A Couple State of Mind

Psychoanalysis of Couples and the Tavistock Relationships Model

Mary Morgan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429835698
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

A Couple State of Mind is a much anticipated book aimed atan international audience of practitioners, students and teachers of psychoanalytic couple therapy, describes the Tavistock Relationships model of couple psychoanalytic psychotherapy, drawing on both historical and contemporary ideas, including the author's own theoretical contributions. The book references contemporary influences of other psychoanalytic approaches to couples, particularly from an international perspective. It will be invaluable for all students learning about psychoanalytic work with couples for other psychoanalytic practitioners interested in this field.

Chapter I

A psychoanalytic understanding of the couple relationship

Past, present and future¹

The understanding of the couple relationship has been at the heart of Tavistock Relationships since its inception in 1948 (then called the Family Discussion Bureau). Set up in post-war Britain amid political and social concern about family and marital distress, there was growing recognition that psychological as well as material help was needed. The pioneering family caseworkers turned to psychoanalysis to help understand the conflicted and distressed couple relationships they were encountering.² Over the last 70 years, this work has developed into a specific psychoanalytic theoretical and clinical approach. As this thinking developed, it has been influenced by a broad base of analytic thinking, but particularly from the 1990s, by post-Kleinian ideas. The model that has evolved concerns the complex unconscious interplay between the two people in a relationship, their internal object relations, unconscious phantasies, conflicts, anxieties and defences, and how these interact with another psyche and create something new.

There are several strands to this thinking that have developed and had prominence at different periods in the history of Tavistock Relationships, but all form part of the current body of thought. These I have conceptualised as the influence of the past on the relationship, the nature of the relationship developmentally and dynamically in the present, and the potential for the relationship in the future. Central to the Tavistock Relationships technique is the therapist’s ‘couple state of mind’. These areas, brought together here in this overview of Tavistock Relationships theory, will be elaborated further in subsequent chapters.

The influence of the past

This concerns the unconscious determinants that bring the couple together based on their past experience, and how their new relationship is shaped by these, and is perhaps set up to repeat, manage or work through unresolved early conflicts and anxieties. Pincus, for example, wrote:

Although there is often a wish to start afresh in marriage and to escape the frustrations or disappointments of unsatisfactory early relationships, the strong unconscious ties to the first love-objects may help determine the choice of partner with whom the earlier situation can be compulsively re-enacted.

(Pincus, 1962, p. 14)

The meaning of the unconscious choice of partner and the unconscious contract that the couple sets up, and the projective system in which each partner splits off, projects into and carries aspects of the other are analysed. In more defensive relationships, there is the wish to keep these aspects located in the other, but in developmental relationships, there is more flexibility and these aspects of the self have the potential to be reintegrated, leading to growth in the individual and the relationship. Early clinical publications traced in detail the meaning of the object choice, the couple fit and the complex unconscious arrangements the couple made to find equilibrium in their relationship.

The defensive version of a couple’s transference relationship – a repetition of an early, unresolved relationship or internal versions of this – was noted by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. He gives examples of individuals whose relationships all seem to have the same outcome, whereby a similar object is repeatedly chosen, but nothing is worked through; no new relationship develops. For example, he speaks of, “the lover each of whose love affairs with a woman passes through the same phases and reaches the same conclusion” (1920, p. 22). He says:

If we take into account observations such as these, based upon behaviour in the transference and upon the life-histories of men and women, we shall find courage to assume that there really does exist in the mind a compulsion to repeat which over-rides the pleasure principle.

(Freud, 1920, p. 22)

In this sense, the new relationship becomes a version of an old relationship.

What these early clinicians understood was that there was often both the wish to repeat and the wish to create something new; for example, Balint observed that:

One of the most striking, and perhaps encouraging, things that psychoanalysts have discovered, is that people never give up trying to put things right for themselves and for the people they love. Even when they may appear to be doing just the reverse, we often discover that what appears to be the most desperate and useless behaviour can be understood as an attempt to get back to something that was good in the past, or to put right something that was unsatisfactory … We could say then, that in marriage we unconsciously hope to find a solution to our intimate and primitive problems.

(Balint, 1993, p. 41)

The relationship is thus seen as potentially containing for the couple in that it can provide an opportunity for working through and development. If the projective system is flexible enough, parts of the self are not lost, but are held by the other and within the safety of the relationship and, over time, can be reintrojected. Ideally, each partner continues to work through, individuate and develop within the context of the relationship which functions as a psychological container (Colman, 1993a). In this sense, the adult intimate couple relationship provides a special opportunity for the individuals within it to both regress and develop or individuate as some earlier clinicians described,

The marriage relationship provides a containment in which each feels the other to be part of themselves—a kind of joint personality. What at first attracts and is later complained of in the other is often a projection of the disowned and frightening aspects of the self. It might be imagined that the best thing to do with unwanted aspects of the self is to project them onto someone or something and get as far removed as possible. That would, however, be placing a part of oneself in danger of being lost forever, and of losing one’s potential for becoming a more complete person.

