Why do those closest to us sometimes wound one another more deeply than anyone else?
Why do conflicts destroy some relationships, while in others they paradoxically become part of the couple’s stability?
From a psychoanalytic perspective, love relationships are never composed of tenderness alone. They always involve:
- aggression
- projections
- unconscious scenarios rooted in childhood
- complex internal conflicts
These forces may undermine a relationship, yet they can also paradoxically sustain it. Psychoanalysis suggests that intimacy in relationships is rarely continuous. Instead, it shifts over time, moving through periods of tension, distance, and restoration.
One of the key phenomena that describes this dynamic is discontinuity in love relationships—periodic distance, conflict, or even temporary separation that may serve a protective function for the couple.
Dr. Otto Kernberg, M.D., argues that the central function of discontinuity explains why some couples may have a steady and durable relationship together with (in spite of or because of) the aggression and violence enacted in their love life. If we categorize nonorganic psychopathology roughly into neurotic, borderline, narcissistic, and psychotic categories, partners coming from different categories of pathology may establish varying degrees of equilibrium that stabilize their relationship while permitting them to enact their world of private madness contained by protective discontinuities.
Throughout many years of living together, a couple's intimacy may be either strengthened or destroyed by enacting certain types of unconscious scenarios that differ from the periodic enactment of ordinary, dissociated past unconscious object relations. These specific, feared, and desired unconscious scenarios are gradually built up by the cumulative effects of dissociative behaviors. The enactments may become highly destructive, sometimes simply because they trigger circular reactions that engulf the couple's love life beyond their intentions and their capability to contain them.
One important type of such unconscious processes is narcissistic conflicts.
Narcissistic conflicts manifest themselves not only in unconscious envy, devaluation, spoiling, and separation but also in the unconscious desire to complete oneself by means of the loved partner, who is treated as an imaginary twin. Didier Anzieu has described the unconscious selection of the love object as a homosexual and/or heterosexual completion of the self: a homosexual completion in the sense that the heterosexual partner is treated as a mirror image of the self. Anything in the partner that does not correspond to that complementing schema is not tolerated.
It has frequently been observed that after many years of living together partners begin to resemble each other even physically; observers often marvel at how two such similar persons found each other. The narcissistic gratification in this twinship relationship, the wedding, we might say, of object love and narcissistic gratification, protects the couple against the activation of destructive aggression. Under less ideal circumstances, such twinship relations may evolve into what is called a “skin” to the couple's relationship—a demand for complete and continuous intimacy that first seems an intimacy of love but eventually becomes an intimacy of hatred.
Thus, a psychoanalytic perspective on love relationships highlights their complex nature: love and aggression, closeness and distance, idealization and disillusionment are constantly intertwined. The capacity of a couple to tolerate these contradictions often determines whether the relationship can not only endure but also develop over time.
(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,
Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy