In the course of family life, every couple repeatedly faces the need to establish, reassess, or restore its boundaries:
- between themselves and their children,
- between their private world and the broader social environment,
- between individual time and their shared history.
These boundaries can be both protective and destructive. They may sustain intimacy, yet they can also generate isolation, envy, and concealed aggression. Within this intricate field of interaction, the deepest psychological mechanisms emerge — from unconscious guilt to regressive tendencies, from narcissistic identifications to the fear of death.
Dr. Otto Kernberg, M.D., note that one of the ubiquitous manifestations of unconscious guilt over the implicitly rebellious and defiant quality of any intimate relationship (representing oedipal fulfillment) is the couple's not daring to maintain firm boundaries of intimacy in relation to their children.
The proverbial absence of a lock on the bedroom door may symbolize the parents' unconscious guilt over sexual intimacy and their unconscious assumption that parental functions should replace sexual ones. This regressive fantasy, projected onto the children as a fear of their reactions to being excluded from the parental bedroom, reflects the underlying fear of identifying with the parental couple in the primal scene and the unconscious collusion between the two parents in abdicating from fully identifying with their own parents.
Another boundary is with the network of couples that constitutes ordinary social life. Relationships with other couples are normally infiltrated with eroticism; among the friends and their spouses in unconscious collusion are the feared rivals and the desired and forbidden sexual objects. The teasingly exciting and forbidden boundaries among couples are the typical settings within which direct and reverse triangulations are played out.
The boundary between the couple and the group is always a combat zone. "Static warfare" is represented by the group's pressure to mold the couple into its image and is reflected in conventional morality—in ideological and theological ritualization of love, commitment, marriage, and family tradition. From this viewpoint, the couple that exists from early adolescence or even from childhood on, brought together by their relatives, sanctioned by universal benevolent perception, actually lives in a symbolic prison, although the couple may escape into a secret love relationship. The mutual temptations and seductions in the network of adult couples represent a more dynamic warfare, but also, at times, potential salvation for individuals and couples entrapped in relationships that are drowning in mutual resentment and aggression.
The group needs the couple for its own survival, for the reassurance that an oedipal triumph, breaking away from the anonymous crowd, is possible. And the group envies and resents the couple's success as contrasted with the individual's loneliness in that anonymous crowd.The couple, in turn, needs the group to discharge its aggression into the environment. Projective identification not only operates within the couple but in subtle ways includes third and fourth parties as well.
In this understanding, the analyst can also become part of the patient’s complex psychological game: the analyst becomes the repository of the aggression against the marital partner, and the patient withdraws into a "saved" relationship with the partner while abandoning the relationship with the analyst.This is a particular example of the more general phenomenon of the "lavatory" analyst.A couple's intimate friends who may serve that function are often not aware that they have become the carriers of the aggression that would otherwise become intolerable for the couple.
A couple that seems to be functioning well may evoke inordinate envy within unstructured social groups, such as extended large travel groups, political parties, professional organizations, or communities of artists. The envy that is usually kept under control by the rational and mature aspects of interpersonal relationships and friendships among a network of couples becomes immediately apparent in such groups. The couple's unconscious awareness of this envy may take the form of guilt-ridden public mutual attacks to soothe those who are envious or external behavior of defiant total harmony while mutual aggression remains hidden from public view. Sometimes the partners manage to hide from others how close their relationship really is.
And a third boundary, represented by the dimension of time, is the frame for both the full development of a couple's life as such and the limited nature of that life because of death and separation. Death becomes an important consideration for couples in later years. Fear of aging and illness, fear of becoming unattractive to the partner, fear of becoming excessively dependent on the other, fear of being abandoned for somebody else, and the unconscious tendency to defy or deny the reality of time—for example, by reckless neglect of one's physical health or that of the partner—may become the field within which aggression from all sources is played out. Here, concern and mutual responsibility derived from ego and superego functions may play a major role in protecting the couple's survival, in contrast to the unconscious collusion with dangerous self-defeating patterns, as in neglecting illness or financial irresponsibility.
Men may be particularly sensitive to the aging process in women, much more so than women in their relation to men, because of an unconscious connection between idealization of the surface of mother's body as one origin of eroticism and fear of the content of mother's body as an expression of unconscious projection onto her of primitive aggressive tendencies. This sensitivity may sexually inhibit men (and, insofar as they fear being sexually less attractive, also women) in advanced stages of their life, reactivating or reinforcing oedipal prohibitions against their sexuality. The affirmation of a couple's sexual intimacy when they are advanced in age is a last test of their sexual freedom.The common denial of sexual life in the elderly is the final edition, so to speak, of the child's efforts to deny the parents' sexuality; it is also the final edition of the parents' guilt associated with their own sexuality. Concern for the loved companion of a lifetime may become an increasingly important factor in mediating and controlling the couple's enactment of dissociated aggression.
The changes of power and authority related to changes in a couple's prestige, income, and other developments having to do with profession and work not only may affect the emotional equilibrium but, paradoxically, may often represent the unforeseen effects of unconsciously determined factors. A classic example is the nurse who puts her husband through medical school, secure in her role as a maternal provider while gratifying his dependency needs. When he later is a successful physician, he resents his dependency on mother and searches for a relationship in which he is the dominant father to a little girl-mistress. His wife struggles with her resentment over the loss of her maternal function for him and the unconscious resentment toward powerful men (penis envy) activated by his professional success.
Or a narcissistic man establishes a relationship with an adoring, inhibited, unsophisticated girl and stimulates her to study and work so that she can live up to his expectations for a narcissistic twinship, only to discover that her blossoming activates his deep envy of women and resentment of her independence. He subsequently devalues her, and their relationship is destroyed.
But time does not operate only destructively. The search for reactivation of past conflicts to heal wounds may be successful in that love can be maintained in spite of the violence of mutual aggression; the survival of the couple may expose the fantastic, exaggerated nature of unconscious fears surrounding repressed or dissociated aggression. To be able to attack one's partner sadistically and yet witness the survival of his or her love; to be able to experience in oneself the transition from relentless rage and devaluation to guilt, mourning, and repair—these are invaluable experiences for the couple. When sexual intimacy and pleasure incorporate the reparative efforts linked to such awareness, guilt, and concern, then sexual excitement and emotional intimacy increase, together with the couple's commitment to joint responsibility for their lives
Emotional growth implies an expanding identification with all the stages of life, bridging the boundaries that separate age groups. The accumulated experiences of a shared life include mourning the loss of one's parents, of one's youth, of a growing past left behind, of a future becoming remorselessly restricted. A joint life becomes the repository of love, a powerful force that provides continuity in the face of the discontinuities of daily existence.
In later life, faithfulness to the other becomes faithfulness to the internal world.
Awareness of boundaries, acceptance of one’s own aggression, and the ability to integrate it into loving relationships open the path toward mature intimacy—where care is not a sign of weakness, and closeness is not a threat to one’s sense of self.
(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,
Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy