James Tobin, Ph.D.
Key Points
- We bring our relational histories into our adult relationships. Early experiences of attachment, rejection, criticism, control, and emotional availability can shape what we expect from intimacy and what feels emotionally familiar to us.
- Sometimes we choose partners who evoke important relationships from our past; at other times, we gradually recreate those relationships together. Through projection, projective identification, and repeated interaction, partners can unintentionally evoke and reinforce the very qualities they most fear in one another.
- Repetition may contain an unconscious hope for repair. We may return to familiar relational struggles not because we want to suffer, but because some part of us is still trying to achieve a different ending—to make the unavailable person available, the critical person accepting, or the unpredictable person safe.
- The strategies we use to protect ourselves can inadvertently recreate what we fear. Fear of abandonment can intensify pursuit and produce withdrawal; fear of control can produce secrecy and greater vigilance; sensitivity to criticism can produce defensiveness that eventually evokes more criticism.
- Couples therapy can help transform repetition into greater freedom and choice. By recognizing the histories and unconscious patterns operating between them, partners can begin seeing each other more clearly, responding less automatically, and creating a relationship that is no longer required to repeat the past.
There is a question that arises with surprising frequency in psychotherapy: Why do I keep ending up in some version of the same relationship?
The people may be different. The circumstances may be different. We may be older, more self-aware, more accomplished, and quite certain that we know what we do not want. Yet somehow a familiar emotional situation emerges.
A woman who spent her childhood longing for the attention of an emotionally distant father finds herself married to someone she experiences as unavailable. A man who learned to carefully monitor the moods of an unpredictable mother discovers that he is once again organizing his life around preventing another person’s displeasure. Someone who grew up feeling controlled becomes fiercely protective of independence, only to discover years later that his partner has become increasingly anxious, intrusive, and preoccupied with knowing where he is.
These repetitions are easy to misunderstand. They do not mean that we literally search for replicas of our parents. Nor do they mean that people secretly want to suffer. They point toward something subtler and, I think, more psychologically interesting.
We do not enter adult relationships as blank slates. We carry with us internal expectations about what love will feel like, what happens when we need someone, whether dependence is safe, what conflict means, how much of ourselves another person can tolerate, and what we must do to preserve connection. These expectations were formed in earlier relationships and continue to organize our perceptions and responses, often outside conscious awareness.
Sometimes this history influences whom we choose. At other times, an even more complicated process occurs: through projection, transference, projective identification, and thousands of reciprocal interactions, we can gradually help create with our partner a relationship that begins to resemble the unresolved relationships of our past.
The distinction matters. We do not merely find familiar relationships. Sometimes we participate in making them familiar. And hidden within that repetition may be an unconscious hope: perhaps this time the relationship will end differently.
Freud’s Discovery: What We Cannot Resolve, We May Repeat
More than a century ago, Sigmund Freud noticed something puzzling in his patients. People did not simply remember important experiences from the past. They often seemed to reproduce them.
In Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through, Freud (1914/1958) proposed that psychological experiences that had not been sufficiently remembered, represented, or worked through could instead appear as repetitions in present life. The person typically does not experience the repetition as something historical. It feels entirely contemporary.
Freud later returned to the problem in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920/1955), developing what came to be known as the repetition compulsion: the perplexing tendency to return psychologically or behaviorally to painful configurations even when conscious wishes would seem to favor something else.
Freud’s explanation of repetition evolved, and subsequent psychoanalytic traditions have interpreted it in different ways. What remains clinically compelling is his fundamental observation: human beings sometimes reproduce precisely the kinds of situations they consciously say they never want to experience again.
Intimate relationships provide especially fertile ground for such repetition because romantic attachment activates extraordinarily deep psychological concerns: closeness and separateness, dependency and autonomy, recognition and neglect, desire and rejection, safety and danger, abandonment and engulfment.
Under these conditions, the present can acquire the emotional intensity of the past.
Your partner may look nothing like your father and possess an entirely different personality, yet waiting for your partner’s attention may recreate something of what it felt like to wait for your father’s attention. Your wife may objectively resemble your mother very little, but when she becomes disappointed in you, you may suddenly experience the familiar combination of shame, inadequacy, and desperate efforts to restore approval.
What returns is often not the person. What returns is the relationship.
