Reversing the Negative Cycle: Interpreting the Mutual Influence of Adaptive, Self-Protective Measures in the Couple

Abstract

The author discusses factors that shape the subjective meanings each member of the couple gives to marital interactions and the intersubjective disjunctions between the partners that can result. These include adaptive, self-protective mechanisms, the wish for mastery, guilt, and defense against grieving. Through illuminating these factors, psychoanalytic couple therapy can enhance empathic awareness of how each partner's attitudes, actions, and once adaptive defenses can actualize the other's transference expectations and evoke his or her painful and traumatic childhood relationships and experiences.

Psychoanalytic Couple Therapy: Classical Style

“…Freud's use of the word cling points to the underlying separation problems inherent in these "interminable" unions. Berkowitz (1999), in reviewing some trends in psychoanalytic couple therapy, emphasized how unconscious guilt is often neglected in our understanding of battling couples.…”

Revisiting the Sadomasochistic Marriage: TheParanoid-MasochisticRelationship

“…Thus, Berkowitz (1999) suggests that clinicians frequently underestimate a couple's guilt, which may manifest in self-defeating behaviors. He also notes that the interpretation of the self-protective aspects of a couple's motivation is often insufficient to produce full therapeutic change.…”

“…Instead, bringing into awareness the guilt that underlies self-sabotage for the couple may be necessary. By guilt, Berkowitz (1999) is referring to the feeling that one deserves to suffer or be punished. He believes that while guilt feelings may be conscious or preconscious, it is unconscious guilt that often causes couples the greatest difficulty.…”

“…The manifestations of unconscious guilt and self-defeating provocations in the couples that Avery (1977) and Berkowitz (1999) describe, and that each author refers to as sadomasochistic, seem to me to be strikingly similar to the kind manifested by the individual patients described by Maltas (1998) andNydes (1963). Like these individual patients, these couples may not be the more commonly known sadomasochistic couples, where one member identifies with the aggressor and attacks the partner, while the other member identifies with the victim and introjects the attacker's blows.…”

Psychodynamic Couple Therapy: A Practical Synthesis

“…The most important writers in the field of psychodynamic couple therapy include (in alphabetical order) Bergler (), Berkowitz (), Dicks (), Donovan (), Gerson (), Hazlett (), Leone (), Livingston (), Ringstrom (, ), Sager (), Scharff and Scharff (), Shaddock (, ), Siegel (, ), Slipp (), D. Stern (), E. Wachtel (), Willi (), Zeitner (), Zinner (), and others who will be cited later. In addition, some non‐psychoanalysts have made important contributions to a depth psychological perspective on couple therapy: Bowen (), Catherall (), Framo (), Greenberg (Greenberg & Goldman, ; Greenberg & Johnson,), Goldman (Greenberg & Goldman, ), Johnson (Greenberg & Johnson, ; Johnson, , ), Middelberg (), Real (), Scarf (), Scheinkman (), Scheinkman and Fishbane (), and Wile (, , , ).…”