I’ve been reading Judith Pickering’s wonderful book “Being In Love: Therapeutic Pathways Through Psychological Obstacles to Love”.
I’ve been long interested in our ‘heroic task’ as humans, that is, how we come to understand who we are. My own relationship, alongside Dr Pickering’s very sage guidance, been clearly illuminated for me that fundamental to the task of understanding our self, is the task of understand our self-in-relationship. When you start, as I do, mired in the “malignant dowries” of personal history, its an truly arduous, painful task, but it seems without doubt, to be one of the most absolute import.
“The heroic task of the real fairytale is to overcome the phantasies, internal demons, monsters and witches of our perverse imagination. Becoming who we are may be a relational activity. Yet such transformations in love are obstructed by the ways we unwittingly conscript each other to play allotted roles in falsely stereotypic and unconscious psychological scenarios. These scenes create an entangled web of projections obscuring the real situation and preventing authentic intimacy from flourishing. Such scenes involve an interpenetration of unconscious defensive, projective and traumatic material, the malignant dowries that each person brings to the new relationship.
True love may be possible, but it as difficult as it is rare. Its path does not always run smoothly, but goes off course with alarming regularity. Its achievement is never once and for all, requires continual renewal, and is dependent upon how well any two lovers can understand, work through and disentangle the webs of mutual projections and false imputations imposed upon each other…
The word ‘pathos’ etymologically means sorrow and suffering. Love’s pathologies give rise to the sense of dis-ease and discontent in our relationships. We do not feel at ease with each other or ourselves. In love we suffer daily irritations, not getting what we want, getting what we don’t want. We miss the bull’s eye of true love through misinterpretations, mistimings and mismatches. We suffer the discomforts of being on the receiving end of unwelcome feelings towards us, and the pain of having our feelings and desires not met in the way we want. Discontent might itself be a disease.
As the Buddha, the Stoics, Augustine, Spnioza, Schopenhauer, Freud and Klein and many others have understood, from the perspective of egocentricity we feel craving for that which brings us pleasure, and antipathy for that which brings pain. It is this egoic core that is the real enemy of true love. Destructiveness in relationships can border on the psychopathic, fuelled by unconscious projections, envy, hostility, blaming, shaming, denigrating, demonizing or retaliation…
The sense of security, continuity and trust afforded by a mutually made commitment to journey together in a partnership can allow such a relationship to function as a space in which partners may further their psychological development, re-encounter and rework areas of developmental arrest and come to know and integrate the different parts of themselves more fully…
In committed and fulfilling adult relationships it is not so much about each partner providing a sense of security and containment for the other, but the creation of a psychological atmosphere of safety and refuge, a container, around both partners. Empathy and mind-mindedness, or the ability to see others as subjects in their own right with thoughts and feelings of their own, are also vital components of creating a secure base in close relationships. When couples have a sense of connection they hold the relationship and the well-being of its members in mind continually. One might call this ‘relationship-mindedness’.
[Couples in therapy often present with] unprocessed primitive anxieties which have never been worked through. Bion called such primitive bits, ‘beta elements’. These are untransformed emotional experiences and sensory impressions of a very raw and inchoate form.
The mindless repetition and compulsive nature of many marital rows are symptomatic of the activation of interlocking systems of mutual projections of beta elements or undigested traumatic material. Each partner has been triggered into their respective unconscious complexes and is swamped by unconscious anxieties, memories of fear, hurt and misunderstanding. Each urgently attempts to lodge unprocessed beta material into the other in order to rid themselves of its incoherent, chaotic and anxiety-ridden nature.