We Carry Relationships Inside Us
Later psychoanalytic thinkers developed Freud’s insight through what became known as object relations theory. The central idea is that important relationships become internalized. We carry within ourselves not merely memories of people but expectations about how relationships work and about who we become in the presence of particular kinds of others.
A child may gradually learn that when someone withdraws, the way to preserve connection is to pursue. Another learns that anger threatens attachment and therefore becomes conciliatory. Another discovers that expressing needs burdens a parent and develops an identity organized around competence and self-sufficiency. Still another learns that unpredictability requires constant vigilance.
These lessons are rarely stored as explicit sentences. They become ways of being with other people.
Attachment theory describes related processes through the concept of internal working models: expectations concerning ourselves, others, and what happens when attachment needs are activated. Repeated experiences of responsiveness, inconsistency, rejection, intrusion, or emotional unavailability can influence how people subsequently anticipate and regulate intimacy (Bowlby, 1969/1982; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2016).
There is also empirical evidence outside psychoanalysis supporting the broader proposition that representations of important earlier relationships influence new ones. Susan Andersen and Serena Chen’s research on the relational self describes how mental representations of significant others can become activated when characteristics of a new person resemble an important person from one’s past. Those activated representations can influence affect, motivation, self-evaluation, and behavior (Andersen & Chen, 2002).
This gives scientific precision to something psychotherapists observe every day: we do not encounter other people entirely as they are. We encounter them partly through what previous relationships have prepared us to notice, expect, fear, and desire.
Do We Really “Marry Our Mother” or “Marry Our Father”?
The popular saying contains an interesting psychological intuition, but taken literally it is misleading.
People choose partners for innumerable reasons: attraction, affection, sexuality, shared values, admiration, friendship, temperament, cultural background, opportunity, timing, social environment, and chance. There is no credible psychological theory according to which adult mate selection can simply be reduced to finding a substitute parent.
But there is a more defensible and interesting proposition: what feels emotionally familiar may influence what feels compelling.
Psychoanalytic theories of couples have long emphasized this possibility. Henry Dicks’s classic work on marriage proposed that partners can form unconscious complementarities in which each person’s internal relational world fits aspects of the other’s (Dicks, 1967). Object-relations couple therapists subsequently developed these ideas further, examining how marriage can become a setting in which disowned, feared, or longed-for aspects of each person’s psychological world become located in the spouse (Scharff & Scharff, 1997).
Imago Relationship Therapy, developed by Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt, makes an even more explicit claim. Imago theory proposes that we carry an unconscious composite image—an imago—formed partly from the characteristics of our formative caregivers, and that attraction may be influenced by qualities associated with this internal image (Hendrix, 1988/2008).
I think the Imago idea is clinically provocative and often useful, but its strongest claims should be understood as a theoretical model, not an established universal law of mate selection. What is particularly valuable in the theory is the proposition that familiar relational difficulties may contain an implicit developmental hope: we return to emotionally recognizable territory partly because some part of us remains invested in achieving an outcome we could not achieve before.
This brings us to an important distinction. Sometimes we select someone who already possesses characteristics reminiscent of an important person from our past. But sometimes something considerably more complex happens: we help create the resemblance.
Projection: When the Past Influences What We See
Projection is one of psychoanalysis’s best-known concepts, although it is often used too loosely. Broadly speaking, projection involves experiencing something arising significantly within ourselves as if it belongs primarily to another person.
In relationships, this can mean that an old expectation influences how we interpret an ambiguous present.
Someone who carries a powerful expectation of abandonment may experience ordinary separateness as rejection. Someone who grew up with an unreliable parent may interpret uncertainty as evidence that a partner cannot be trusted. Someone who has difficulty acknowledging anger may become extraordinarily sensitive to irritation in a spouse.
This does not mean that the partner is doing nothing, nor that the perception is imaginary. Projection is rarely as simple as seeing something that does not exist. More often, a real feature of the other person becomes magnified, organized, or given meaning through an older emotional template.
Consider the seemingly ordinary statement: “I need some time alone.” One person hears, “My partner needs an hour to decompress.” Another hears, “I have become too much. She is pulling away. Eventually she is going to leave.” The sentence belongs to the present, but some of the meaning it acquires may belong to the past.
Projective Identification: When We Begin to Create What We Fear
Projective identification takes us considerably further.
