the wonderful energy of lust and love, so too these differences add the potential for failure of attunement and hence injury over time.

It is of course artificial to separate individual projections from normative ones − but it is also to miss the significance of embodiment and the vast range of evidence suggesting that the psychology and neurobiology of men and women differ and that in the nuances of these psychobiological pressures frustrations and injury creeps in. Could the simple waning of erotic desire with time itself lead to feelings of injury? In the modern context, Perel (2007) makes the point that familiarity and the blurring of ‘otherness’ may lead to disillusionment. “Some of America’s best features”, she argues, “the belief in democracy, equality, consensus building, compromise, fairness, mutual tolerance – can, when carried too punctiliously into the bedroom, result in very boring sex. Sexual desire and good citizenship don’t play by the same rules. And while enlightened egalitarianism represents one of the greatest advances of modern society, it can exact a toll in the erotic realm. (pp. 55-56).

This loss of ‘otherness’, in other words, may be experienced as loss, which carries with it the implications of hurt and the experience of personal injury. This complex mix of emotional and erotic drivers that enable the full power of initial attractions may mean that injury is embedded in attraction and its subsequent vicissitudes. Freud had made the point, for example, that, ‘It is naturally just as unfavourable for a woman if a man approaches her without his full potency as it is if his initial overvaluation of her when he is in love gives place to undervaluation after he has possessed her’ (Freud, 1912, p. 186). Of course, full potency is not only a matter of sexual performance – it is a matter of sexual desire. Many women I have seen in couple therapy have complained bitterly that the waning of her man’s desire has led to feelings of loss and hence anger, even where no malice at all is carried by his waning desire of or disinterest. Equally, when a woman’s desire for her man’s phallus is replaced by the advent and preoccupation with her baby, for example, a normal developmental challenge can become a source of deep injury for her partner. In this example, normal primary maternal pre-occupation (Winnicott, 1956), on the one hand desired, often carries with it deep anger and resentment for the displaced husband.

We can see that there are many examples of the processes of how initial idealization/overvaluation invariably leads to disappointment and disillusionment, and hence the experience of injury. Thinking you had bought a Porsche, and paid the price for one, and finding it has turned into a VW Beetle can feel injurious. Raphael-Leff (2001) makes this point rather more poetically: ‘Thus, between two bodies locked in sexual attraction, a delicate tissue of imagery is fabricated, so strong it can withstand the cruellest of tests; yet so fragile, the magic of intimacy can be dispelled as irrevocably as belief in the tooth fairy’ (p. 13).

Coleman (2005) corroborates this idea that disappointment and disillusionment is a most common and universal feature of couples. ‘The only couples who are not disappointed in each other’, he argues, ‘are those who are so defended against disappointment that they are unable to make any real commitment in the first place’ (p. 59). This in-built disillusionment is perhaps also embedded in Fisher’s (1999) notions of how narcissism and marriage are opposing tensions in couples – by extension, narcissistic injury is embedded in intimate relating. ‘I think that if one probes deeply enough’, says Fisher, ‘it is possible to find traces of that original love object, and that falling-in-love, which resonate in the bitter disappointment of what has become intolerable’ (p. 187). It is, he suggests, that ‘the misery is always feeding on the ruin of loveliness’ (p. 188). It is a grisly idea.

More generally, we could point out that ‘the psychical importance of an instinct rises in proportion to its frustration’ (Freud, 1912, p. 188) – or inverted, once consummated, and the instinct is satisfied, a drift toward disinterest or even devaluation can occur until the instinct recharges. The novelist Samuel Richardson (1862) wrote that ‘Love gratified is love satisfied, and love satisfied is indifference begun’ (p.452). Whilst gender difference plays a role in how this may manifest, in essence the discharge of an instinct may lead to reduction in the psychical importance of the desired object. Libidinal drivers, or lust, prompt over-valuation of the object, and when this is withdrawn, at least some hurt seems inevitable.

