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In the 1986 film “9 ½ Weeks” directed by Adrian Lyne, Mickey Rourke plays John, an investment banker on Wall Street who falls into a highly erotic relationship with Elizabeth, a beautiful art gallery executive played by Kim Bassinger.

 

The film is a disturbing depiction of how powerful unconscious forces are in romantic relationships, and how destructive they may be.

 

The characters’ intense sexual attraction toward each other initiates a passionate yet fiery and highly abusive tryst that devolves quickly.

 

The film depicts what psychoanalysts would characterize as a sadomasochistic relationship in which both partners are unconsciously caught up in a dynamic that centers on seduction, possessiveness, insecurity, fear, narcissism and codependency. Essentially, the two characters — for very different reasons — cannot love or be loved, and connect tolerate intimacy or mutuality, the hallmark components of healthy and long-lasting relationships.

 

As the film unfolds, John’s character becomes progressively unmasked – both to the audience and to Elizabeth. His emotional and psychological approach to Elizabeth consists mainly of objectifying and debasing her so that she cannot hurt him; he manifests what is called a narcissistic character structure. It is organized to defend against seeing others as significant and them desiring something from them. Need and desire from someone who is loved and desired is intolerable, largely because early in life what had been so damaging was when the dependent needy infant or young child reached out for an idealized caregiver who did not respond or who responded in unconscionable ways – leaving the child abandoned and adrift.

 

In this presentation, I want to focus more, however, on Kim Bassinger’s character Elizabeth rather than John, the character played by Rourke. And what I want to suggest is that Bassinger’s character, and the film as a whole, reveal a psychological problem we all are endowed with – what I call an “unconscious relational template.”

 

Elizabeth’s unconscious relational template is what initially attracted her to John, drew her into the relationship, imprisoned her in its abusive and frightening dynamics, and made it almost impossible for her to escape the prison the relationship had become.

 

This implies that each of us has an unconscious relational template that determines who we love, why we love them, and how they love us, and very little about this template is in our conscious control, very little is of our own choosing or even our own preference.

 

For Elizabeth, her unconscious relational template consists of a tendency to attract, and be attracted to, people with whom she can set up specific roles and dynamics in which she is objectified, dehumanized, and possessed by narcissistic individuals who cannot tolerate their own vulnerably and dependency. Though it is not depicted in the film, Elizabeth’s developmental history likely included similar dynamics in her relationships with her caregivers and significant others in her early development.

 

A core element of these early relationships likely involved figures in her life who were not secure or content in their own right and who saw Elizabeth through a lens of desire in which what she represented psychologically was something they could never actually feel or be.

 

Elizabeth was imprinted with this pivotal flawed characteristic of her early caregivers, and that became organized as a template or prototype for all future relationships in her life.

 

Much like a mutation arising on a gene and across generations expressing itself in pathology, so too does one’s early relational circumstances, with all the idiosyncrasies involved in who bonded to the child and the nature of these bonds, create the precedent for a precise quality of dysfunction in later romantic bonds.

 

Templating is a term I use with my clients to refer to the mind’s unconscious drive to adhere to a relational mutation that originated early in one’s life and is carried along unconsciously throughout one’s life, duplicating its roles and dynamic again and again. The relational template seeks and guarantees compliance, converting all circumstances into a facsimile of the early relational prototype.

 

The child’s early relationship with one’s primary caregivers is imprinted and maintained across time in two ways.

 

First, early relational experience sets up an emotional equation in the child’s mind for how relationships work, the roles that will be played, who will play them, how love is manifested, and the nature of the intimacy possible between partners in a relationship.

 

Second, based on thousands of interactions between the caregiver and child, by around middle childhood or so we now have scientific evidence indicating that the child’s brain and nervous system, their neurobiology, has been shaped and organized around a particular relationship architecture.

 

This is a neurobiological synthesis involving the brain and central nervous system, the endocrine system, neurotransmitters, even various elements of the physical body. The child literally is wired to adapt to and accommodate the kind of relational bond the caregivers have established with the child. And so, to have a different kind of a relationship with another person would be foreign — it would be like learning a new language because one’s entire neurobiology is wired to speak only one language.

 

These two factors: the emotional equation for how relationships work, and the neurobiological wiring of the brain and body that evolved in association with this emotional equation, set up the unconscious relational template.

 

And once it is set up, its deterministic nature selects, edits, reconfigures, and binds all future experience to it.

 

Now this may sound rather gloomy given that what I am saying is that we are primed and programmed to replay over and over again the flawed qualities of relational connection we initially experienced early in life.

 

But there is a silver lining to this story. Just as genetic mutations can be treated and perhaps even altered, so too can the ongoing, repetitive expression of unconscious relational templates be interrupted. Not to give too much away, but the film “9 ½ Weeks” does end with Elizabeth freeing herself from the sado-masochistic relationship with John and in so doing counter-acting the unconscious relational template that had been influencing her so strongly for so long.

 

In future presentations, I will describe what it takes to dis-embed ourselves from the unconscious relational templates we each are saddled with and that often destine our relationships to conflict and failure.