ABSTRACT
Today’s marriage calls for partners to be equals, and privileges commitment based on desire, mutual respect, and personal love, i.e., “I will stay with you as long as it suits my needs.” This contemporary contract replaces marital contracts founded on religion, family traditions, or long-term impersonal pragmatics (e.g., expanding a family’s resources). Partners now say they feel disempowered or have low self-esteem if they stay in an intimate relationship that no longer suits their needs. After the initial romance is over, partners often find themselves embroiled in repetitive, deadening power struggles about different styles of interacting or needs, and question the relationship’s viability. Such differences tend to polarize partners, and if ignored, can transform them into “intimate enemies.” Couples may call this “problems in communication,” but we propose there is much more to it. Psychoanalysis shows us that communication is mostly unconscious, and occurs in an “internal theater” of interpersonal dynamics, where the parts played by people in one’s early life are superimposed on one’s current romantic relationship. We introduce the concepts of projection and “projective identification” as organizing principles for understanding the repetitive polarizations in couples, and describe the development of Dialogue Therapy, as a means to address such polarizations.