Raphael-Leff (2001) eloquently refers to the ‘flesh doing the bidding of fantasy’ (p. 13), describing how partners unconsciously select each other for their capacity to re-elicit earlier emotions. She adds, ‘The magnetic attraction of being ‘in love’ constitutes a form of re-cognition, attributing to the ‘familiar’ stranger qualities transferred from internal figures’ (p. 13).

With the passage of time, however, these projections face the uncomfortable and disappointing process of withdrawal. The capacity of projections to fulfill the function of an intra-psychic process remains to some extent unsustainable under the pressures of death-drive ascendancy and the waning of libidinal dominance. It is no surprise that encountering the loss of idealization of a partner, as projections either soften or become entrenched, as if they now literally belong to the other, may lead to increasing disappointment.

Attraction invariably has in its midst unconscious elements that require compensation through a partner, in the initial complimentarity, a great sense of wholeness and relief is found. But these same elements of complimentarity become exposed over time and in their place may appear resentment at seeing split-off parts of the self in the other. Specific patterns of partner-choice based on early history, what Dicks (1967) described as the unconscious agreement between partners, lead to mental idealization when a neat psychological fit is found. The resulting sense of completion, of restoring what Klein (1963) called lost parts of the mind, through engagement with another, creates the mental illusion of a wonderful sense of completion and wholeness. Equilibrium is restored; it is as if the unconscious lights up like a Christmas tree and all is good with the world. The tingling of the magic mix of imago with libido is heady and addictive. But with time, these projections may trend to face the uncomfortable process of withdrawal and disillusionment.

Immunizing Function

Whilst these examples of injury are by no means exhaustive, they are meant to represent a cross range of internal and external ‘pathogens’. One the one hand, intra-psychic projections and issues particular to the individual that lead to the possibility of injury over time. But also, of universal, sometimes gender-specific experiences that in the normal course of relating lead to experiences of disillusionment and loss, which like any impingement creating diseqilibrium, activate a response aimed at restoring internal integrity. As discussed above, narcissistic injury leads to disequilibrium, even where such injury is perceived and experienced because of personal and/or historical reasons. These psychic pathogens activate a response aimed at restoring integrity and stasis, and this death-drive response emerges in the form of aggression. Aggression does not, we well know, manifest always in acting out physically or even emotionally. Sometimes aggression is introjected, projected, or somatised through recruitment of the body, leading to possible somatic disturbances, tensions, or even auto-immune problems.

In the consulting room, we are invariably faced with aggression in both couple and individual work and often such aggression has what appears to be a destructive impact and effect. But examining the aims of such aggression, rather than its effects, can assist the clinician in identifying the underlying disequilibrium triggered by some experience or perception of injury. Narcissistic injury is common to us all, but becomes even more exaggerated in those with narcissistic fixations in their personality, which amplifies hurt considerably. Retaliation is often about restoration, the implication being that without a psychogenic pathogen, no aggressive response would manifest. In the somatic realm, the immune system remains, as it were, ready but latent and does not amount an immune response unless a pathogen threatens somatic equilibrium, at least in the normal course. In the mental realm, the same may be observed that only in response to an experience of an activating psychogenic pathogen, will an immunizing response be mounted in the form first of emotional arousal, and possibly also in the form of verbal or physical reprisal. Such abreactive process may strive for restoration but is not always effective outside, that is, of the therapeutic realm because more often than not the pathogenic trigger is intrapsychic and unconscious and not purely in response to a real, objective threats. Narcissistic injury invariably carries extracts of personal experience and injury, and these associative elements amplify hurt, which means that in the absence of therapeutic mutation through interpretation, the actual psychogenic pathogen remains internal. Sorting out the external source is really an attempt at sorting the internal projection and expectation through the other person. But this remains, invariably, a partial and impermanent solution. Since where ever you go, you take yourself with, and under the supervision of the repetition compulsion, the likelihood of reproducing similar dynamics through different relationships remains high. The immunizing function of aggression does not aim to cause trouble, it aims to reduce it but in the process often leads to conflict and heightened tensions.

