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

Abstract

This paper explores the aims of the death-drive and aggression and its relationship with narcissistic injury in the couple dynamic. Rather than thinking about the all-too-common effects of aggression in relationships, this paper examines its paradoxical aims and how various forms of injury and disillusionment are built into the developmental processes of all couples. If aggression is the mental immune system, the paper tries to make clear how reactivity in relationships is built on the link between experienced injury and the attempts by the death-drive to paradoxically restore equilibrium. If these links are better understood, especially how inevitable disillusionment is linked to injury, it may assist couples to normalise their difficulties and reduce the destructive effects of the well-intended aggressive drive.

KEY WORDS: Death-drive, aggression, disillusionment, narcissistic injury, mental immunity, eroticism, couple conflict

"I have never really understood this liking for war. It panders to instincts already well catered for in any respectable domestic establishment." (Alan Bennett)

This paper sets out to delve into a central question of intimate coupling: Why is it that associated with the most love is also the most hate? How is it that the intensity of initial idealisation, that blissful pinnacle of eros and mental ‘homecoming’, can morph into such denigration, or as one patient put it during the death-throes or her marriage, the “pit of emotional hell”? As a relationship evolves, why does it seem that there is an inevitability to disillusionment, frustration, and anger. Even in the healthiest relationships, the most optimistic scenario still seems challenged by tensions and conflicts driven by disillusionment and injury. In and out the consulting room, it appears as if no relationship ever escapes hurt and anger.

It seems to me that central to understanding this common undoing lies in examining the role that the function of the death drive plays in both the intra- and inter-psychic space. So commonly does aggression emerge as the key element in any couple process, that remedial intervention to such conflict and undoing rests on making sense of the nature, rather than the effects of aggression. In either its high expressed (hot) or low-expressed (cold) forms that may manifest in relationship conflict, aggression plays a central role in both the creation and undoing of the couple. I set out to better understand in this paper what the nature of aggression is and how its direct relationship with injury, more specifically narcissistic injury, is forged.

THEORY OF THE DEATH DRIVE

Aim of Aggression

In theorising about couples, the tendency in the literature (and in clinical discussion) is more often than not to look at the effects of aggression and how it is acted out between couples. Further, attention is often paid to how these effects interface with transference-counter-transference and the interplay that manifests from these attacks. Whether viewed as originating from a deeper intra-psychic repetition or as an inter-subjective dance, many theorists in thinking about aggression examine its effects. Monguzzi (2011), for example, rather elegantly describes aggressive couples as often, “rather than having a problem, are the problem” (p. 211). Such couples feature resentment, anger, aggressiveness and violence as having a destructive impact on “the fragile process of the couple's commitment to therapy” (p. 211) and of course, on their own capacity for healthy relatedness. Ruszinsky (2006) makes the point that, like Bion, he sees the death drive as destructive, which “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. This view of aggression-as-destructive, seems to me fairly prevalent in the literature on couples. It is a view I wish to supplement in this paper with an exploration of how aggression can be viewed differently − not via its effects but via its intent.

Managing and containing aggression, versus processing it at a deeper level, may also present itself as the technical conundrum in working with aggression. Some authors, such as Monguzzi (2011), maintain this leaning, especially with more overtly aggressive couples. Other authors also argue that in both self-psychology and object relations a “here and now” approach is indicated, rather than dealing with the aggression or material in general as “representations of their troubled development” (Goldstein, p. 75). Keogh et al (2007) concurs with this trend in describing a “therapeutic style” that emphasises the relational (i.e., moment to moment countertransference in borderline systems that tend to be disorganised). The aim is to promote containment and organisation before understanding and insight.

But this technical conundrum of containing versus exploring deeper meaning of aggression in pathological couples may be seen to apply to couples more generally. And in both cases the focus seems to be on its negative effects. Whichever way one approaches these technicalities, the theoretical trend appears, in other words, to be in describing its effects and objects, rather than its nature and aims. Whilst many papers seem to make the connection between hurt and the perception of injury (for example, Coleman, 2005), by and large this link represents internal object representations projected onto the other rather than the nature of aggression itself. In my view, enhancing our understanding of the nature of this central element in the couple dynamic enhances understanding and intervention.

The tradition of psychoanalytic research has trended in the direction of understanding psychopathology as a conduit to understanding normality in the intra-psychic dynamic. In this paper, I want to examine normal processes in the aggression-injury link as a conduit to better understanding when things go awry in the couple, trending from the normal to the pathological. To achieve this, I want to explore aggression from the angle not of its effects or objects but its aim. That is, from the vantage point of itself, what does the death drive set out to do?

Dual Theory of the Drives

In the view I wish to take in this paper, I will lean on what I regard and one of the most brilliant theoretical aspects, albeit controversial, of Freud’s work. It is one that relatively late in his career, addressed the function of aggression, and with his insight into understanding the duality of the drives provided an important platform for understanding psychology and psycho-biology (Freud, 1920). On the one hand, Freud argues that there is libido striving for novelty, change, creativity, procreativity − “the sexual instincts which are perpetually attempting to achieve a renewal of life” (Freud, 1920, p.318) and “to combine matter into ever greater unities” (p.315). In contrast to this ‘stimulating’ drive is what Freud termed the “death drive”, one striving for stasis and quiescence, tending “towards the restoration of an earlier state of things” (p. 310). This drive aims to “‘bind’ the instinctual impulses which impinge on it...and convert their freely mobile cathectic energy into a mainly quiescent (tonic) cathexis” (p. 336).