(Cleavely, 1993, p. 65)

All these writers speak about the tension between the developmental and the defensive needs inherent in most relationships. But essentially this is quite an optimistic view of the couple relationship as potentially therapeutic, with the capacity to repair the past and enable the individuals in the relationship to work through earlier conflict.

A further important thread in this thinking was the idea of shared unconscious phantasy (Bannister & Pincus, 1965). It was observed that, as well as repeating or reworking the past, couples brought to the relationship shared or similar ways of experiencing the world through unconscious phantasy; as, for example, the unconscious phantasy that love or hate are dangerous. It could be seen how couples set up shared defences to manage shared unconscious phantasies, leading to a relationship in which, for example, strong feelings are avoided and the presenting problem is a lack of intimacy and sex. More recently, very fixed and more deeply unconscious phantasies that grip a relationship have been thought about as unconscious beliefs about being a couple (Britton, 1998c; Morgan, 2010; Humphries, 2015).

Much of this thinking was prevalent from the 1960s to the 1980s and can be seen in the publication, edited by Stanley Ruszczynski, Psychotherapy with Couples (1993a).

The present

There are two areas of thought that relate to the nature of the relationship in the present, which I describe as the relationship developmentally and dynamically in the present.

The couple’s psychic development in becoming a couple

Becoming a couple is part of a process of psychic development from birth onwards, but development can become stuck before becoming a couple is achieved, or if development towards being a couple is not secure. In a paper on being able to be a couple (Morgan, 2005), I describe this process of the couple’s psychic development, in which the relationship to the primary object, working through the Oedipal situation and adolescence are all crucial. Therefore, sometimes as couple therapists we ask what kind of couple exists in the present; do the partners feel part of a couple and, if so, what kind of couple is it?

It could be that the relationship is set up unconsciously to create an idealised version of a mother–baby dyad. Or there may be problems in being able to take a step into being an adult couple because of difficulties relinquishing an earlier stage of psychic development, such as the adolescent sense of autonomy. It is not infrequent to see couples try to create a perfect unity, holding the belief that this is what a couple relationship is, or should be. Equally, we see individuals who are terrified of making the commitment to be a couple, as if they would get lost in, or consumed by, this idea of coupledom.

The relationship dynamically in the present

Unconscious phantasy

Unconscious phantasy, although inevitably having roots in past experience, also shapes the way the couple relates in the present. The way we experience the world, including those we are in a relationship with, is filtered through the lens of unconscious phantasy. In a healthy relationship, this is a two-way process, these unconscious phantasies are brought into contact with external reality and are modified. But couple therapists also observe the partners perceiving the other in repetitively familiar ways and misperceiving each other. It is like another unconscious conversation going on between the couple of which they are not aware.

Some unconscious phantasies dovetail in the couple relationship around significant areas – for example, dependency, separateness or intimacy – and the couple’s unconscious struggle with these areas can be thought of as shared unconscious phantasies. The couple relates to the shared issue in particular ways and can induce the partner to play a part in their phantasy. As this happens both ways around, the couple creates a shared ‘story’. In the process of the couple repeatedly bringing different versions of this story, which the therapist is unconsciously invited to participate in, the therapist can build a picture of the shared unconscious phantasies underlying it.

Unconscious beliefs (Britton, 1998c) are conceptualised as a type of unconscious phantasy that has not developed and remains deep in the unconscious in an unchanging state. Sometimes the couple or one partner holds unconscious beliefs about the meaning of being a couple (Morgan, 2010). The belief is like an ever-present backdrop to the relationship. In the unconscious, it is experienced as a ‘fact’ and therefore does not need to be questioned. The partner not fitting in with the belief is seen as a betrayal which justifies criticism and attack. It is harder to make contact with these beliefs, but when they break through into consciousness, sometimes through an enactment or through making sense of a disturbing, elusive countertransference, the present but unseen backdrop of the belief can for a moment come into sharp focus.