Concluding Comments

My understanding of aggression and its link to injury is not intended to reflect only pathological relating, but also to understand the normal waning of attachment and the gradual ascendancy of the death-drive whose aim is less about causing damage as it is about restoration and preservation of the self rather than the other. Unfortunately, the casualty in this recalibration is often the couple, since the injury that is perceived and experienced cannot escape the capsule from which it was born. In some respects, injury is built into the normal vicissitudes of attachment, and the bewildering sense of loss that accompanies this disillusionment can be fruitfully normalized for couples consumed by a sense of failure that may be no more a failure than is ageing of any sort. As Raphael-Leff (2001) reminded us above, the bite of the tooth fairy is never nice since from innocence and illusion built on mutual projection emerges instead the pain and disillusionment of reality. Out of disillusion too often comes dissolution. If mental immunity is understood from whence it emerges, then the aim of the death-drive and its aggressive effects might, more productively, like Eros, find convergence through facilitation where they diverge in their natural state.

Note: This article is based on my paper “Till death-drive us apart: Associating injury and aggression in the couple”. Psycho-analytic Psychotherapy in South Africa, in press 2013.

References

Barratt, B. (2012). What is psychoanalysis? 100 years after Freud’s ‘secret committee’. London: Routledge.

Bennett, A. (1972) Forty Years On. In Plays One: Forty Years On, Getting On, Habeas Corpus and Enjoy. Faber & Faber, (London, [1991] 1996).

Coleman, W. (2005). The intolerable other: The difficulty of becoming a couple. Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Couple Work, 1, 56-71.

Dicks, H. (1967). Marital tensions. Clinical studies towards a theory of interaction. London: Routledge.

Fisher, J.V. (1999). The uninvited guest: Emerging from narcissism to marriage. London: Karnac.

Freud, S. (1912). On the universal tendency to debasement in the sphere of love (contributions to the psychology of love 11). In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 11, pp. 177-190). London: The Hogarth Press.

Freud, S. (1914). On narcissism: An introduction. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 14, pp. 67-102). London: The Hogart Press.

Freud, S.(1920). Beyond the pleasure principle. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 18, pp. 7-64). London: The Hogarth Press.

Freud, S. (1921). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 18, pp. 67-143). London: The Hogarth Press.

Freud, S. (1923). The ego and the id. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 19, pp. 1-66). London: The Hogarth Press.

Freud, S. (1924). The economic problem of masochism. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 19, pp.155-170). London: The Hogarth Press.

Freud, S. (1940). An outline of psychoanalysis. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol.23, pp. 139-208). London: The Hogarth Press.

Gigli, F., Velotti, P., & Zavattini, G.C. (2012). Working with couples between past and present: Some clinical implications. Couple and Family Psychoanalysis, 2(1), Spring 2012. London: Karnac.

Kandel, E.R. (2006). In search of memory: The emergence of a new science of mind. New York: WW. Norton.

Keogh, T., Kourt M., Enfield, C. & Enfield S. (2007). Psychopathology and therapeutic style: Integrating object relations and attachment theory in working with borderline families. In M. Ludlam & V. Nyberg (Eds.), Couple attachments: Theoretical and clinical studies (pp. 239-252). London: Karnac.

Klein, M. (1963). On the sense of loneliness. In M. Masud & R. Kahn (Eds.), Envy and gratitude and other Works 1946-1963 (pp. ?). International Psychoanalytic Library. London: Hogarth & Institute for Psychoanalysis (1975).

Klein, M. (1932). The psycho-analysis of children. London: Hogarth.

Lubbe, T. (2011). Object relations in depression: A return to theory. Sussex: Routledge.

Mills, J. (2006). Reflections on the death drive. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 23(2), 373-382.