I am aware of the complexity and controversy surrounding Freud's concept of the death drive amongst contemporary analysts but in this paper wish to draw on the commentary of Mills (2006) in his strongly formulated paper on the subject. He argues against resistance to the concept by placing it in the dialectic relationship to eros that Freud intended and which I too believe captures Freud’s original observations and intent: “Death-work for Freud (1933) was ultimately in the service of restoring or reinstating a previous state of undifferentiated internal being…”(p.4), that being a state in which tension is reduced or eliminated. This goes further than merely being a force acting against arousal or pleasure but which aims to restore quiescence when internal equilibrium is disturbed. As Mills writes, “Freud did not argue that death was the only aim of life, only that it maintained a dialectical tension in juxtaposition to a life principle under the ancient command of Eros, yet the two forces of mind remained ontologically inseparable.” (p.4).

Mills goes on to argue that, “Psychoanalysts are often confused by viewing death as merely a physical end-state or the termination of life, when it may be memorialized in the psyche as a primary ontological principle that informs the trajectory of all psychic activity... a dialectic that is ontologically inseparable and mutually implicative. What we call a life force, drive, urge, or impetus is intimately conjoined with its opposition, that is, its negation, termination, or lack. Here life = death: being and nothing are the same.” (p4). The death drive is, ultimately, the “first drive” (Freud, 1920, p. 38), “a compulsion to return to an original inanimate state. In fact, Freud (1933) tells us that the death drive “cannot fail to be present in every vital process” (Mills, 2006, p.107).

Mills further captures the broader notion of the death drive as restorative, arguing that “Freud conjectures that the organism must have an intrinsic capacity to protect itself from powerful stimuli through a resistive process internally operative and sensitive to intrusive encroachments from externality that threaten its potential destruction. The human mind is no exception. Here Freud’s entire discourse is an economy of energetics designed to transform stimuli in the service of self-preservation, thus defending from both external and internal stimuli that create states of unpleasure. This example from embryology is extended to the psychical apparatus…” (italics mine)(p.8) whose aim is ultimately, as Freud extends his hypothesis, “that all drives aim toward a restoration of earlier events or modes of being, namely unmodified quiescence” (p.9).

This raises two interesting issues: firstly, that the death drive and its representatives in the form of aggression and destructiveness can be viewed not merely as serving to reduce arousal but as a more general mechanism whose aim is to restore equilibrium from any state of disequilibrium; secondly, that there is a paradoxical nature of the death drive: namely, that its modus and effect is one of aggressing but that its aim is not to aggress at all. Rather than aiming to impinge, the death drive aims to reduce impingements, rather than upset, to reduce upset − that is, to restore the state that existed prior to an impingement. The libidinal drive aims to cathect and in so doing finds objects for this purpose. Aim and effect seems to find common purpose. One might say, therefore, that whereas the aims and effects of eros and the life drive converge, the aims and effects of the death drive diverge.

The death drive, unlike the life drive or Eros, is an energy that Freud (1920) argues to be a conservative instinct, one striving to preserve the status quo, or at least restore an organism to as close a proximation of it as it can. Its aim, therefore, is to restore an organism disturbed by external impingements to its prior resting state, or as close an adaptation to it as is forced upon it. The only mechanism available for this purpose is one that offers resistance to impingements and that is capable of defending the organism from pressures to change. The 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 that persisted prior to the impingement. Any primitive organism, or more complex one that carries some of the essential energies of its more primitive components, will resist change imposed by impingements by defending itself aggressively. Mills points out that Freud (1920) initially situates his argument within the language of embryology, and postulates that a living organism in its most simplified form is in a state of undifferentiation yet is “susceptible to stimulation” from the many forces that comprise the external world.” The organism must have an intrinsic capacity to protect itself from powerful stimuli through a resistive process internally operative and sensitive to intrusive encroachments from externality that threaten its potential destruction. The human mind is no exception.” (p. 8). In other words, the aim of aggression is really to protect the organism from states of disequilibrium, like the immune system protects the body from impingements that create disequilibrium − a parallel to which I will return later. Therefore, whilst we could describe the effects of aggression as potentially malignant we could describe its aim as benign.

A useful, albeit unlikely example of this paradox can, I believe, be illustrated by the mechanism and effects of a baby crying. I include this example, though apparently unrelated to couple conflict, because it captures the nature of this aggressive mechanism in a way that is more opaque in adults. Nonetheless, it help to understand how it manifests later in adults. Since crying in infancy is driven by states of disequilibrium, whether internal (hunger, reflux, or some other discomfort), external (cold, needlestick, noise) or psychological (loneliness, anxiety), crying is triggered in order to induce responsiveness from the environment to assist in restoration of homeostasis. In its helpless state the infant has no other means to achieve this. This drive to induce environmental responsiveness is, I believe, a useful example of how aggression can present itself with a single aim. Crying is effectively aggressive in that it is the only mental mechanism available in an infant to force itself into the environment and activate responsiveness. The feeling of activation this induces in adults indicates that something has been forced into the environment which promotes a response. Most adults are familiar with a crying baby’s capacity to induce intense feelings which prompt action to remedy whatever is wrong. It tends to be irresistible, even to non-parental figures. But if prolonged, such intrusiveness can induce rage in the adults because their own equilibrium becomes distorted. This unlikely example of aggression helps to differentiate the effects of the crying (that is, the aggression) from that of its aim. The effects are to induce dis-equilibrium in the environment through ‘assaulting’ it by intruding into it but its aim is merely to restore equilibrium, the stasis that existed prior to the infant’s impingement. Were it content, it would not cry nor intrude.