Narcissistic relating

Related to this, but opening up a broader question, is how does a couple manage the reality or fact of being in a relationship with an ‘other’ who is separate and different, but also intimate? This, I think, is both an ordinary difficulty as well as a more narcissistic problem. Being in a relationship (unless the relationship is very fused) faces the individual on a daily basis with the reality of there being another view, a different experience, and perhaps one that cannot easily be engaged with or understood. Even if we consider the couple relationship to be constructed on the basis of object seeking, inevitably there are aspects of the ‘other’ discovered in the relationship that cannot be anticipated and will be challenging – not all of the other can be assimilated, known or even tolerated. This reality can hit some couples hard and it is not uncommon to see couples expending an enormous amount of psychic energy in trying to deny this fact. The therapist’s exploration here is not so much about why two people come together based on unresolved aspects of their past and what the relationship might help them work through or defend against, but rather about the impact on each partner of being with an ‘other’.

For some, the fact of there being a separate other is intolerable and couples resort to primitive defences to try to deal with this situation. One common solution is the attempt to force the other to fit in with one’s own view, resulting in endless conflict, or a sado-masochistic dominance and submission. In another solution, which I have termed a ‘projective gridlock’ (Morgan, 1995), the couple collapses into each other. Here projective identification is used to create a sense of living inside the object, or the object living inside the self, as a way of managing and denying the other’s actual separateness and difference which are experienced as too threatening to the self. We see with couples the way in which this psychic arrangement can create a comfortable sort of fusion, but it usually becomes something that feels very controlling and rigid, trapping the couple in the gridlock they have created.

These ideas about narcissistic relating in the couple were developed in Tavistock Relationships from the 1990s onwards and were described in Intrusiveness and Intimacy in the Couple (Ruszczynski & Fisher, 1995) and in The Uninvited Guest: Emerging from Narcissism towards Marriage (Fisher, 1999). Here, Fisher suggests an ongoing tension between narcissism and the psychological state of marriage:

The capacity to pursue the truth of one’s own experience and also to tolerate the truth of another’s experience, acknowledging and taking the meaning of the other’s experience without losing the meaning of one’s own, especially when these experiences not only differ but conflict, is a major developmental achievement … The achievement of this capacity is not a fixed state and in intimate relationships they are always under pressure of our own infantile wishes, fears, and anxieties to redraw the boundaries between self and other.

(Fisher, 1999, p. 56)

Sharing psychic space was the subject of the Enid Balint Memorial Lecture in 1999 given by Ron Britton. Giving the response to that paper, I was very struck, as I imagine Britton was from his use of metaphors in that lecture, by the parallels between the analytic (patient/analyst) relationship and the intimate couple relationship. In particular, Britton described two kinds of narcissistic relating – ‘adherent’ and ‘detached’ – which can result in disturbing kinds of ‘couple fits’; for example, in which one partner takes all the psychic space in the relationship while the other is hidden or absent (see Chapter 7), or in which each member of the couple acts as opposite poles preventing any kind of intimacy (Britton, 2003a; Nyberg, 2007).

Both Ogden (1994a) and Pickering (2006) describe the individual’s confrontation with what they call “alterity” – the otherness of an ‘other’. This affects our sense of who we are and “does not allow us to remain who we were” (Ogden, 1994a, p. 14). Thus, intimacy is not just about being close while remaining separate – each member of the couple is changed through the encounter with the other. The fact that the way the self is changed cannot be known and is not conscious helps us see why, for some, contemplating a relationship may be experienced as a frightening step into the unknown.

Again, drawing fruitfully on the work of Britton and the development of triangular space, as an outcome of working through the Oedipal situation, couple therapists in different ways have applied this to the couple and to analytic couple therapy. Ruszczynski has written about “the marital triangle” (Ruszczynski, 1998), and more recently, Balfour (2016) has highlighted the special potential of the triangular situation in couple therapy for creating more psychic space. I have proposed the notion of “a couple state of mind” (Morgan, 2001) as something that is often missing in couples seeking help and that can be provided by the therapist and gradually internalised by the couple as an outcome of treatment. The couple state of mind is a third position symbolised by the couple’s relationship itself, and helps the couple to be themselves, while also seeing themselves, in the relationship with the other. This is important in potentially containing the turmoil that is inevitable in an intimate relationship in which both the otherness of the other and the impact o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series editor’s foreword by Susanna Abse
• Foreword by Ronald Britton
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• A couple state of mind
• 1. A psychoanalytic understanding of the couple relationship: Past, present and future
• 2. Assessment
• 3. Engaging a couple in treatment and establishing a couple analytic setting
• 4. Unconscious phantasy, shared unconscious phantasy and shared defence, unconscious beliefs and fantasy
• 5. Transference and countertransference and the living inner world of the couple
• 6. Projective identification and the couple projective system
• 7. Narcissism and sharing psychic space
• 8. The couple’s psychic development, sex, gender and sexualities
• 9. Interpretation
• 10. Endings and the aim of couple therapy
• References
• Index