Monguzzi, F. (2011). Anger and aggressiveness in couple therapy: Some clinical considerations from an Intersubjective perspective. Couple and Family Psychoanalysis, 1(2), Autumn 2011. London: Karnac.

Perel, E. (2007). Mating in captivity: Sex, lies and domestic bliss. London: Hodder.

Perkel, A. (2001). Psychological mating: The compulsion to compensation. Psycho-analytic Psychotherapy in South Africa, 9(1), 46-58.

Perkel, A. (2007). The couple and its instincts. Psycho-analytic Psychotherapy in South Africa. , 15(2), 38-59.

Perkel, A. (2013). Till death-drive us apart: Associating injury and aggression in the couple”. Psycho-analytic Psychotherapy in South Africa, in press 2013.

Richardson, S. (1862), Clarissa, Vol 2, p.452, letter 126. Tauchnitz Edition.

Solms, M. & Turnbull, O. (2002). The Brain and the inner world: An Introduction to the neuroscience of subjective experience. New York: Other.

Pankskepp, J. & Biven L. (2012). The archaeology of mind: Neuroevolutionary origins of human emotions. New York: Norton.

Raphael-Leff, J. (2001). ‘When sexual difference peaks’ - The emotional impact of male/female reproductive experience. SPMP International Conference 2001.

Ruszczynski, S. (2006). Sadomasochistic enactments in a couple relationship. The fear of intimacy and the dread of separateness. Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Couple Work. SCPP, Issue 2.

Solan, R. (1999). The Interaction between self and others: A Different perspective on narcissism. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 54, 193-215.

Winnicott, Donald W. (1956). Primary maternal preoccupation. In Collected papers: Through paediatrics to psychoanalysis (pp. 300-305). London: Tavistock, 1958.

Winnicott, Donald. (1975). Through paediatrics to psycho-analysis. The International Psycho-analytic Library, 100, 1-325. London: Hogarth.

MORE POSTS

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The Benign Intention of Hate

The Couple and its Instincts

The First Seduction: Exploring Resistance to the Acknowledgement of Maternal Sexual Abuse

The Phallic Container in the Post-Partum Couple

Till Death-Drive Us Apart: Associating Injury and Aggression in the Couple

The Curious Case of La Petite Mort

“I have never really understood this liking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment” (Alan Bennett, 1972, p. 40)

It is one of the most perplexing questions of life that ‘love’s executioner’ finds it fitting to hover incessantly in the wings of every love relationship, seemingly waiting to destroy the best stuff at its peak, to reduce love to hate and wreak untold misery on all who fall prey to its spell. Why does love invariably get contaminated by hate and anger, which apparently sets out to destroy the initial intimacies of almost every couple? Why does anger and emotional aggression seem so endemic to the intimate dance of every love relationship? It makes little intuitive sense that hate should be such a universal characteristic of love.

Aims vs Effects of Aggression

The answer to this question is assisted by an examination of what aggression is, and the strange quality of its Nature. Often, when visiting these phenomena in our personal relationships or in the consulting room, we notice first-off that aggression seems such a destructive energy. We observe around us its damaging effects. The yelling, attacking, vilifying. These effects are hard to miss because they dominate the therapeutic landscape of a couple in conflict and as Ruszinsky (2006) says, following Bion, and many other authors, that aggression, or the death drive, is destructive in that it ‘attacks and distorts the capacities for perception and judgement’ (p. 116). He argues it to be deadly in its attacks on meaning and difference, as a result of which ordinary developmental processes are retarded and undermined.

However, this view of aggression fails in one important aspect: that its effects differ from its aim. Differentiating its intent from its effects is a useful enhancement to deciphering this perplexing contaminant of love. Perhaps the most complex, controversial, and useful insight into the nature of aggression comes from Freud’s (1920) dual drive theory, and in particular his differentiation of the sexual drives from the death-drive, representing the forces of aggression in the mental realm. Whilst the full import of this masterful theoretical piece has been backgrounded in the period after Freud’s death, the lateral genius of his thinking assists us today to understand the paradoxical nature of the destructive processes inherent in human relatedness.