Melanie Klein (1946) introduced the concept within psychoanalytic theory. Later theorists, particularly Wilfred Bion (1962) and Thomas Ogden (1979), helped extend the idea into a model of interpersonal communication and influence. Contemporary psychoanalytic thinking increasingly understands projective identification not merely as something occurring inside one person’s mind but as a process unfolding between people.
Arthur Nielsen’s important paper “Projective Identification in Couples” is especially relevant. Nielsen (2019) describes projective identification as involving processes of projection or transference, interpersonal induction, and identification, and shows its usefulness for understanding couple conflict, partner selection, and what he calls marital polarities.
The distinction from ordinary projection is crucial. In projection, I may experience you as controlling partly because my history has made me unusually sensitive to control. In projective identification, I may interact with you repeatedly in ways that contribute to you actually becoming more controlling with me.
Imagine a man whose mother was intrusive and controlling. As an adult, he is fiercely protective of independence. He chooses a partner who initially has no unusual tendency to monitor him. She asks one evening, “What time do you think you’ll be home?” Because questions about his whereabouts carry historical meaning for him, he responds defensively: “Why do you always need to know where I am?”
She is confused. She explains that she was simply planning dinner. Similar exchanges recur. He begins withholding information because he anticipates intrusion. His withholding makes her increasingly uncertain. She begins asking more questions because she senses that information is being withheld. He experiences her questions as confirmation of his original perception and becomes still more secretive. Her anxiety increases further.
Years later, he may accurately say, “She needs to know everything I do.” The tragedy is that she may now actually behave in ways resembling his intrusive mother. But she did not enter the relationship that way.
His history has not simply distorted his perception of the present. Through hundreds of reciprocal interactions, the couple has constructed a relationship in which the feared pattern has become increasingly real.
This is one of the central paradoxes of intimate life: we may eventually receive from our partner precisely the response we have spent years expecting and fearing.
How Two People Create a Relational System
Projective identification should never be understood as psychological mind control. We cannot simply manufacture an arbitrary personality in another person. The other person arrives with a developmental history, vulnerabilities, defenses, desires, capacities, and choices of their own.
The process works because something in the projected role resonates with something already possible in the recipient.
Consider another couple. A man grew up with a highly critical mother and remains extraordinarily sensitive to disappointment. His wife initially makes ordinary requests: could he help more around the house, remember an appointment, or put away his phone during dinner?
He hears criticism where she experiences herself as making requests. He explains, defends, counters, and minimizes. Because gentle requests seem to accomplish little, she becomes increasingly emphatic. Eventually she becomes frustrated and sharp. He responds, “Nothing I do is ever good enough for you.”
There is now considerable truth in his experience. She has become more critical. But a photograph of the couple taken at this stage cannot explain how they got there.
In my earlier article, The Roles We Play for One Another, I described this process as a kind of relational seesaw. The more one person occupies one psychological position, the more the other can become organized around its opposite. The more one pursues, the more the other withdraws; the more one controls, the less initiative the other takes; the more one insists on rationality, the more the other becomes the carrier of emotion.
Eventually, each person points to the other’s behavior as proof of what that person “is.” Yet what we are observing may not simply be two personalities. We may be observing a relationship that has acquired a personality of its own.
Why Would We Recreate Something Painful?
This is the deepest question in the article: Why would the mind return to something that hurt?
One answer is familiarity. We are not drawn only toward what feels good. We are also drawn toward what is psychologically recognizable. An unfamiliar form of love can sometimes feel less immediately compelling than a familiar one, even when the familiar form contains frustration.
But psychoanalytic and relational theories suggest something beyond familiarity. Repetition may contain an attempted solution.
Imagine a child who could never obtain the sustained attention of an emotionally distant father. Decades later, she becomes deeply invested in getting an emotionally distant partner to turn toward her. Consciously, she wants intimacy. But psychologically, the stakes may be greater than the present relationship alone would suggest. Somewhere within the struggle is an old question: Can I finally make the unavailable person become available?
A man who could never satisfy a critical mother may become intensely invested in obtaining unconditional acceptance from a partner whose disappointment devastates him. Beneath countless arguments may lie another question: Can I finally make the person whose judgment matters tell me that I am enough?
