ABSTRACT
In order to explore and describe the psychological dynamics between partners in a marriage or committed couple relationship, we need to understand the ways in which each person influences the other beyond those that are direct, behavioural, or conscious. Psychoanalytic thinking about the nature of the unconscious and its impact between people is based on a particular understanding of the growth of the mind in the mother–baby relationship, and psychoanalysis has developed a mature theory of how this is replicated in the special situation of the analyst–analysand dyad in psychoanalytic psychotherapy.
