What factors are responsible for creating and maintaining a successful relationship between a man and a woman?

In clinical practice, we often encounter this question at moments when a couple seeks help not because their feelings have disappeared, but because being together has become difficult. Tension between partners increases, accompanied by hurt, irritation, and conflict—yet at the same time, they feel they do not want to lose the relationship.

From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, the longing to become a couple and so fulfill the deep unconscious needs for a loving identification with paternity and maternity in a sexual relationship is as important as the aggressive forces that tend to undermine the couple; and what destroys passionate attachment and may appear to be a sense of imprisonment and “sexual boredom” is actually the activation of aggression, which threatens the delicate equilibrium between sadomasochism and love in a couple’s sexual and emotional relationship.

Often, one partner may begin to experience the relationship as a loss of autonomy, which leads to irritation or withdrawal, while the other perceives this withdrawal as a lack of love, prompting an increased need for contact. From the outside, this may appear as incompatibility, but it in fact reflects the activation of internal conflicts.

But more specific dynamics come into play as emotional intimacy develops. The unconscious wish to repair the dominant pathogenic relationships from the past and the temptation to repeat them in terms of unfulfilled aggressive and revengeful needs determine their reenactment with the loved partner. By means of projective identification, each partner tends to induce in the other the characteristics of the past oedipal and/or preoedipal object with whom he or she experienced conflicts around aggression. 

An example of a pre-Oedipal conflict is a situation in which one partner consistently feels criticized or devalued, while the other insists that they are “only reacting.” On closer examination, it becomes evident that both partners are reenacting familiar roles from their past—for example, that of a strict and demanding parent and a child who continually fails to meet expectations.

If such conflicts were severe, this includes the erotic possibility of reenacting primitive, fantastically combined mother-father images that carry little resemblance to the actual characteristics of the parental objects.

In such cases, a partner begins to perceive the other not as they are, but as “all-powerful,” “cold,” or “engulfing,” responding not to the actual situation but to an internal representation activated within the interaction.

Unconsciously, an equilibrium is established by means of which the partners complement each other’s dominant pathogenic object relation from the past, and this tends to cement the relationship in new, unpredictable ways. 

Some couples remain together for years despite ongoing conflict. Their interaction is painful, yet psychologically “familiar” and recognizable to both partners.

Descriptively, we find that couples in their intimacy interact in many small, “crazy” ways. From an observer’s position, the couple enact a strange scenario, completely different from their ordinary interactions, a scenario that, however, has been enacted repeatedly in the past. This “union in madness” ordinarily tends to be disrupted by the more normal and gratifying aspects of the couple’s relationship in the sexual, emotional, intellectual, and cultural realms. 

It is often observed that, following an intense conflict, partners may quickly restore closeness, as if nothing had happened, which from the outside appears as a rapid shift in states—from distance to intimacy.

In fact, a normal capacity for discontinuity in their relationship plays a central role in maintaining it.

The capacity to temporarily step back, tolerate a pause, and return to contact without disrupting the bond is a key factor that allows a couple not only to withstand conflict but also to integrate it into their shared experience.

Thus, the stability of a couple is defined not by the absence of conflict, but by the partners’ ability to tolerate, reflect on, and gradually integrate the aggressive and repetitive patterns that emerge in intimacy.

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(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,

Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy

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