Akin to the Somatic Immune System

This mental mechanism of restoration, through the death drive, usually manifests in some form of aggression once mobilised. As mentioned earlier, Freud viewed this mechanism as an extension of a more primitive biological resistance to impingements that threaten the organism. I wish to suggest that this mechanism can be viewed as akin to the immune system in the body. The somatic immune system is highly aggressive in mounting a response to any invading pathogen that threatens the organism’s equilibrium. Its effects are murderously aggressive − and devour and destroy the threats. Its aim, however, is merely the restoration of stasis and a return to the equilibrium. Alongside Solan, (1999), I propose to consider narcissism and its preservation through aggression “as one of the psychic envelopes that function as the “immune system” of our familiar sense of self while being permeable to excitations with the nonfamiliar other” (p. 197), a topic to which I will return shortly.

Freud rued the difficulty of theorising about the death drive because of its stealth-like quality − its tendency to operate in the background virtually undetected, unlike Eros which is more visible and felt in its presence. “So long as that instinct operates internally, as a death instinct, it remains silent; it only comes to our notice when it is diverted outwards as an instinct of destruction. It seems to be essential for the preservation of the individual that this diversion should occur; the muscular apparatus serves this purpose” (Freud, 1940, p.150).

But unsurprisingly, perhaps, like the somatic immune system, which also is undetected and unconscious despite being highly aggressive, only becomes evident when the organism is under threat and responds to mount an immune response. The death drive, in this fashion, can be viewed as the mental representation of the body’s immune system, apparently operating in the background until a threat to equilibrium is present. When such a psychological impingement, a ‘pathogen’ if you will, threatens stasis it evokes an aggressive response to whatever this threat is experienced to be.

This concept of mental functions emerging from biological and somatic functions, as the mental representative of an underlying biological process, is not novel, of course. In fact, the whole corpus of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory is premised on prototypes such as these, from defences emerging on underlying developmental processes (example, denial being a primitive oral defence evoked by the infant’s closing of the mouth, vomiting as ejection/ projection, and incorporation/ introjection being focuses of the early oral phase and its mental representatives). Consciousness itself “emerges instead of a memory trace”, like the crust of a bread baked through by the external impingements of the environment, the ego being the representative of this interface between the unconscious and the external environment, like a psychic skin (Freud, 1920, p. 296-297). Freud (1923) further makes the point that, “the ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body. It may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body” (p. 364-5). It is no great stretch to view the death drive and its aggressive qualities as the mental representative of the somatic immune system, operating in the psychological realm to deal with mental impingements and assist in the restoration of psychological homeostasis.

The concept of the death drive originally rested more on theory than empirical evidence. Freud himself was not entirely satisfied with this but observed that in sado-masochism the manifestation of the death drive could be seen. Klein later ran with this in her work with children, seeing aggression imbedded in the infant’s response to frustration and which then “seeks to defend itself by destroying the object” (p. 128), that is employing aggression in the service of an imagined restoration. However, despite Klein adding clinical observations to Freud’s construct, the death drive remained by and large a theoretical construct waiting for empirical verification. Although beyond the scope of this paper, it is interesting to note that contemporary work in related fields of neurobiology and neuro-psychoanalysis on aggression and memory (linked to the repetition compulsion) are beginning to add evidence for this construct (for example, Kandel, 2006, Solms & Turnbull, 2002; Panskepp & Biven, 2012).

One distinction I must briefly mention, however, is between a form of aggression that is self-preservatory and that which is predatory. Glasser (cited in Ruszinsky, 2006) refers to self-preservatory aggression where the aim is to eliminate the source of perceived threat. This distinguishes this form of aggression from more sadistic or cold ‘reptilian’ aggression, perhaps linked to the predatory aggression and its neurobiological circuits described by Panskepp and Biven (2012). The significance of this is that unconscious associations to aversive impingements (whether internal, external, or emotionally perceived) may activate the ‘mental immune system’ or emotional memory as a protective measure against hurt and disequilibrium. The relevance of this theory to a paper on couple conflict, is that of trying to deepen the understanding of the aggressive response so central in all couples and to link this response to its activators. Such activators appear linked to perceptions or experiences of injury. I wish to now turn to this second part, in order to understand what is perceived as injurious that might provoke an aggressive response, since I will argue below, that aggression does not, and perhaps cannot, stand alone.

Narcissistic Injury

Winnicott’s (1964) quip that “there is no such thing as a baby” (p.99), there is a baby and someone, raised an important psychoanalytical precept for both the love and the hate that is invariable relational. Without viewing the relational connection in the mother-infant dyad, one cannot make clinical sense of the baby’s dynamics − “the unit is not the individual, the unit is an environment-individual set-up (p.99). I wish to proffer that this is true in the area of aggression too − that without understanding the triggers for aggression, we cannot understand aggression itself. It simply cannot stand alone either theoretically or clinically. Whilst eros can exist without an object (at least not an external one), aggression maintains a latent state unless activated by a trigger which creates dis-equilibrium.

Hence, we cannot go any further in understanding why couples aggress against each other without understanding the link between a relational trigger and an aggressive response. Physical immunity has a ‘memory’ and the signature of a pathogen can be measured objectively. But mental immunity is not blessed with such simplicity. If we accept that aggression is activated for a preservatory purpose, it must also be true that in the mental realm there is not necessarily any objective criteria for what creates disequilibrium or is experienced as noxious. As mentioned, although narcissism is an involved topic which covers various elements of both the normal and the pathological, I concur with Solan’s point (1999), that within the normal sphere of mental functioning, narcissism functions to maintain integrity of the core self in response to impingements that upset this equilibrium and hence, “the narcissistic envelope functions as a distinct framework for the familiar belongings of the self.” (p.198). 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.66).