The therapeutic space as a ‘borrowed container’, as well as the therapist’s capacity and willingness to stand such unprocessed material – to ponder it, experience its re-renactments, digest and reflect on it – enables the couple to feel some reassurance that it is not so unspeakably loathsome and dreadful, it can be thought about. This enables the couple to introject a capacity to contain difficult material and gradually metabolise and modify it into alpha elements…
This transformation creates a link between preconceptions and new information from the world of others. This gives rise to further elaborations in the process of thinking, leading to the formulation of intuition, insight and finally coherent theory-making. All this arises gradually and thoughtfully out of a situation which began as utter confusion. It is this capacity, however psychologically hard-won, which enables a couple to dismantle their co-constructed prisons of projections…
The therapists capacity to perceive and receive the tangles mass of material, tolerating not knowing, while seeking with every fibre of his or her being to understand, is itself part of the containing function couples are seeking. This affords the couple the possibility of realizing that their terrible anxieties, lack of coherence and confusion might perhaps after all be something that has the possibility of clarity. To jump to a hasty conclusion or make a premature and simplistic interpretation curtails this process…
Alpha function refers here to the therapist’s capacity to sit with an incoherent mass of chaotically loaded, primitive emotional material (beta elements) emanating from both partners and creating a toxic mutually projective confusion. This is related to negative capability, the capacity to observe a mass of confusing emotional material without jumping to a hasty conclusion, to tolerate not knowing while seeking to know. This containment is modelled to the couple… Frustration and the capacity to sit with it, rather than act out primitive emotional states, generate a capacity for thoughtful consideration. This transmutes the material under consideration into alpha elements. Then gradually dream thoughts, dreams, myths, fantasies and narratives emerge out of a cultural unconscious. These gradually lead to preconceptions and first inklings of what is going on. Further seminal discussions between the analytic trio (mating of ideas) lead to conception, concept and thence theory, in fact to organised thinking… the ability to gestate such a process, to deepen one’s understanding, without jumping to premature action, leads to the ability to construct preliminary hypotheses, notation, attention, inquiry and thence to mindful, considered action and the final revelation (uncovering) of truth. All put together, publication, as in a well-thought articulation of the emotional situation may result. The process involves: observation, containment, reflection, incorporation, comparison, analysis, mating with other ideas, conception, gestation, and final expression of a well-thought and well-timed interpretation…
Love’s therapeutic depends on increasing our capacity to entertain, like a holy guest, presentiments of truth behind the projections and fabrications. It is to take up an ‘as if’ stance, reception to a niggling doubt that we probably have failed to properly understand a situation, that our perception is clouded, and to factor this into our interactions and reflections. We can then ponder, be curious and receptive to new insights that may dawn as tentative hypothesis, entertained as such. It is the language of uncertainty coupled with enquiry, wanting to discover the truth as through a glass darkly. We increase our psychic capacity to contain and psychically metabolise what was uncontainable: primitive anxieties, dreads, fears of falling to bits, fears of death and destruction. We begin to intuit faint glimmerings of the real person under all our obscurations….
If relational work in couple therapy can be envisioned as a process of aletheia, aiming to uncover the real situation and person behind the mass misconstructions, there is a bewildering array of ways that we misapprehended each other. Projections, identifications, mutual projective identifications, extractive introjections, miscommunications, misinterpretations, fixed ideas, illusions, delusions, idealizations, denigrations, constellations of internal object relations and impositions of relational templates all create an inter-personal mire of Maya, of illusion…
The more we can become aware of our particular unconscious complexes and object relations and how they overlay our perceptions of each other and interfere with our love lives, the more we can factor them in to our healthy scepticism about the veracity of our emotional reactions to others. We gradually learn to identify and see through such templates and projections. It might be like seeing through glasses that we know are scratched, dirty or rose-coloured or have distorted lenses, but it has the advantage of loosening the fixity of projective perception. This requires arduous psychological work such as in an analysis, at the end of which we hopefully find ourselves less under the sway of such endogamous forces or have some insight into what might be going on beneath the surface. At the very least we are able to ask ourselves difficult questions concerning the hidden factors governing our choices and perceptions.”
(from Chapters 5- 7)
As a corollary, a great quote from psychologist Heinz Kohut on love and acceptance (from How To Be An Adult in Relationships);
“The more secure a person is regarding his (sic) own acceptability, the more certain his sense of who he is, and the more safely internalised his system of values, the more self confidently and effectively will he be able to offer his love … without undue feelings of rejection and humiliation.”