Whilst the sexual instincts are “perpetually attempting and achieving a renewal of life” (Freud, 1920, p. 46), a creative force aimed at energizing and stimulating, the death-drive aims for stasis and quiescence, tending towards “the restoration of an earlier state of things... a quiescent cathexis” (p. 34). The aim of the death-drive is hence primarily in the service of restoring or reinstating a state in which tension is reduced or eliminated. In this reading, alongside authors such as Mills (2006), we can view aggression as present in every vital process (Freud, 1933), the intent of which is to restore status when disequilibrium is created, whether in the physical or mental realm. This mechanism is integral to an organism’s ability to restore equilibrium when a transgression challenges its threshold of stasis and hence invites, from the subjective point of view of the organism, destruction. Without such a mechanism, the organism would quickly succumb to the inevitable encroachments and threats that impinge, whether they originate through neglect or by design. Aggression therefore can be understood as the key mechanism in the mental realm available for ensuring self-preservation. This highlights its paradoxical nature. Whereas the sexual drives converge in their aim and effects − cathexis of an object, the aggressive drives diverge in that aggressing is merely an attempt to restore equilibrium and if able, to go, as it were, silently into the night.

Interestingly, one might consider therefore that whilst the sexual drive may benefit from arousal without a trigger and then seeks an object on which to cathect, the aggressive drive seeks to be left alone and remain quiescent. It is only mobilized in the presence of a pathogen. The death-drive remains, says Freud, silent and only comes to our notice when it is directed outwards as an instinct of destruction, aimed at preserving the individual from threats both internal and external.

It may therefore be viewed that the death-drive is to the mind what the immune system is to the body, maintaining a ready but latent state until activated by a pathogenic trigger − infection in the body, emotional threat to the mind. This idea of a mental function being derived from a biological function is, of course, imbedded in the entire corpus of psychoanalytical thinking, including defence mechanisms emerging from underlying somatic foci in development. The ego itself, which emerges as the interface between the unconscious and the external environment, is as the mental projection of the surface of the body interfacing between the internal and external environment. Consciousness itself emerges, says Freud, instead of a memory trace, like the crust of a bread baked through by the impingements of the external environment.

If the death-drive is that part of the mind that as the representative of mental immunity remains latent until an activating trigger provokes an aggressive response, the question is raised as to why more often than not we notice that aggressive reactions in couples are disproportionate to any objective provocation or malice. Sometimes, even, it is as if there is no provocation at all and yet an emotionally violent reaction is observed to some perceived experience of hurt. This takes us onto the issue of what triggers − and the function of narcissistic injury.

Narcissistic Injury

Narcissism is often associated with being a distasteful description of undesirable traits, usually best avoided. Yet this concept describes a normative part of development and is not simply about pathology. It is also about integrity of a core self, or mental cohesion that differentiates oneself from another and provides identity. Freud (1914) explained that narcissism is not simply about pathology or perversion ‘but the libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation, a measure of which may justifiably be attributed to every living creature’ (p. 74).

If it is true that aggression remains latent until activated by some impingement, this begs the question of what the mind, and any specific individual mind, interprets as pathogenic and inviting of disequilibrium. Clinical evidence is compelling in demonstrating that one person’s elixir is another’s poison − implicating subjectivity in the perception of what is hurtful or noxious. Inputs that are interpreted emotionally as injurious, create internal disequilibrium and hence mental immunity is activated. Anger begins to simmer. Since narcissism is constantly being battered by reality, says Freud, our inner core self is always threatened with in-cohesion. Alongside Solan (1999) we can see that aggression serves to restore subjectivity and cohesion by expelling the threat to the outside (using projection, for example). It is a mechanism aimed at restoring self-cohesion, even where to the outside observer the impingement and the emotional response may not seem proportional. Yet, from an intrapsychic point of view, the experience of hurt, no matter how subjective, is likely to lead to the mobilization of an aggressive response. Lubbe (2011) makes the point that normal development itself carries huge and “terrifying” risks of emotional injury since the love object, on whom we depend, “could die, or run away, or fall out of love with you, in other words the object as separate obeys irreducible laws of the external world’ (p. 14).