A patient of mine once said: “Our marriage would be very happy − if I just did not exist…!” What she meant was, without a relational other in their marriage, there would be no cause for dis-equilibrium. Fisher (1999) highlighted this conundrum of emerging from narcissism into marriage as a developmental achievement. And if, as I have suggested, aggression is a response to injury, understanding the cycles of aggression must link to the centrality of what hurts? It raises important challenges around what is regarded by the mind as a noxious impingement that evokes an ‘immune response’ rather than as something pleasant which does not. Lubbe (2011), points out how the transition from narcissism to object love “holds terrifying risks” (p14). “It 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). It could, in other words, and invariable does, threaten one. As Freud (1914) put it, “Everything a person possesses or achieves, every remnant of the primitive feeling of omnipotence which his experience has confirmed, helps to increase his self-regard” (p. 98) but when this is threatened, deflation can result, since “we must recognize that self-regard has a specially intimate dependence on narcissistic libido” (p. 98), and in the normal course of relating, injuries to this are inevitable.

Solan (1999) corroborates this understanding, arguing that, “As early as 1914, Freud had observed that narcissism was constantly being battered by reality and that man was forever striving to restore the sense of wholeness of which he had been robbed. Indeed, given the amount of excitations that threaten the sense of self even in the earliest developmental experiences, one may wonder how the self can possibly be immunized against the alien stimuli bursting forth in any interaction. This immunizing mental activity may be considered narcissistic “to the degree that its function is to maintain the structural cohesiveness, temporal stability, and positive affective coloring of the self-representation” (Stolorow, 1975, p. 198)” (p. 198).

Solan adds: “Whenever the narcissistic functions fail to recognize the familiar, strangeness is experienced, and the self is threatened with incohesiveness. The result is felt as an attack on the bodily and sense data, its identities, values, and self-attributes, or as an injury to its affective-state of narcissistic familiarity... Activation of the mechanisms of adaptation and defense by the ego is comparable to the immunizing and defensive mechanisms in narcissism.” (p. 201).

I have argued that a baby crying is a useful example of this mental ‘immune system’ operating − activating the environment to reduce impingements and return to a state of stasis. This fits the requirement of the death drive I am positing, alongside authors such as Mills, 2006 and Solan, 1999, of aggression in the service of restoration. But clearly, as we note repeatedly in the consulting room and in the clinical example below, reactivity to apparent impingements often seem to have no direct proportionality to the experienced provocation. It usually seems to be more a subjective rather than objective phenomenon. Sometimes, there is no apparent provocation at all that is visible. The anger expressed by one spouse is because something inside them has become frustrated or disappointed over time. I will address these issues later.

First, a brief clinical example illustrates this link between injury and aggression where some form of provocation is overt and visible. A detailed case is beyond the scope of this theoretical paper but this description assists to illustrate the pivotal link between an aggressive response and an experience of injury leading to dis-equilibrium. A young couple I saw presented one year into their marriage with extreme cycles of conflict. Married for barely 2 months and they had separated. She was pregnant with their first child and returned to stay with her mother where she stayed after the child was born. Her rationale for this drastic step was that despite their loving each other, his volatility and breakouts into verbal, emotional, and occasionally physical violence frightened her. It soon became clear to me that the wife was passive-aggressive in her approach to him, maintained an underground and compartmentalised emotional world that he could sense but which she denied, and withheld their child from him when he was born. Despite being extremely religious, and I might add a likeable and deeply gentle soul, I was surprised to discover in the consulting room an emotional reactivity that virtually rattled my windows and which literally could be heard down the street. His invective was startling, and would lead to screaming tirades during which he would swear and call his wife things that would make a drunk pirate blush, accuse her of being unfaithful and devious, of destroying their family, and withholding their child from him. Despite his headache-inducing tirades, he described feeling bullied by her and by me in any attempt I made to intervene or reflect. When I attempted to calm the situation down, he aggressively accused me of trying to intimidate him. He would repeatedly raise examples of her past hurts and sleights, “betrayals” and “lies”, accuse me of siding with her or being duped by her “bullshit” and felt ripped off by the value of the therapy . He refused, however, to even consider going anywhere else, especially following a previous failed therapy attempt. She would shed what seemed to be crocodile tears in spurts of brief histrionics and then easily gather herself, pull me into her view of him, and tell me, “you see how he is?”

I could get virtually no word in as his tirades extended for sometimes 20 or 30 minutes at a time. What was striking was how much pain accompanied them. Tears would well up in his eyes and he would weep with deep anguish at the pain his wife caused to him. The triggers were, generally, not objectively proportionate to the extent of his rage. He found any perceived trickery or withholding from his wife as an attack on his ego and as having a deflationary effect, as he did any interpretation I tried to make. His fragile ego had been facilitated by, amongst other experiences, an abusive and rigid father but a detailed history was impossible to obtain as anything that he felt was hurtful led to his aggressive response.

The case illustrates how any experience that he perceived as hurtful was met with an internally ‘proportionate’ aggressive retaliatory response, but which from the outside appeared disproportionate. His experience of narcissistic injury was profound and only through his emotionally aggressive response was he able to restore some semblance of equilibrium and begin to feel better. It became clear to me that from his internal perspective, the degree of his hurt and injury was proportionate to his aggression. The greater his experience of narcissistic injury, triggering some distant unconscious associations, the greater the aggressive response, as if he was being invaded by an emotional pathogen requiring extreme measures.

