A French view of the couple
We have the pleasure of publishing a guest post by Eric Smadja a French author, psychiatrist, couples psychoanalyst and anthropologist, which is an extract from his book The Couple: A Pluridisciplinary Story recently published in English by Routledge . Eric Smadja will be at the Freud Museum in London the 6 November 2016.
From page 34 to 36 in The Couple: A Pluridisciplinary Story, Routledge, London, 2016
My view of the couple
For me, the couple is a historically and socio-culturally determined, living and composite – sexual-bodily, socio-cultural and psychic – reality with diverse and variable interrelationships. It involves several ambivalently transferential figures playing multiple roles within this inter-transferential dynamic organization determined by a compulsion of repetition of “infantile prototypes”. Inspired by Freud on the subject of analytic transference, I maintain that the couple creates and constitutes an inter-transferential neurosis, while nevertheless, presenting psychotic virtualities, in particular during critical periods and events that then reactivate each one of the partners’ depressive and paranoid-schizophrenic positions. This inter-transferential neurosis unfolds and evolves in accordance with a complicated temporality combining historical and socio-cultural, bodily and psychic temporality, the latter being multiple, composed of progressive, regressive movements, fixations, repetition compulsion, but also of after the fact. In addition, every couple’s becoming is inevitably regularly marked by mutative and maturing critical stages. Ambivalently invested, the couple is then structurally and dynamically as conflictual as it is critical.
The couple’s sexual –bodily reality involves two human beings, and their sexual bodies, but also two “psychosomatic organizations” living together with implicit or explicit plans “to reproduce”, thus participating in the vast program of preservation of the species. It is a matter, therefore, of a biological unit of procreation. These two sexual bodies and “psychosomatic organizations” communicate with one another in accordance with varied verbal and non-verbal modes: mimetic-gestural, behavioral, fantasized and sexual. Vis-à-vis the other person’s body there are: reciprocal flows of drive investments (narcissistic, erotic, tender and aggressive); representations (conscious, preconscious and unconscious); projective and identificatory movements mobilizing the psychic bisexuality of each partner, which participate in the elaboration of a “psycho-bodily pairing”, or rather of a “fantasy of psycho-bodily pairing”.
For its part, the sexual act would, in particular, realize the group fantasy of an “imaginary common body”, bisexual, unconscious, fantasized body. Moreover, it actualizes the regressive desire for narcissistic union, conferring upon both a state of narcissistic completeness.
Its socio-cultural reality is characterized by the presence of two individuals living together and constituting a social unit of economic production and cooperation, of social reproduction, and of child raising, for the couple that has become parental. Inspired by Bion (“work group”) 1953 I see them as forming a “work couple” ensuring its material means of existence. Finally, they belong to a social group, occupy a position in the social structure, are endowed with roles and functions. Their couple can be institutionalized by marriage as well as by other forms of social recognition. . They thereby elaborate together a conjugal “culture” and “identity” (Smadja, 2011)
Finally, its psychic reality consists of fundamental psychic components ensuring its “psychic consistency”, made up, notably, of a plurality of conflictualities, of flows of drive investments, of fantasies of desire, of object-relations, of an interplay of identifications and of projections, imagos, anxieties and multiple correlative defense mechanisms applied in the structuring and functioning of this conjugal dyad.
Inspired by Kaës’ 2007 work Un singulier pluriel, I envisage three “logical levels” in my approach to the conjugal psychic reality:
the group level, common psychic reality shared by its members, with its specific organizers and its formations;
the level of the intersubjective relationship, with its modalities and variable levels of object-relations, its unconscious alliances (structuring, defensive, even offensive), the relating of Œdipus and sibling complexes, especially. The triangulation secured within the intersubjective love relationship by the co-creation of the conjugal group, common, shared fantasizedliving being and psychic cradle of the future child to be born would contribute to the consolidation of the partners’ oedipal organization;
the intrapsychic individual level, with its own conflicts between the Ego and its internal love object (trauma-object, following André Green, 1993), between its two specific psychic objects, the love object and the couple-object, but also in the Ego’s tense relationship with the couple-group, between the similitude and difference of psychic spaces.