Someone raised by an unpredictable parent may repeatedly become the regulator and peacemaker in adult relationships. Beneath the vigilance may be yet another question: Can I finally make the unpredictable person safe?
This is one way of understanding the unconscious hope for repair.
It is important to distinguish this contemporary relational idea from a simplistic reading of Freud’s repetition compulsion. Freud did not simply claim that people repeat painful experiences because they want another opportunity to fix them. Later psychoanalytic, attachment-oriented, and couples theories have developed more explicitly the idea that repetition may involve attempts at mastery, integration, recognition, or repair.
The person does not consciously say, “I am going to find someone emotionally unavailable so that I can finally solve my relationship with my father.” The process occurs at a very different level of psychological organization. What feels consciously like attraction, chemistry, urgency, frustration, or extraordinary emotional importance may sometimes contain a much older project.
When the Attempt at Repair Recreates the Original Injury
Here we encounter the cruel irony of repetition. The person who desperately wants a different ending may behave in ways that make the original ending more likely.
The abandoned child becomes so vigilant for signs of abandonment that a partner feels chronically scrutinized and eventually withdraws. The controlled child protects autonomy so fiercely that a partner becomes anxious and intrusive. The criticized child becomes so defensive that a partner must escalate complaints to be heard. The neglected child demands reassurance with such urgency that affection begins to feel compulsory. The parentified child takes responsibility for everything and eventually finds herself living with someone who has become increasingly passive and dependent.
The historical wound and the attempted solution become intertwined.
This is why the arguments of distressed couples can seem simultaneously trivial and enormous. On the surface, the conflict concerns money, sex, chores, phones, lateness, parenting, in-laws, work, or who initiated the last conversation. Underneath, the questions may be much older: Will you abandon me? Will you control me? Will you humiliate me? Will you notice me? Can I need you safely? Will you still love me if I disappoint you? Can I remain myself and still belong to you?
The argument is occurring on Tuesday night. The emotional problem may be decades old.
Why Painful Relationships Can Be So Difficult to Leave
This perspective can also help explain why certain painful relationships exert such extraordinary psychological gravity.
Friends or relatives looking from outside may ask, “If you’re so unhappy, why don’t you leave?” Sometimes leaving is indeed necessary. Relationships involving abuse, coercive control, violence, exploitation, chronic deception, or serious threats to safety require a framework centered on protection and responsibility, not romanticized interpretations of mutual enactment. A concept such as projective identification should never be used to imply that someone caused another person’s abusive behavior.
But in other relationships, difficulty leaving may partly reflect the fact that more than the present partner is psychologically at stake. If I have spent years attempting to get from this person what I could not obtain from someone important long ago, ending the relationship may unconsciously feel like relinquishing the original hope as well.
I may be giving up not only the partner, but also the fantasy that this time I will finally make the distant person stay, the critical person approve, the unpredictable person become safe, or the withholding person recognize me. The attachment may therefore be not only to the partner but also to the possibility of changing the ending.
The Unconscious Fit Between Partners
One of the deepest insights of psychoanalytic couples theory is that these configurations are rarely created by one person alone. Partners often fit one another in psychologically precise ways.
A person who fears abandonment may become involved with someone uncomfortable with dependency. Someone who fears engulfment may be drawn to someone who desires frequent reassurance. A person who disowns anger may pair with someone who expresses it readily. A chronically responsible person may fall in love with someone spontaneous and less structured.
Initially, these differences can feel exhilarating because the other person seems to possess something we have difficulty accessing in ourselves. Your spontaneity frees me. Your stability grounds me. Your emotionality helps me feel. Your independence expands my world. Your strength makes it safe for me to be vulnerable.
Problems arise when complementarity becomes polarization.
The capacity I initially admired in you becomes something I increasingly require you to carry for both of us. As you carry more of it, I develop less of it myself. Eventually your strength feels controlling, your emotionality feels irrational, your independence feels selfish, your spontaneity feels irresponsible, or your need for closeness feels suffocating.
What initially made us feel complete begins to make us feel trapped.
This connects closely with what I have elsewhere called relationship architecture: the largely invisible system of roles, expectations, accommodations, emotional responsibilities, and recurring sequences that gradually organizes a couple. The relationship eventually becomes structured enough that each person’s behavior helps produce the behavior they most dislike in the other.