This raises the issue of ‘emotional perception’ of what is noxious/unpleasure − based on a deep subjectivity. In my experience, there is invariably such a link − a perception or experience of injury is associated with anger and aggression in couples, even where no such intent to cause injury is present. As we well know, such subjectivity is rooted in unconscious experience, some of which might originate in the psychological space between the mother-infant dyad and some of which might originate in unpleasant experiences either from the internal (such as colic or reflux) or external environment.

It seems obvious to suggest that subjective perceptions of injury will related to whatever is experienced as hurtful to the self/ ego. If early trauma or failures led to fixations in whatever developmental phase, these fixations may represent early injuries that become encoded psychologically (and perhaps neurobiologically) as sensitivities which when activated will revive afresh the perception of injury − and may then evoke an aggressive/ immune response as protection. We note in clinical work that most often, what is experienced as injurious appears puzzlingly out of proportion to the impingement. The greater the narcissistic pathology, the greater may be the aggression in response to perceived injury − but I want to suggest that this principle is true of every relationship. Hence perceptions of injury, however unconscious, become all important in the to and fro of couple conflict. Put differently: the activation of an ‘immune response’ in response to the experience of injury or something emotionally/ psychologically pathogenic drives retaliatory aggression.

This point may seem to add nothing new to a phenomenon we observe everyday in the consulting room − but I want to take it further by linking the issue not only to narcissistic pathology but to a general response for all people when they are narcissistically injured, in the sense of narcissism that Freud and Solan describe above representing a threat to the cohesion of how the internal ego is represented and held together. What is it that makes relationships such a cauldron of injury and hence aggression? The question of why love seems to be so closely tied in with hate, was captured by Freud’s quip that dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate. Humans are bound to love and hate the same object, we note. But this does not fully explain why this should be so in the couple space − why injury appears so closely allied with intimacy. As I mentioned above, at times the ‘provocation’ is apparent and visible, even when disproportionate. At other times, it is as if there is no such provocation and yet over time anger builds and conflict emerges. There appear to me several reasons for this, which I wish to briefly explore.

Sources of Narcissistic Injury

In the couple, the closeness of psychological range, that is, its ego-proximity, introduces a greater potential for the penetration of defences and access to the inner core of each personality − hence the greater potential for narcissistic injury and reactivity and the ‘hate-and-hurt’ pair. A close waltz will yield greater risk of foot injury than a long-armed barn-dance.

However, proximity is evidently not only a matter of proximity-related intimacy. If it were so, then closeness would guarantee conflict and distance not. But we also know that couples exhibit an “unconscious fit” (for example, Dicks, 1967 cited in Monguzzi; Monguzzi 2011), and that proximity is not only a matter of intimacy but also of exchange. That is, the projection of unconscious parts of the self into the Other as part of a complimentary exchange facilitates psychic completion (for example, Perkel, 2001; 2007). Repressed parts of the mind find expression through projection into the other, an exchange argued previously (for example Perkel, 2007) to be both the source of complimentarity and completion but also of conflict and breakdown. Attraction and repulsion remain strange but unavoidable bedfellows. This would seem to relate to the probability that these parts of the mind that are projected outward in such an exchange represent unsavoury, threatening elements within the unconscious and are hence defended against.

The significance of this is that those unwanted parts of the self become externalised into the other, which whilst initially relieving and complimentary (“I felt like I had come home”, I felt like I had known this person all my life”) become the cause of friction and breakdown as the normal ascendance of the death drive moves the couple developmentally ‘back’ towards equilibrium. Injury to the self, once internal, is now external − representing a threat and potential source of injury. Such mental proximity of expelled parts of the self often come to represent a source of narcissistic injury from the Other in the relationship that may trigger cycles of injury and retaliation. In this respect, it would seem that every couple is doomed to experience cycles of narcissistic injury and retaliation with a release of the aggression that underpins the ego’s attempts to restore the self/ equilibrium.

This process of the gradual withdrawal of projections appears to be accompanied, as a general characteristic of all couples, with what I term ‘developmental atrophy’. This is not so much about personal dynamics as it is about the shifting balance between eros and the death drive. With the ascendancy of the death drive over time, after the initial dominance of the libidinal elements, the pressure to quiescence in the couple (or better, of the couple) seems to be a developmental inevitability. This leads to projection withdrawal, the waning of the libidinal drives, and hence the potential for narcissistic injury and conflict.

As a general rule, it is possible that the simple process of the waning of the eros-driven novelty that is associated with initial idealisation of the other can lead to the perception/experience of loss and hence injury. This observation finds some support in Freud’s tackling of the issue of idealisation and denigration, which I wish to briefly discuss.

Idealisation-denigration-injury

The link between idealisation and denigration (or what Freud termed “debasement” (Freud, 1912) enables the separation of affectional and sensual currents that facilitates the free-flow of erotic life. The ability to separate oedipal associations out from current adult erotic objects is a necessary condition for the free-flow of erotic energy. Where such unconscious intrusions manifest, sexual dysfunction may follow what is a possible symbolic violation of the incest barrier. Freud argued that idealisation is an inevitable part of erotic love, especially for men, describing what he termed the “overvaluation” of the object − and it’s link to the separation of the maternal and erotic.

“The whole sphere of love... remains divided in two directions personified in art as sacred and profane (or animal) love. Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love… The main protective measure against such disturbance which men have recourse to in this split in their love consists in a psychical debasement of the sexual object, the overvaluation that normally attaches to the sexual object being reserved for the incestuous object and its representatives. As soon as the condition of debasement is fulfilled, sensuality can be freely expressed…” (Freud, 1912, p. 251 - 252).