Like in infancy, the intimate couple in adulthood is a cesspool of provocations, losses and disappointments driven by hope and expectations, and all manner of unconscious projection. Whilst unconscious projections, based on personal history, are the necessary glue for any intimate bond and the driver of attraction, they are also the nuclei of later dissolution. Attraction and repulsion are strange but inevitable bed-fellows caught in a powerful tension between the wish to idealize and find compensation, as occurs in the initial flushes of romance, and the inevitability of disappointment and hence denigration that seems to follow.

Erotic life, which is embedded in the complex mix of intrapsychic issues and unconscious associations, itself has a complex and convoluted foundation in a psychobiological and intrapsychic matrix, coloured by experiences of childhood, effected by experiences and memories, and subject to the crazy vicissitudes of hormones and embodiment. Incest taboos and its barriers have to be surmounted as unconscious associations to oedipal triumphs and failures influence adult attachments and repetitions of early emotions finding themselves evoked again in the reality of a present partner. Without these, no sexual life is possible. And yet, embedded in these associations are the inevitable reawakening of old injuries, and the frustrating vicissitudes of life itself.

Sources of Injury

I want to identify two broad sources of narcissistic injury, the one belonging to the individual and their personal history and the other to factors that appear universal in their trends. As Barratt (2012) importantly reminds us, recognition of the embodiment of the mind is a crucial aspect of understanding it. The mind is an embodied mind, and this concept is central to the corpus of Freudian thinking. He laments the fact that, ‘Although Freud stands at the head of somatic psychology and his theorizing is a bodymind approach to the erotic, the discipline that bears his name has all too frequently become the ‘science’ of the disembodied subject’ (p. 87). Barratt argues that, ‘Indeed, what the holistic notion of libidinal energies asserts is that the entirety of our embodied experience is ‘sexual’, in that it is sensually endowed and is the foundation of our psychic realities’ (p. 67). That is, in the couple space we are not only confronted by two people in the room exchanging unconscious projections. We are confronted by two embodied people whose embodied divergence itself promotes tension. Whilst these differences were invariably part of the initial attraction and the wonderful energy of lust and love, so too these differences add the potential for failure of attunement and hence injury over time.

It is of course artificial to separate individual projections from normative ones − but it is also to miss the significance of embodiment and the vast range of evidence suggesting that the psychology and neurobiology of men and women differ and that in the nuances of these psychobiological pressures frustrations and injury creeps in. Could the simple waning of erotic desire with time itself lead to feelings of injury? In the modern context, Perel (2007) makes the point that familiarity and the blurring of ‘otherness’ may lead to disillusionment. “Some of America’s best features”, she argues, “the belief in democracy, equality, consensus building, compromise, fairness, mutual tolerance – can, when carried too punctiliously into the bedroom, result in very boring sex. Sexual desire and good citizenship don’t play by the same rules. And while enlightened egalitarianism represents one of the greatest advances of modern society, it can exact a toll in the erotic realm. (pp. 55-56).