What Couples Therapy Can Do
If intimate relationships can become places where the past is repeated, they can also become places where repetition is recognized and interrupted.
The first task of therapy is recognition. Instead of asking only, “Who started this?” or “Which one of us is right?” therapy introduces different questions. Why does this particular behavior carry so much emotional meaning? Where has each partner experienced something like this before? What role does each repeatedly occupy? What does each person become in the presence of the other? What does each partner seem to require the other to become? And perhaps most importantly: What historical relationship has become partially recreated between these two people?
The second task is differentiation. My husband is not my father. My wife’s disappointment is not my mother’s contempt. My partner’s desire for closeness is not my parent’s intrusion. My partner needing space does not necessarily mean abandonment. Another person’s separateness is not rejection.
These distinctions can be intellectually obvious and emotionally extraordinarily difficult. Our earliest relational expectations were established long before we could explain them. They often exist not primarily as thoughts but as bodily responses, anticipations, emotional certainties, and automatic defensive strategies.
This is why insight alone rarely changes an entrenched relationship. A new relationship must eventually be experienced, not merely understood.
The Partner Must Become a Person Again
Despite important theoretical differences, contemporary psychodynamic couple therapy, attachment-oriented treatment, Emotionally Focused Therapy, and Imago therapy converge around an important principle: partners need help moving beneath repetitive defensive interactions toward the fears, longings, injuries, and attachment needs organizing those interactions.
In Emotionally Focused Therapy, the familiar pursue-withdraw cycle, for example, is understood as an attachment-organized pattern rather than simply a communication failure (Johnson, 2019). In Imago work, partners are encouraged to understand how developmental histories contribute to what each needs and fears in the relationship. Psychoanalytic couple therapy adds particular attention to projection, projective identification, enactment, unconscious complementarity, and the psychological functions served by the couple’s organization.
The goal, therefore, is larger than “better communication.” The deeper goal is to create a relationship in which neither person must continue playing the role assigned by the other’s history.
The withdrawing partner learns that remaining emotionally present does not necessarily mean being engulfed. The pursuing partner discovers ways to express longing without converting fear into accusation. The controlling partner learns to tolerate uncertainty. The chronically dependent partner reclaims competence. The person who has carried the couple’s emotional life no longer has to feel everything for two people.
As these positions loosen, something remarkable can occur. The person who had gradually become your mother stops being your mother. The person who had become your father stops being your father.
Your partner becomes psychologically visible again.
From Repetition to Mourning
There is, however, another part of therapeutic change that is sometimes overlooked. We do not become free of the past simply by understanding it. We may also need to mourn it.
If I spend my adult life trying to make an unavailable partner finally give me the love I could not obtain earlier, freedom may require acknowledging that the original deprivation cannot be retroactively erased.
No present relationship can rewrite childhood.
A loving partner can offer experiences that are deeply reparative. Therapy can transform our capacity for attachment. We can experience forms of recognition, safety, intimacy, and reciprocity that genuinely alter our internal relational world. But mature repair differs from historical reversal.
My spouse cannot literally return to my childhood and become the father who was emotionally present, the mother who was less critical, or the caregiver who protected me. Paradoxically, relinquishing the demand that our partner repair the past may make a much deeper form of intimacy possible in the present.
We stop asking the person in front of us to become someone who existed before them.
The Resolution We Were Actually Seeking
This brings us back to the paradox at the heart of repetition.
We may enter relationships unconsciously hoping that another person will resolve something left unfinished in earlier life. Yet genuine resolution rarely occurs because we finally force the new person to provide precisely what the old person could not.
It occurs differently.
We recognize the repetition. We understand the longing inside it. We reclaim parts of ourselves that we assigned to another person. We grieve what cannot be repaired retrospectively. We develop capacities that the relationship had previously distributed between us. And gradually, we learn to tolerate a kind of intimacy that does not conform entirely to what our histories taught us to expect.
Perhaps this is one of the greatest developmental possibilities contained within adult love.
The past inevitably enters the relationship with us. But it does not have to determine what happens next.
The deepest work of couples therapy may therefore be not simply helping two people communicate more effectively inside the relationship they already have. It may be helping them understand how much of that relationship has become organized around histories neither consciously chose—and creating enough psychological freedom that something genuinely new can happen between them.
