Unconscious (Psychology)

After giving an introductory outline of the phenomenology and theoretical aspects of the concept "love affair", the author proceeds to review a number of symptomatic love affairs arising in the lives of a series of female patients during the course of analytically oriented psychotherapy.. The material is presented in its general aspects and in the form of one detailed case history. In subsequent discussion the author attempts to explain the genesis of these love affairs in terms of phase-speciifc conflicts in the patient and certain iatrogenic aspects of the therapy.

Any considerations of object relations theory and love requires a clear understanding of how the term, object relations, is used. In this contribution the concept of the object as a mental representation is emphasized. Developmentally, the evolution of the object cannot be separated from the vicissitudes of the drives. Sensorimotor experience is metaphorically assimilated in terms of pleasure-unpleasure components. Since the object concept develops in this context, it is inextricably linked to the vicissitudes of the drives.

With the help of clinical material obtained from two male patients in therapy at the same time, the concept of the loving father is examined. Both patients presented with a fear of being homosexual. It gradually became clear during the therapy that both of them were searching for a loving father.

The psychoanalytic literature on shame is critically reviewed. A vagueness and incompleteness in formulations is noted which appears to be related to an adherence to the structural and topographical models. Shame is shown to have a clearly defined place in object-relations theory, in particular within the theory of narcissism as developed elsewhere by the author. It is the signal, affective and cognitive, that a move from 'self-narcissism' to 'object-narcissism' is about to occur.

In this paper I examine the interplay of love and aggression in a couple's emotional relationship. I explore the activation of dominant repressed or dissociated object relations with the parental figures, and the unconscious collusion of both partners to enact these past relationships in the present. I then examine the couple's relationship as determined by differences in male and female development, as well as the counterpart of these differences--unconscious moves toward "twinship" and complementarity.

Just as the couple becomes the repository of both partners' conscious and unconscious sexual fantasies and desires, and of their consciously and unconsciously activated internalized object relations, so does the couple activate both partners' conscious and unconscious superego functions. The interaction of the partners' superego over time results in the forging of a new system, which I am calling the couple's superego. The functions of the couple's joint superego structure is described, as are the symptoms of superego pathology in the couple's love life.

The medium of film offers a vivid demonstration of the ongoing tension between conventional morality and mature, passionate love. While film activates mass psychology and therefore conventionality, the erotic in film threatens conventional boundaries. The dialectic thus involved in erotic art in film, the conventional film, and pornography sheds light on the unconscious motivations for accepting or rejecting the erotic.

In this paper, the author explores the difficulties in developing the capacity to fall and remain in love, as shown in a case study of a Holocaust survivor's daughter whose mother lived through the Holocaust as a child. These difficulties arose from the inability of the daughter to go through the mourning processes necessary for the separation from her bereaved mother, as well as from the daughter's fixation on the mother's interminable, unresolved mourning. The daughter exploited her relationships with the love objects in her life to play the role of the victim/persecutor.

The study of sexual boundary violations, through the actual evaluation and treatment of therapists who have engaged in sexual misconduct, reveals that all of us are potentially vulnerable to violations of this nature. A number of lessons can be learned from the detailed examination of these cases. These lessons include the following: (1) There is a difference between the conscious and unconscious intent of the therapist.

Freud made some seriously mistaken assumptions about mature love based on his notion about the role unconscious guilt plays in human affairs. Clinical data are presented here about a young man, who implicated in the suicides of two of his colleagues, was more concerned with the failure of his love affair in college than with guilt for his involvement in the suicides.