ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the couple's fundamental psychic components. It analyses the full complexity of the conscious, preconscious and unconscious psychic reality present through its "materials" and at work in the organization and functioning of every couple. In addition, it prepares one for the discovery and intelligibility of its "natural" history. Several specialists, among them Bernard Brusset, have detected the existence of two-sidedness of the object present from the beginning in Sigmund Freud's work and generating a fundamental contradiction. The meaning of the notion of object-relation, as it can be established from the stages of Freud's work that are significant in this regard, describes a process going from the drive - and, thereby, from the implicit reference to the deviant sexual act - to object love. By defining primary narcissism as an original libidinal investment of the Ego, Freud was indicating that the Ego is in the place of the object and was consequently describing an object-relation.
