Romantic Love, Couples and Relationships

Why We Love Who We Love: A Psychodynamic Perspective on the Loss of Free Will

In this presentation, Dr. Tobin describes a model of romantic love that synthesizes concepts from evolutionary psychology, Freudian thought, interpersonal neurobiology, and intersubjectivity. Notions of free will and conscious decision-making regarding the choice of romantic partners are refuted. Instead, Dr. Tobin presents an unconsciously motivated perspective on romantic love that emphasizes our uncanny tendency to select and induce others to hurt us emotionally in ways that are familiar and to which we are highly adapted.

Inducing and Being Induced: How to Recognize Dysfunctional Relationship Dynamics

As a species, we are socialized from birth to compromise various aspects of one’s true identity in order to appeal to the primary caregiver. Consequently, we learn how to play roles in relationships very early in development. Yet, role-playing continues into adulthood and even across the lifespan. Every human interaction may be conceptualized from the vantage point of roles, as roles organize emotional experience, the hierarchy of power between individual s and groups, and the execution of tasks. Human relationships, therefore, revolve around inhibitions and resistances to authentic intimacy given that roles provide an architecture of human relatedness and fend off psychological fears and anxieties about closeness. In no other aspect of human life is this most apparent than in romantic relationships. We unconsciously coerce or “induce” others to act in accordance with our role preference, and in turn we are coerced or induced to act in accordance with the role . preferences of others. These induced roles quickly set into motion a sequence of interactions that constricts a person’s relational freedom, thus straight jacketing the person into a role that, over time, becomes quite rigid and constraining.

Love and Parasites: More on the Recruitment Paradigm

This talk presents Dr. Tobin’s view that human relationships, especially intimate romantic bonds, revolve around a central dynamic in which one’s internal representation of relational trauma previously experienced in one’s life (metaphorically called a “parasite”) gets “injected” into the other (or in one’s partner). All human relationships are constituted by a “sender” of parasitic material and a “recipient” who is unconsciously recruited to host the parasite. Once the parasitic material nests and proliferates in the identity of the recipient, the recipient is gradually but inevitably transformed into a perpetrator who then inflicts relational trauma back onto the sender. In this way, the sender’s previous relational trauma is re-experienced in the contemporary relationship, confirming the sender’s rigid construction of the world, of others, and of human relatedness. According to Dr. Tobin, this dynamic of parasitic love explains the patterns of self-sabotage and self destruction so common in people’s romantic lives. However, it also suggests a paradigm for understanding all forms of aggression including envy, racism, and overt acts of violence: not only are we consistently injecting our parasitic material into others, but we are constantly inundated with parasitic injections into us and ultimately altered in insidious ways that perpetuate cycles of injustice and self-hatred.

Repeating the Trauma: Unconscious Factors that Determine Contemporary Life

Early developmental factors that pre-determine who we are romantically attracted to and with whom we ultimately choose to be. The narcissistic-codependent bond is only one example of a broader, and more insidious, concept: the human mind is programmed to seek out the “familiar,” no matter how unhealthy, across the lifespan. This notion has been widely supported by theorists in evolutionary psychology and the social sciences, but is not often emphasized when considering the problems of contemporary life. In this presentation, Dr. Tobin outlines why and how we seek to repeat the fundamental circumstances of early life in relationships, friendships, workplace settings, financial status, and how we perceive and treat ourselves. While most of our early childhoods are relatively healthy, Dr. Tobin contends that a specific, fundamental trauma underlies each of our personalities and largely determines how our lives unfold.

False Intimacy: The Plague of Relationships

In this presentation, Dr. Tobin argues that inauthenticity in relationships may be characterized by dynamics in which two people relate to each other defensively and with an unconscious wish to recapitulate historical relational trauma.

The Dynamics of Unconscious Communication: Projection, Projective Identification,
and Re-Traumatization

According to Dr. Tobin, communication occurs at an unconscious level and is organized largely around psychological processes that re-create historical events. This talk seeks to clarify how projection and projective identification are relevant in all romantic relationship and engineer patterns of relatedness oriented
toward re-traumatization.

The Dynamics of Unconscious Communication: Projection, Projective Identification,
and Re-Traumatization

According to Dr. Tobin, communication occurs at an unconscious level and is organized largely around psychological processes that re-create historical events. This talk seeks to clarify how projection and projective identification are relevant in all romantic relationship and engineer patterns of relatedness oriented
toward re-traumatization.

Interpersonal Transformation (Part II): Attachment vs. Relatedness

Dr. Tobin’s perspective on interpersonal transformation involves the capacity to recognize how we are coercing our romantic partner, or being coerced by our partner, to perpetuate an unresolved early developmental trauma in our adult life. It is not uncommon for these coercive patterns to play out not only in romantic relationships, but also in our work lives, family lives, even with friends. In this talk, Dr. Tobin emphasizes the need to quickly recognize when we are being drawn into these insidious psychological and emotional provocations so that we can avoid them or act to change them. This involves the capacity to identify and understand how our own unique attachment patterns increase our tendency to get drawn into negative relationship dynamics. By the term “attachment” Dr. Tobin is referring to innate, unconscious, and highly rigid feelings, emotions, and assumptions about bonding with another that we inherited from childhood. According to Dr. Tobin, what is problematic is that many people never make a highly significant psychological
transition in their adult lives: abandoning these old attachment tendencies for a more mature, healthy, and well-boundaried style of adult relatedness.

Does Being a Wife Mean a Better Life? A Critical Review of the Evidence

According to co-authors Dena Schulze and James Tobin, research has shown that, for men, being married is associated with physical, psychological and social benefits. However, the impact of marriage is less well understood and potentially more complex for women. The purpose of this review of the literature is to examine the relationship between marital status and physical, psychological, psychiatric and social variables in women. Empirical studies conducted within the last 5 years comparing married to non-married women on psychological, psychiatric, social and/or physical variables were evaluated. Main findings, methodological strategies, sample characteristics, and researcher inferences were itemized and assessed for the emergence of robust patterns. The primary finding of was that 62.1% of the studies examined provided evidence that marriage in women is associated with psychiatric (levels of depression and anxiety), physical (healthier blood pressure), social (increased support from friends and family members, including one’s marital partner), and financial (higher income) advantages, as indicated by correlational and between-group analyses. Overall, this evaluation of the recent literature indicated that being a wife may potentially enhance a woman’s life in numerous ways. However, being a wife does not necessary mean a better life! The benefits of marriage for women appear to be largely mediated by the quality of the marital relationship more so than any other variable. The analysis revealed that within marriage the underlying conditions of (1) companionship, (2) spousal support, and (3) collaborative co-parenting potentiate the well being of women across the lifespan, while a distressed relationship tends to obstruct these available benefits.