ABSTRACT
This chapter recounts the "natural" history through certain particularly significant periods chosen for their "mutative" and maturing critical characteristics. It compares several approaches - anthropological, sociological and psychoanalytic. The chapter discusses different stages of a couple namely the meeting, the conditions of choice of partner and modalities of structuring the couple. The romantic meeting causes a trauma, a breaking into the partners' psyches, which produces an upheaval of greater or lesser significance on the economic, dynamic and topographical levels. The romantic object must be at the origin of narcissistic, erotic, tender and aggressive forms of satisfaction, and at the same time contribute to strengthening the Ego and its defensive organization, especially in those areas in which it is rather weak in face of a never entirely controllable balance of drives. The chapter presents a case example of Judith and Albert couple.
