ABSTRACT
Choosing a partner encompasses the deepest experience of human existence, the search for physical intimacy and emotional closeness to another human being with whom we hope to find mutual love and understanding. We could say that we search for what we long for. Either we hope to regain what we imagine we had at the beginning of life, a blissful state of wellbeing in symbiotic union with a perfect mother, the nursing couple. Or we may hope to gain in a new couple that which was missing in the original one of mother and baby. Yet as adults we must also consciously maintain a sense of separateness from our partner that we have painfully acquired by giving up the symbiotic mother-baby relationship as we grow through the different physical and emotional phases of the life-cycle from infancy to adolescence.
