Aggression in the Long-term Relationship and Progressive Emotional Communication

Introduction

The psychoanalysis of couples involves two people with good intentions in fierce battle with their unconscious urge to repeat historically destructive patterns.

We are all familiar with the history of marriage, because throughout human existence and spanning geography, the institution can be split into two eras: before love and after love, which is a very recent revolution in the course of human social history, about 200 years old, and has led to a high rate of divorce. It is not that marital disharmony did not occur before the era of the love marriage; it just did not matter in terms of how the disharmony played out, because marriage had little to do with emotions and much more to do with finances, property, and social status.

Family historian Stephanie Coontz (Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage” [NY: Viking, 2005]) wrote, “Ironically, the fragility of modern marriage stems from the same values that have elevated the marital relationship above all other personal and familial commitments: the concentration of emotion, passion, personal identity, and self-validation in the couple relationship and the attenuation of emotional attachments and obligations beyond the conjugal unit.”

Along with the “fragility” that comes with love comes the need for couples to learn how to strengthen their bond by learning how to talk and stop pretending, to give up the illusion that marriage will cure their problems. The solution to emotional fragility is talking, constructively. Most of the couples who come into analysis, who were madly in love when they got together, then wonder

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why they have nothing much to say to each other within two years, are helped through analysis to understand the consequences of “concentrating” all of their “emotion, passion” and, especially, “personal identity and self-validation” into their marriage.

The closer we are to someone, the more intense our feelings are, both positive and negative. The contortions that people, who are afraid of their own aggression and others’ toward them, go through to conceal their negative feelings do not work. Freud wrote, “He who has eyes to see and ears to hear will be able to convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips. Betrayal oozes out of him at every pore” (S.E., Vol. 7, pp. 77-78).

There are basically three categories of defenses that people suffer from and bring into their long-term relationships in an attempt to conceal their aggression rather than acknowledge it. These are symptoms, substances, and psychosis.

Symptoms Case Study

D grew up in a working class home with two uninterested, unhappy parents and an older brother who was allowed to torture him and rule the household. D’s mother would use him for sympathy and companionship without protecting him from his father or brother. That is, she took and he gave.

He reported in analysis that, as a child, he built an elaborate cardboard house under the dining table where he would isolate himself for hours. D survived childhood by becoming a scholar, hiding out in academia and becoming a tenured professor at a young age. His inner life remained unequipped to deal with relationships.

When he met E, an instructor at the same university, he thought he had found a kindred spirit, an intellectually brilliant woman who had a similarly neglectful childhood and had survived by isolating herself from her family. They seemed to each other (unconsciously—they never spoke about this) like twins who would be able to depend on each other for nurturing without having to

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give any back.

In their second year as a couple E injured her hand badly and was suddenly forced to depend on D for everything—sympathy, nursing, fetching medicine and food—everything D had counted on not ever being needed for. At that point he became unconsciously resentful and though he provided E with the things she needed it stimulated memories of his mother; he became exhausted and shut down emotionally, to punish her for needing him. After that incident they went on to get married, but he is still shut down, having never discussed with her his disillusionment and resentment. His symptom, the substitute for discussion, is to lock himself in his study (cardboard box) and avoid interacting. There are times when he will not even answer casual questions E asks him and just ignores her completely. Their sex life also ended after E’s injury and has yet to resume.

Substance Abuse Case Study

X was raised by an alcoholic father and a cold, abusive mother, who fought viciously in front of X and his two brothers. X took on the role, as a child, of literally standing between his mother and his father while they screamed at each other, begging his mother to be quiet so that his father could go and “sleep it off.” His two brothers would disappear during their parents’ fights and he was left alone, blaming his mother for inflaming the screaming fights and protecting his drunken father. He reported in analysis remembering lying in bed at night praying that his parents would not get divorced.

X grew up with typical “survivor” mentality, believing that anything even the slightest bit better than what he had experienced as a child was enough to make for a good life. Of course this always fails because anything a little bit better than a violent, abusive, alcoholic childhood is not enough to make a good marriage.

X married a cold and girlish woman, whose own father was an alcoholic. Because of X’s (unconscious) repetition compulsion, he had married a woman who was uninterested in their children,

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and in denial about her negative feelings and his. He became an alcoholic to medicate his disappointment in her controlling and unloving behavior. His wife had a pathological need to be seen by the world as warm and caring, unlike his mother who did not care what anyone thought about her. X’s alcoholism was the “functioning” type whereas his father’s interfered with his work and home life. X imagined that he had succeeded in leaving his childhood behind. Since this was not the reality, and he would not admit it for several years into analysis, he became depressed and his substance abuse increased.

Psychosis Case Study

R, a woman who identified with her psychotic mother, grew up suffering from psychotic beliefs that impeded her adult life. Although R was able to marry and raise two children without appearing to be as psychotic as her own mother, she was afflicted with a deeply entrenched thought disorder. She suffered from extreme agoraphobia, was hospitalized for anxiety when her second child was born, and was most destructive in terms of her marriage—splitting. She turned everyone in the world into either all good or all bad. Since she was incapable of imagining that she had married a “bad” man, or seeing reality, that he was both good and bad, she turned him into all-good and displaced her hatred of him onto “men.”

All of her negative emotions leaked into political issues, about which she became completely informed, an obsessive reader, especially the news, and became a strident pseudo-feminist whose rage at her husband took the form of spouting at parties and other social occasions (she could leave the house if someone else drove) about the injustices and inequalities that “women” endure at the hands of men. All women are good, strong, and smart victims of all men, who are all evil masters. Being unconscious, she did this seemingly political discourse loudly, in public, in front of her husband. Then in analysis she wondered why he didn’t desire her, why he fell asleep on the couch after dinner, why he shut down whenever possible.

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The Language of Emotional Progressive Communication

Couples have only one healthy choice to manage aggression, avoid becoming symptomatic and estranged from their partners, and create a harmonious marriage: discussions, about everything—discussions that modern analysts call progressive emotional communication.

In order to be equipped to have these discussions, couples have to be willing to abandon the three most common ways used to deal with unpleasant feelings stimulated by their partners: defensiveness, criticizing, and avoidance. In other words, couples have to learn how to listen and how to respond so that a good fight ends with the couple loving each other again instead of hating each other more. In order to do this, the couple has to help each other stick with an unpleasant discussion until it is resolved.

What psychoanalysis contributes to the topic that is missing from all of the popular self-help books is an acknowledgment of the power of the unconscious, which fiercely fights our well-intentioned, conscious goals. In essence, there are more than two people having a fight. There is a person fighting with his unconscious to have a logical, loving discussion, and his partner and her unconscious battling her for the right to have a constructive discussion.

The purpose of modern analysis is to help people put their feelings into words, not actions. In the first phase the couple will not be able to have the discussion at all. In the second phase of analysis the unconscious will alter or modify the words so that the effect is weakened. Usually the way in which the unconscious alters the direct communication suggested by the therapist makes things worse, not better. Instead of saying, “I’m afraid,” the patient’s unconscious induces her to say something to inflame her partner, leaving her more afraid. In the third phase the couple is ready to have a progressive emotional discussion.

The Foundation of Progressive Communication

In order for a couple to begin having civilized, progressive

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discussions, they have to learn first to tolerate and accept difference and the need to control. This might seem like a natural skill that we all learn growing up, but unfortunately, many of us are not raised to tolerate difference. More people than not are greatly disappointed to find that the partner they chose is not their clone. Much of the analysis of couples, besides learning the language of progressive emotional communication, involves helping people not only to tolerate and accept their differences but also to enjoy the differences.

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