This loss of ‘otherness’, in other words, may be experienced as loss, which carries with it the implications of hurt and the experience of personal injury. This complex mix of emotional and erotic drivers that enable the full power of initial attractions may mean that injury is embedded in attraction and its subsequent vicissitudes. Freud had made the point, for example, that, ‘It is naturally just as unfavourable for a woman if a man approaches her without his full potency as it is if his initial overvaluation of her when he is in love gives place to undervaluation after he has possessed her’ (Freud, 1912, p. 186). Of course, full potency is not only a matter of sexual performance – it is a matter of sexual desire. Many women I have seen in couple therapy have complained bitterly that the waning of her man’s desire has led to feelings of loss and hence anger, even where no malice at all is carried by his waning desire of or disinterest. Equally, when a woman’s desire for her man’s phallus is replaced by the advent and preoccupation with her baby, for example, a normal developmental challenge can become a source of deep injury for her partner. In this example, normal primary maternal pre-occupation (Winnicott, 1956), on the one hand desired, often carries with it deep anger and resentment for the displaced husband.

We can see that there are many examples of the processes of how initial idealization/overvaluation invariably leads to disappointment and disillusionment, and hence the experience of injury. Thinking you had bought a Porsche, and paid the price for one, and finding it has turned into a VW Beetle can feel injurious. Raphael-Leff (2001) makes this point rather more poetically: ‘Thus, between two bodies locked in sexual attraction, a delicate tissue of imagery is fabricated, so strong it can withstand the cruellest of tests; yet so fragile, the magic of intimacy can be dispelled as irrevocably as belief in the tooth fairy’ (p. 13).

Coleman (2005) corroborates this idea that disappointment and disillusionment is a most common and universal feature of couples. ‘The only couples who are not disappointed in each other’, he argues, ‘are those who are so defended against disappointment that they are unable to make any real commitment in the first place’ (p. 59). This in-built disillusionment is perhaps also embedded in Fisher’s (1999) notions of how narcissism and marriage are opposing tensions in couples – by extension, narcissistic injury is embedded in intimate relating. ‘I think that if one probes deeply enough’, says Fisher, ‘it is possible to find traces of that original love object, and that falling-in-love, which resonate in the bitter disappointment of what has become intolerable’ (p. 187). It is, he suggests, that ‘the misery is always feeding on the ruin of loveliness’ (p. 188). It is a grisly idea.

More generally, we could point out that ‘the psychical importance of an instinct rises in proportion to its frustration’ (Freud, 1912, p. 188) – or inverted, once consummated, and the instinct is satisfied, a drift toward disinterest or even devaluation can occur until the instinct recharges. The novelist Samuel Richardson (1862) wrote that ‘Love gratified is love satisfied, and love satisfied is indifference begun’ (p.452). Whilst gender difference plays a role in how this may manifest, in essence the discharge of an instinct may lead to reduction in the psychical importance of the desired object. Libidinal drivers, or lust, prompt over-valuation of the object, and when this is withdrawn, at least some hurt seems inevitable.

Raphael-Leff (2001) eloquently refers to the ‘flesh doing the bidding of fantasy’ (p. 13), describing how partners unconsciously select each other for their capacity to re-elicit earlier emotions. She adds, ‘The magnetic attraction of being ‘in love’ constitutes a form of re-cognition, attributing to the ‘familiar’ stranger qualities transferred from internal figures’ (p. 13).

With the passage of time, however, these projections face the uncomfortable and disappointing process of withdrawal. The capacity of projections to fulfill the function of an intra-psychic process remains to some extent unsustainable under the pressures of death-drive ascendancy and the waning of libidinal dominance. It is no surprise that encountering the loss of idealization of a partner, as projections either soften or become entrenched, as if they now literally belong to the other, may lead to increasing disappointment.

Attraction invariably has in its midst unconscious elements that require compensation through a partner, in the initial complimentarity, a great sense of wholeness and relief is found. But these same elements of complimentarity become exposed over time and in their place may appear resentment at seeing split-off parts of the self in the other. Specific patterns of partner-choice based on early history, what Dicks (1967) described as the unconscious agreement between partners, lead to mental idealization when a neat psychological fit is found. The resulting sense of completion, of restoring what Klein (1963) called lost parts of the mind, through engagement with another, creates the mental illusion of a wonderful sense of completion and wholeness. Equilibrium is restored; it is as if the unconscious lights up like a Christmas tree and all is good with the world. The tingling of the magic mix of imago with libido is heady and addictive. But with time, these projections may trend to face the uncomfortable process of withdrawal and disillusionment.