This separation of forbidden incestuous objects from current sexuality leads to a form of objectification or “debasement” in the sphere of love − in the service, ironically, not of denigration but of erotic valuation and the flow of erotic energy. There is invariably a link, therefore, between over-valuation of the love object, or idealization, and subsequent devaluation (in part, as a defense against incestuous associations).

Denigration can also be seen as a defence against injury driven by hormonal desires and lust. Lust has a tendency to lead to idealisation of the object, often exacerbated by its unavailability, and the denigration that follows the non-satisfaction of this. The familiar tendency of people pained by either unrequited love or frustrated lust can lead to a rapid turn from desire to rage and denigration of the desired object. This implies a hormonal and neurobiological role for desire that may lead to over-valuation of the object because of the pressure of desire. But if rejection follows that desire, a decent into denigration and devaluation may follow.

But further, Freud noted that “(a)n obstacle is required in order to heighten libido; ...at times where there are no obstacles to sexual satisfaction, love becomes worthless and life empty…” (Freud, 1912, p. 256). A patient of mine, a lonely depressed man in his early 50’s, presented with a deep emptiness in his life. He felt ‘in-between’, and struggled with attachment and feeling, and loss of sexual desire. Of relevance here, is that he owned a prominent strip club chain, was surrounded constantly by people (and naked women), but yet found his life wanting. He made a comment that captured the paradox Freud alludes to above, when he told me, without a hint of irony, that what really turned him on was a woman who was “nicely dressed”. The endless stream of naked women that danced on his stages did nothing to stir his libido any longer.

More generally, we could point out as Freud does, that “the psychical importance of an instinct rises in proportion to its frustration” (p. 257) − or inverted, once consummated, and the instinct is satisfied, a drift toward devaluation can occur until the instinct recharges. The novelist Samuel Richardson wrote, that “Love gratified is love satisfied, and love satisfied is indifference begun”. 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, can be viewed as a driver for over-valuation of the object. The developmental problem this creates can be viewed in the natural waning of the intensity of lust over time in any relationship and hence an aspect of the drive towards idealisation may wane too. If the object no longer carries the intensity of projected libido, there is a loss that makes the object ‘guilty’ of disappointing one. This may represent a narcissistic injury to the initial libido-driven over-investment and over-valuation of the object − as internal “imagos” (Freud, 1912, p.249; 1921, p. 171; see also, 1924, p. 423), and libidinal drivers blend in that potent and heady mix of ‘falling in love’.

I wish to go into further discussion of these psychological idealisations but first add a caveat: It is over-simplistic, one could argue, to attach too much importance to the view that hormones and neurobiology play a significant role in the idealisation of the sexual object. Such an objection would have merit since in coupling this process of idealization and denigration is not only for sensual reasons; it is also because of projection and withdrawal of projections and the disappointment and failure this represents. Nonetheless, it is useful to recognise that a link exists between hormonal drivers that fuel the mental idealization associated with object choices and subsequent mental effects of libidinal waning that accompanies time.

Injury and Mental Idealisation

Hormonal drivers aside, it is clear that without ideation, and the oedipal imagos associated with it, there would unlikely be object choice in coupling. Pre-oedipal matrices that influence oedipal templates become the foundation of the second wave of psychosexual development at puberty. Specific patterns of partner-choice based on this early history, what Dick’s (1967) described as the “unconscious agreement between partners”, lead to mental idealisation when a neat psychological fit is found. The resulting sense of completion, of restoring repressed (or what Klein called “lost parts” (Klein, 1963) 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. Raphael-Leff (2001) refers rather eloquently to the “flesh doing the bidding of fantasy” (p. 13) − how partners unconsciously select each other for their capacity to re-elicit earlier emotions. As she puts it: “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).

But with the passage of time, 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 this encountering of the loss of idealization of a partner, as projections either soften or become entrenched as if they now belonged to the other, leads to increasing disappointment.

There is an old joke that suggests a woman goes to the alter hoping her man will change, and he doesn’t. A man goes to the alter hoping his woman will never change, and she does. In the normal course of falling in love, idealization is in ascendance driven by both sensual and emotional components. The over-valuation of the object, driven by libidinal drivers and the exchange of unconscious elements, leads to a sense of overwhelming completion and ‘coming home’. But later the withdrawal of projections leads to partners feeling underwhelmed and this loss/ disappointment can be experienced as a narcissistic injury. In other words, the heady promise of the other becomes unfulfilled.

An attractive young couple I saw presented with deep frustration in their relationship. Both likable and gentle to the point of being shy, they presented with little manifest conflict. The problem was in the wife’s deep frustration with her husbands lack of sexual desire and her need to feel desired by him (she knew she was desirable). She found his niceness too much to bear and longed for a stronger masculinity in him, the lack of which left her feeling deeply inured and unaffirmed in her femininity. After one frustrating night out, she shouted at him: “I’d rather be raped by you than have this flaccid, soggy attention!” She was high-powered in her professional life and hob-knobbed with international players in business., but had become disillusioned by her husband’s lack of power and masculinity, despite his being good and gentle. From her perspective, he left her feeling as if she was not desirable enough to stimulate a greater level of attention. Her frustration and disillusionment was painful. And ultimately, this made the relationship simply too much to bear. Eventually, with her anger smouldering in the background, and to protect herself from this hurt, she killed it. This experience is not unusual or pathological if the clinical evidence is to be believed. It was given voice by another woman, as a further example, an attractive woman in her late thirties, whose husband also lacked sexual desire, who described feeling “very, very hurt by his rejection of me. It is too painful to bear. It makes me feel deeply frustrated and angry with him! I have to leave this relationship if I am to survive”. Once again, nothing personal was intended by these men’s lack of libidinal charge or initiative but the experience of this was felt to be deeply personal. In essence, it was felt as if it were an attack on the sense of femininity and self these women held dear to themselves and in both cases found these ‘attacks’ to be unbearable and enraging. In both cases they had an affair to remedy their hurt and restore mental equilibrium and in the latter case even threatened that he should not be surprised “if I do that again, as much as I feel guilty about the last time and am not that type of woman!” This begs the question of where the pathology lies: in the action to remedy disequilibrium driven by normal needs being frustrated or in an accommodation to a potentially abnormal situation where needs are frustrated.

