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In a prior presentation, I described the destructive sado-masochistic relationship depicted in the 1986 film “9 ½ Weeks” between John, a Wall street investment banker played by Mickey Rourke, and Elizabeth, a beautiful art gallery executive played by Kim Bassinger.

 

In that presentation, I explained how early in development the mind organizes itself around an unconscious template for all future relationships based on the idiosyncratic nature of these early life relationships, especially the parent-child relationship.

 

The specific quality of the parent-child bond, and the nature of the roles and dynamics played out in this relationship, leave an imprint on the mind, unconsciously influencing all future relationships to comply with it, to become a facsimile of the bond it signifies.

 

And there is now scientific evidence indicating that, based on what happens to us in our youths in these early formative relationships, we are literally wired neurobiologically to find or create relationships across our lifespan that in essence duplicate our early formative relationships, even if these relationships were unfulfilling, unsupportive, abusive or traumatic.

 

Some theorists even go so far as to suggest that this priming or conditioning is stronger in promoting repetition of the flawed and dysfunctional aspects of our early relationships rather than the positive loving components of these relationships.

 

Sounds pretty bleak, right?

 

But the film “9 ½ Weeks” does end on a hopeful note, however. Elizabeth is able to escape her abusive traumatic relationship with John and in so doing counter-act the unconscious relational template that influenced her to get into the relationship in the first place, and perhaps others like it in her past.

 

But what is it that stimulates an opposition to our templates? What is it that inspires an abandonment of the way it has always been? What enables us to forego the familiar and to alter the ill-fated course of our relationships?

 

Many clients in my psychotherapy practice readily acknowledge and understand the negative relationship patterns they are repeating over and over again, yet they still have tremendous difficulty disengaging from them.

 

My answer to these questions is what I have come to refer to as the psychological capacity of inflexion. And I view it to be a psychological capacity because I see it much like any other ability – it is arrived at only after much toil and heartbreak, much sweat and tears.

 

To say more about the term inflexion. As in geometry, inflexion is a point of curvature or alteration in the direction of a line, and this serves as a metaphor for what psychologically seems to occur when a person comes to recognize the plot line he or she has been traveling on, realizes it can be deviated from, and then chooses to deviate from it.

 

I am describing 3 specific components that constitute inflexion – recognition of the line you’re on, realization that you do not necessarily have to continue to follow the line, and, finally, choosing to derail from the line.

 

The first element, recognizing the line you’re on, seems to be the most crucial and the most difficult.

 

In the film “9 ½ Weeks”, it is shocking how difficult it is for Elizbeth to get out of her relationship with John. She experiences and readily acknowledges how abusive and traumatic the relationship is, but she cannot extricate herself; she is hopefully drawn to John, all of his dysfunction, and all of the dysfunction they create together. Yet again and again she relinquishes her efforts to leave him.

 

In various scenes of the film, John foists Elizabeth into literal and symbolic positions of surrender and subjugation which parallel her own psychological reality of abandoning attempts to go vs. the grain, to move against the current, to counter-act the unconscious relational template that has bonded her to John.

 

All changes, though, when Elizabeth encounters a painter who whom her gallery has been pursuing in order to exhibit his art. In a pivotal scene, the painter, an old man not consumed by the narcissistic qualities Mickey Rourke’s character is, sits on a bench in the woods by his house, quietly examining with wonder the fish he has just caught. Elizabeth tells him that the reason why she likes his paintings so much has to do with the way he is able to capture a moment in his work. And the painter replies, “It is the moment — a thing that is so familiar, it is strange.”

 

It is at this moment that what has been familiar to Elizabeth — her unconscious relational template of being caught, possessed and destroyed — and her being complicit in this dynamic, is revealed to her in the image of the hooked fish. And upon this recognition of the line she is on (no pun intended), the familiar becomes strange to her, becomes alien. She realizes she now has the ability to choose to move away from this line, and to free herself. The narrative of her relational life has reached an inflexion point and can be veered away from.

 

Unfortunately, inflexion points in real life are not usually reached so suddenly or clearly like an epiphany . More realistically, inflexion is a rather difficult, arduous and even grueling process, in which bit by bit a person becomes aware of what was always there but never quite represented in conscious thought. The alienation one feels toward oneself is more slow and gradual.  But it in the rejection of the familiar, the unconscious status quo, a clearing emerges: this is the precipice of change, freedom, and self-definition.