Immunizing Function

Whilst these examples of injury are by no means exhaustive, they are meant to represent a cross range of internal and external ‘pathogens’. One the one hand, intra-psychic projections and issues particular to the individual that lead to the possibility of injury over time. But also, of universal, sometimes gender-specific experiences that in the normal course of relating lead to experiences of disillusionment and loss, which like any impingement creating diseqilibrium, activate a response aimed at restoring internal integrity. As discussed above, narcissistic injury leads to disequilibrium, even where such injury is perceived and experienced because of personal and/or historical reasons. These psychic pathogens activate a response aimed at restoring integrity and stasis, and this death-drive response emerges in the form of aggression. Aggression does not, we well know, manifest always in acting out physically or even emotionally. Sometimes aggression is introjected, projected, or somatised through recruitment of the body, leading to possible somatic disturbances, tensions, or even auto-immune problems.

In the consulting room, we are invariably faced with aggression in both couple and individual work and often such aggression has what appears to be a destructive impact and effect. But examining the aims of such aggression, rather than its effects, can assist the clinician in identifying the underlying disequilibrium triggered by some experience or perception of injury. Narcissistic injury is common to us all, but becomes even more exaggerated in those with narcissistic fixations in their personality, which amplifies hurt considerably. Retaliation is often about restoration, the implication being that without a psychogenic pathogen, no aggressive response would manifest. In the somatic realm, the immune system remains, as it were, ready but latent and does not amount an immune response unless a pathogen threatens somatic equilibrium, at least in the normal course. In the mental realm, the same may be observed that only in response to an experience of an activating psychogenic pathogen, will an immunizing response be mounted in the form first of emotional arousal, and possibly also in the form of verbal or physical reprisal. Such abreactive process may strive for restoration but is not always effective outside, that is, of the therapeutic realm because more often than not the pathogenic trigger is intrapsychic and unconscious and not purely in response to a real, objective threats. Narcissistic injury invariably carries extracts of personal experience and injury, and these associative elements amplify hurt, which means that in the absence of therapeutic mutation through interpretation, the actual psychogenic pathogen remains internal. Sorting out the external source is really an attempt at sorting the internal projection and expectation through the other person. But this remains, invariably, a partial and impermanent solution. Since where ever you go, you take yourself with, and under the supervision of the repetition compulsion, the likelihood of reproducing similar dynamics through different relationships remains high. The immunizing function of aggression does not aim to cause trouble, it aims to reduce it but in the process often leads to conflict and heightened tensions.

Concluding Comments

My understanding of aggression and its link to injury is not intended to reflect only pathological relating, but also to understand the normal waning of attachment and the gradual ascendancy of the death-drive whose aim is less about causing damage as it is about restoration and preservation of the self rather than the other. Unfortunately, the casualty in this recalibration is often the couple, since the injury that is perceived and experienced cannot escape the capsule from which it was born. In some respects, injury is built into the normal vicissitudes of attachment, and the bewildering sense of loss that accompanies this disillusionment can be fruitfully normalized for couples consumed by a sense of failure that may be no more a failure than is ageing of any sort. As Raphael-Leff (2001) reminded us above, the bite of the tooth fairy is never nice since from innocence and illusion built on mutual projection emerges instead the pain and disillusionment of reality. Out of disillusion too often comes dissolution. If mental immunity is understood from whence it emerges, then the aim of the death-drive and its aggressive effects might, more productively, like Eros, find convergence through facilitation where they diverge in their natural state.

Note: This article is based on my paper “Till death-drive us apart: Associating injury and aggression in the couple”. Psycho-analytic Psychotherapy in South Africa, in press 2013.

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