Whilst all the dynamic reasons for these experiences are beyond the scope of this paper, it is worth noting that this sort of complaint is reported commonly amongst couples in therapy . Expectation and its failure seem imbedded in relationships, and they lead to injury and anger, even where the partner is not doing anything intentional to cause hurt. I am also suggesting that such failure is not only because of expectations associated with personal unconscious needs but also in the normal course of the waning of libido and its effect on failed expectation. Erectile dysfunction, for example, seems to be injurious for women and creates personal hurt, even where difficulty with an arousal response may have little to do with her man’s attraction to her and more to do with intrapsychic conflicts (Freud, 1912) or the waning of libido over time.

It is not a stretch to therefore suggest that idealization/ overvaluation must invariably lead 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 makes this point rather more poetically, when she describes: “Thus, between two bodies locked in sexual attraction, a delicate tissue of imagery is fabricated, so strong it can withstand the cruelest 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). This grisly phrase is captured clinically by Gigli, Velotti and Zavattini (2012) who, describing a case of theirs, tap into this trend: “The two of them briefly entered into contact with the ‘foreign’ part of the other; a part that seems to drift away, leaving the partner, alone and disoriented, struggling with what remains of both the ‘dream’ and the powerful initial idealization…” (p. 75). This clinical description captures two inter-related elements: the projection of the personal and the experience of the universal. On both fronts, disillusionment has its influence.

Wrote the poet Pablo Neruda:

“I do not love you except because I love you;I go from loving to not loving you,From waiting to not waiting for youMy heart moves from cold to fire.

I love you only because it's you the one I love;I hate you deeply, and hating youBend to you, and the measure of my changing love for youIs that I do not see you but love you blindly”

Desire, Familiarity and Injury

Apart from the withdrawal of the unconscious idealization, and the paradoxical loss of the ‘blindness’ Neruda describes, there is the reduction in levels of desire − the natural waning of lust or erotic strength. This reduction, I have suggested, may also lead to a sense of loss − and accompanying loss of often anger since anger is the protection against the disequilibrium activated by such loss. Anger often leads to devaluation, a mechanism in this context aimed at restoring the levels of ego-inflation that the boost of falling in love enables. Partners invariably lose some interest and the early intensity wanes naturally under the pressures of the balancing of the libidinal and aggressive currents. Familiarity itself tends to blur the novelty of ‘otherness’, so essential in the libidinal and mental eroticising that accompanies love. The shift from the unavailability and differentiation of ‘otherness’ that heightens libido and desire, may be accompanied by an easing into familiarity, where the lines between self and other blur. The loss, or even defiling of the sacredness, is not always welcome in the maintaining of the erotic current, and hence what we might think of as the fuel needed to maintain intimacy. Overexposure to the sights, smells, and normal bodily functions and flaws, unfiltered by the usual barriers that apply in the early stages of romance, can lead to a drop in the capacity for idealisation. Such familiarity is not always a desirable outcome of intimacy because such loss may be associated with an, albeit unconscious, experience of injury. One patient complained bitterly: “When I met him, he couldn’t take his eyes off me. Now, if I stand naked between him and the TV, he just tilts his head to the side. It’s no wonder I had an affair!”

It is interesting that some religions embed separation into their spiritual principles. In Judaism, for example, there is the concept of “niddah” (Laws of Separation), a state of spiritual impurity during phases of the menstrual cycle, during which physical contact between spouses is forbidden. To some extent, even visual familiarity is discouraged, such as seeing too much of a spouse’s nakedness. This can be seen as a mechanism to encourage ‘otherness’. Separation, perhaps carrying a hidden wisdom of the need for obstacles to heighten libido, as Freud (1912) would put it, have long been recognised intuitively, even thousands of years ago, as paradoxically necessary to maintain the intimacy of the human couple. One very religious Jewish man in his fifties told me, that after 24 years of marriage, during their period of separation, he still found himself lusting after his wife. “When she walks down the passage”, he told me, “I find myself staring at her ass!” In other words, where familiarity may breed contempt, ‘otherness’ may, paradoxically, breed intimacy.

In the modern context, Perel (2007) agrees with this issue of familiarity leading to disillusionment, when she posits the argument: “Some of America’s best features − 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.” (p. 55-56). The loss of ‘otherness’, in other words, may exact a price, resulting in the experience of 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 since so are the pressures of normal development. As an example of this Freud makes the point: “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” (p.255). Of course, full potency is not only a matter of sexual performance − it is a matter of sexual desire. For women, the waning of her man’s desire may lead to feelings of loss and hence anger, a common clinical complaint in marriages. Equally, when a women’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), that is on the one hand desired, often carries with it, deep anger and resentment. More often than not, a husband will preface his rage at his wife for her neglect of him by stating quite emphatically, as one patient did: “Don’t get me wrong. She’s a great mother. A wonderful mother. But I don’t know where my wife has gone and I want her back!” To which his wife replied: “I can’t stand it when he’s so needy! Why can’t he just man-up?”