The aim is not to find the perfect person who will finally repair childhood. It is to become capable of a relationship in which neither person is required to keep recreating it.
Questions People Often Ask
Does this mean we unconsciously marry our mother or father?
Not literally. Partner selection is far too complex to reduce to a search for parental substitutes. We choose partners for attraction, values, temperament, sexuality, compatibility, circumstance, shared interests, and many other reasons. But important early relationships can influence what feels familiar, compelling, threatening, or emotionally meaningful to us. Imago therapy makes a particularly strong version of this argument, while psychoanalytic, attachment, and social-cognitive theories offer somewhat different accounts of how earlier relational representations influence adult relationships.
The more useful question is therefore not, “Did I marry my mother?” but: “What about this relationship feels emotionally familiar to me, and why?”
Can I actually turn my partner into someone like my parent?
Not in any absolute sense. Projective identification is not mind control. But intimate partners continuously influence one another. If you expect rejection, for example, you may become vigilant, demanding, or defensive in ways that make closeness increasingly difficult. If your partner has vulnerabilities that fit the role, the pattern can become self-reinforcing.
This is one reason Nielsen’s formulation of projective identification in couples is so useful: it bridges individual psychodynamics and interpersonal systems. The phenomenon involves not simply what one person imagines but what begins happening between two people.
Does this mean I am responsible for my partner’s hurtful behavior?
No. Understanding reciprocal influence does not eliminate individual responsibility. Two people can participate in a relational system without possessing equal power or equal responsibility for harm.
Projective identification should never be used to explain away abuse, intimidation, violence, coercive control, chronic deception, or exploitation. A person’s history may help us understand their vulnerability to a particular relational pattern; it does not make them responsible for another person’s harmful choices.
Why would I be attracted to someone who activates painful childhood experiences?
Partly because familiarity and safety are not identical. Something can be psychologically familiar without being psychologically healthy. Early relationships teach us the emotional grammar of intimacy: how closeness works, what we must do to preserve attachment, what kinds of people feel compelling, and what forms of emotional tension we recognize.
There may also be an unconscious hope for repair. The unavailable person presents another opportunity to obtain availability. The critical person presents another opportunity to obtain approval. The unpredictable person presents another opportunity to establish safety. We are not consciously choosing pain. We may be unconsciously returning to an unfinished psychological problem.
Is this why some relationships have unusually intense “chemistry”?
Sometimes it may contribute, but it would be too reductive to explain romantic chemistry entirely this way. Attraction has biological, interpersonal, social, psychological, and cultural determinants. Nevertheless, extraordinary intensity can occasionally signal not only compatibility but recognition: something about another person activates a deeply established relational configuration.
This is one reason intensity should not automatically be confused with compatibility. Feeling that you have “known someone forever” can be romantic—and sometimes psychologically accurate in a way we did not intend. You may not know the person nearly as well as you know the pattern.
Why doesn’t insight alone stop the cycle?
Because relational patterns are not merely ideas. They involve emotion, attachment, bodily arousal, expectations, defensive reactions, and procedural ways of relating that developed through repeated experience. Knowing, “I become frightened when my husband withdraws because my father was emotionally unavailable,” can be enormously valuable. But the insight may disappear emotionally the next time the husband turns away during an argument.
Change requires repeated experiences in which the old expectation is activated but something different happens: the partner remains, the vulnerable feeling can be expressed, the conflict does not destroy the relationship, or the person discovers that they can tolerate not being immediately reassured. The new experience gradually competes with the old expectation.
Can these patterns actually change after many years?
Yes, although deeply established patterns generally change through repeated work rather than a single insight. Couples can learn to recognize the cycle earlier, understand what each person’s defensive behavior protects, identify the historical meaning of particular triggers, and respond differently enough that the relationship stops continually confirming each partner’s expectations.
The important shift occurs when the couple begins thinking, “We are inside the pattern again,” rather than, “Here is further proof that you are the problem.” That change—from being inside the enactment to becoming able to observe it—is one of the foundations of relational freedom.
How do I know whether a relationship should be repaired or ended?
Psychodynamic understanding cannot answer that question for someone. Recognizing that a relationship contains repetition does not mean the relationship should necessarily continue. Some relationships become more flexible as partners understand their patterns and take responsibility for changing them. Others remain chronically destructive despite substantial effort. Relationships involving abuse, coercion, serious threats to safety, or persistent violations of fundamental boundaries require different considerations.