More generally, it would seem that desire for the object and idealisation, tensions itself against loss of desire for the object and devaluation. I suspect it is not an exaggeration to suggest that where idealisation was, there devaluation shall follow − because at some level, devaluation or denigration may become a defence against the experience of loss-driven injury. Narcissistic injury is invariably linked to aggression, in the service of protection and restoration. The death drive serves the purpose of this mental immune system. The only remaining question is what form this aggression may take − and that is an individual matter.

Implications for Treatment

Whilst this paper is not intended to carry a detailed clinical discussion, some comments on the implications of these theoretical issues are warranted. This paper interfaces two related themes − namely, individual intrapsychic exchange in coupling and its complex relationship with universal drivers and patterns associated with sexuality; the injury associated with the disillusionment wrought by failures in both these levels leading to narcissistic injury and a death-drive ‘immune’ response aimed at restoration of the mental disequilibrium this wreaks. In my view, it is important in therapy with couples to recognize both these features of coupling and to normalise reactivity that afflicts everyone, whilst understanding the deeper individual psychodynamic contributions that pertains to each couple’s intra-psychic specifics and chemistry. Whilst projections pertain to both levels, one form of these projections are deeply individual and the other are universal and often gender-specific. Often in therapy, being explicit about such differences seems to violate our imperative to maintain neutrality, rather than recognising that some of the needs, frustrations, and injuries are embedded in such universality. As Barratt (2012) importantly reminds us, 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 theorising 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, they add the potential for failure of attunement and hence injury over time. If one’s mind, in its embodied form, is not fully recognised by those whom one loves, injury does tend to ensue. By the same token, if the gendered sexuality of the body loses its value to one’s partner, injury and disequilibrium tend to result.

Because of this reality, there is no escape in the therapy room from aggression in virtually every couple encounter. Spouses express it in various ways but invariably beneath the anger is hurt of some sort. As argued previously, it is meaningless to think about aggression without simultaneously thinking about narcissistic injury, since the aggression has aims that are more usefully understood than its effects. Disequilibrium is induced by either personal unconscious associations to something experienced as injurious to the ego or reflecting some universal experience of disillusionment induced in the normal oscillations of the instinct, hormonal systems, libido-death drive recalibration, or developmental pressures such as having a child or getting older. The distinction between these is artificial (since there is, evidently, always an ‘I’ experiencing these challenges), but they are also important to differentiate since the personal intra-psychic can trend to reflecting something that needs to be changed whereas the latter trends toward something that needs to be normalised and embraced.

Therapeutic gains are both expedited and enhanced, in my experience, by understanding that the effects of aggression often stand in contradiction to its intent and that many cases get stuck because of a failure to distinguish these. Shifting therapeutic focus from the effects to the intent in one’s reflections and interpretations enables deeper meaning to be made of the hurts and failures that accompany being in a relationship. Whilst at one level, it may seem that this paper is much ado about nothing new and that it is obvious that interpretation of anger invariably involves understanding the underlying hurts. But in my experience this is often not the case and that a full understanding of aggression and embodiment seems to often remain curiously absent and hence not brought to bear in the service of the struggling couple.

In Conclusion:

In concluding, a few comments are in order. My understanding of aggression and its link to injury is not intended to understand only pathological relating, but also to understand the normal waning of attachment and the gradual ascending of the death-drive whose aim is less about causing damage as it is about restoration and preservation − with time, in the direction 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 is born. In some respects, injury is in-built to the normal vicissitudes of attachment and the bewildering sense of loss that accompanies this disillusionment might benefit in the consulting room from normalising it for couples consumed by a sense of failure that may be no more a failure than is ageing of any sort. The bite of the tooth fairy is never nice. Out of disillusion too often comes dissolution. But 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.

Or, as Jennifer Batch wrote in her poem entitled Disillusionment Falls Away:

“From dream into nightmare through to realityWhere abundant possibilities lay in waiting to be claimed”

References

Barratt, B. (2012). What is Psychoanalysis? 100 Years after Freud’s ‘Secret Committee’. London: Routledge.Coleman, W. (2005). The intolerable other: The difficulty of becoming a couple. Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Couple Work, 1, 56-71. 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.). On Sexuality. The Penguin Freud Library, 7. London: 1993Freud, S. (1914). On Narcissism: An Introduction. In: J. Strachey (Ed.) On Metapsychology. The Penguin Freud Library, 11, London: 1993.Freud, S.(1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In: J. Strachey (Ed.) On Sexuality. The Penguin Freud Library, 7, London: 1993.Freud, S. (1921). Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. In: J. Strachey (Ed.), Civilisation, Society and Religion, 12. London: 1991.Freud, S. (1923). The Ego and the Id. In: J. Strachey (Ed.). On Metapsychology. The Penguin Freud Library, 11. London: 1993Freud, S. (1924). The Economic Problem of Masochism. In: J. Strachey (Ed.). On Metapsychology. The Penguin Freud Library, 11. London: 1993Freud, S. (1940). An Outline of Psychoanalysis. In: J. Strachey (Ed.). Historical and Expository Works on Psychoanalysis. The Penguin Freud Library, 15. London: 1993.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. London: Karnac.Klein, M. (1963). On the sense of loneliness. In M. Masud & R. Kahn (Eds.), The Psycho-analysis of Children. 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.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 Archeology 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

The Benign Intention of Hate

The Couple and its Instincts

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

The Immunizing Function of Aggression (in the Couple): an article for new therapists

The Phallic Container in the Post-Partum Couple

The Curious Case of La Petite Mort