The purpose of understanding repetition is not to persuade someone to stay. It is to make the decision less governed by forces they cannot yet see.
What is couples therapy actually trying to accomplish when these dynamics are present?
At its best, couples therapy helps transform an unconscious enactment into something the couple can think about together.
The therapist helps each person identify what is being activated, what historical meaning the present situation has acquired, what defensive response follows, what that response evokes in the partner, and how the resulting reaction then confirms the original fear. Over time, each person becomes more capable of recognizing the partner as a separate person rather than only as the character assigned by an older relational script.
The ultimate goal is not a relationship without conflict. It is a relationship with greater freedom: greater freedom to perceive accurately, to respond rather than reflexively react, to possess parts of ourselves we previously assigned to the other person, and to love someone who no longer has to play a role written before we met them.
Questions for Personal Reflection
When you experience your strongest emotional reactions to your partner, consider asking yourself several questions. How old does this feeling seem? Where have I felt something like this before? What do I repeatedly try to obtain from my partner—approval, reassurance, attention, protection, freedom, recognition—that I once struggled to obtain from someone else?
Consider also the roles that have developed between you. Are you repeatedly the pursuer, caretaker, critic, peacemaker, responsible one, rebel, dependent one, invisible one, abandoned one, or misunderstood one? What position does your partner occupy opposite you? Which qualities in your partner provoke your strongest reactions, and who else in your history possessed those qualities?
Finally, perhaps the most challenging question is this: What do I repeatedly do in response to what I fear that may make the response I fear more likely?
That question does not erase the other person’s responsibility. It identifies the place where your own freedom can begin.
References and Further Reading
Andersen, S. M., & Chen, S. (2002). The relational self: An interpersonal social-cognitive theory. Psychological Review, 109(4), 619–645. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.109.4.619
Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from experience. Heinemann.
Bowlby, J. (1982). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment (2nd ed.). Basic Books. (Original work published 1969)
Dicks, H. V. (1967). Marital tensions: Clinical studies towards a psychological theory of interaction. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Freud, S. (1955). Beyond the pleasure principle. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 18, pp. 1–64). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1920)
Freud, S. (1958). Remembering, repeating and working-through (Further recommendations on the technique of psycho-analysis II). In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 12, pp. 145–156). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1914)
Hendrix, H. (2008). Getting the love you want: A guide for couples (20th anniversary ed.). Henry Holt. (Original work published 1988)
Johnson, S. M. (2019). Attachment theory in practice: Emotionally focused therapy (EFT) with individuals, couples, and families. Guilford Press.
Klein, M. (1946). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110.
Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2016). Attachment in adulthood: Structure, dynamics, and change (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
Nielsen, A. C. (2019). Projective identification in couples. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 67(4), 593–624. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003065119869942
Ogden, T. H. (1979). On projective identification. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 60(3), 357–373.
Scharff, J. S., & Scharff, D. E. (1997). Object relations couple therapy. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 51(2), 141–173. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.psychotherapy.1997.51.2.141
Wallin, D. J. (2007). Attachment in psychotherapy. Guilford Press.
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Disclaimer
The clinical examples in this article are illustrative composites based on commonly observed relational patterns and are not descriptions of particular patients or couples. Identifying details have been omitted, altered, or combined to protect confidentiality. Any resemblance to a specific individual, couple, or therapeutic relationship is coincidental.
This article is intended for educational and informational purposes and is not a substitute for psychotherapy, psychological assessment, crisis intervention, or individualized professional care. Relational concepts such as projection, transference, and projective identification should not be used to excuse abusive, coercive, threatening, deceptive, or otherwise harmful behavior, nor do they imply that responsibility for such behavior is shared equally between partners.
About James Tobin, Ph.D.
James Tobin, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist in private practice in Irvine, California. His work with adults and couples is informed by contemporary psychodynamic and relational psychoanalysis, attachment theory, developmental psychology, systems thinking, and contemporary relationship research. His clinical interests include the ways earlier relationships become organized within present experience, how couples unconsciously develop complementary psychological roles, and how psychotherapy can help individuals and partners move from repetitive relational patterns toward greater freedom, recognition, and intimacy.
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