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A couple is never a fixed entity: it is a scene, a rhythm, a language under constant revision, a narrative forever in the making. At every stage—whether the first encounter, moving in together, the desire for children, parenthood, the widening of family circles, crises, or aging—unconscious scripts inherited from childhood resurface and replay themselves. Psychoanalysis sheds light on this dynamic, not to impose a model, but to render thinkable what unfolds between two desiring subjects.
It all begins with the encounter. Freud identified two unconscious pathways in partner choice: the anaclitic axis, where one seeks the support of early figures (the nurturing mother, the protective father), and the narcissistic axis, where one loves what one once was, what one wishes to become, or what once mirrored the self. The encounter, in this sense, is born of a misunderstanding, yet a fertile one. For Lacan, love is giving what one does not have to someone who does not want it. In other words, each brings their own lack, hoping the other will turn it into poetry rather than emptiness.
At this stage, idealization serves as a protective shield. As Melanie Klein observed, it is a subtle splitting: pushing the bad aside, gathering the good close, and in doing so, creating the space where intimacy can bloom. Later, Jean-Georges Lemaire would speak of the conjugal novel: a tacit narrative pact in which each partner takes on a role, the daring one and the cautious, the planner and the dreamer, a way of stabilizing the uncertainty of being two.
Then come the first steps of shared life, where we begin to negotiate with our masks. Joan Rivière once described femininity as a “masquerade”, a soothing performance that hovers between anxiety and rivalry. In the beginning, each presents to the other their most polished psychic attire. Yet sooner or later, the masks must fall, ideally without falling apart.
Here, Winnicott offers a vital image: that of “holding”, an environment sufficiently supportive to let the true self emerge. Everyday gestures become transitional objects: the morning coffee, a shared song, familiar rituals, forming a play space where each can explore, retract, laugh, and return without fear of collapse.
It is within this playful terrain that the couple begins to discover itself, a necessary prelude to the more demanding task of learning how to think together.
However, reality soon asserts itself. Territories must be mapped, boundaries drawn, rhythms established. Families of origin reappear with their expectations and rituals. Conversations about money, logistics, and time seem practical, yet beneath them lies a deeper bargaining of place and recognition. Am I seen? Do I have a distinct role? Does my way of inhabiting the world carry equal weight?
Melanie Klein reminds us that partners often displace what they cannot bear within themselves, projecting jealousy or resentment onto the other, as if to be rid of it. The result is a shared psychic battleground, where each struggles against what the other has deposited, becoming adversaries within their own creation.
Wilfred Bion, for his part, introduces the concept of containment in the couple. The relationship holds when, in turn, each partner receives the other’s raw anxiety, works it through, and makes it thinkable by containing it. When this function breaks down, “attacks on linking” emerge: thoughts are no longer connected, dialogue is abandoned, the thread is severed. And sometimes, actions often replace thoughts through hostile silence, withdrawal, nights spent elsewhere, even violence, all to avoid confronting what cannot yet be borne.
In a couple, sexuality is never a separate domain, it permeates the whole relationship. Lacan put it starkly: “There is no sexual relationship”, meaning there is no natural alignment of individual pleasures. Bodies seek each other at different tempos; words weave connection even as they expose misalignment. Old wounds resurface: shame about the body, fear of abandonment, dread of being engulfed.
A couple does not resolve the enigma of sexuality. Rather, it invents a way of inhabiting it, of speaking it without shattering it, of giving space to fantasy while respecting boundaries, without reducing the other to an object of one’s own enjoyment.
Between excessive fusion, which smothers desire, and excessive distance, which extinguishes it, the challenge lies in finding a rhythm, a breath both shared and singular, that keeps the flame alive.
When the question of a child arises, the narrative reshapes itself, once more under the sway of fantasy. The desire for a child gathers contradictory impulses: to repair, to transmit, to perpetuate oneself, to feel powerful, or to heal the wounds of one’s own childhood. For women, pregnancy intensifies what Winnicott called “primary maternal preoccupation”: an almost oceanic state of attention that can relegate the partner to the margins.
Birth introduces a real third. The dyad becomes a triad, and a new geometry of gazes emerges. Lemaire describes this shift as a trial for the narcissistic pact: can each partner accept no longer being the exclusive object of attention? Can one relinquish a portion of omnipotence to a crying infant who now redistributes sovereignty?
Bion invites us to consider the “borderless nights”, those moments when the child floods the parents with raw, unprocessed experiences (“beta elements”) that they must transform into psychic nourishment.
Conflicts take on tangible forms, division of care, the role of grandparents, returning to work, dormant libido, but beneath these lie deeper negotiations of recognition and debt: “Do you see what I carry? Do you see what I lose?” Melanie Klein would place this within the dynamic of envy and reparation.
The couple’s task is to maintain boundaries that are porous yet firm, welcoming the family of origin without surrendering the sovereignty of the conjugal core.
With adolescence, family life begins to resemble a seismograph. Parents are jolted, indirectly, back to the turbulence of their own youth. Authority fractures when it demands uniformity; it gains credibility when differences can be expressed without disqualifying the other.
This period becomes a pivotal moment for reassessing the conjugal relationship beneath the parental one: Is there still space for “just the two of us”? A symbolic place to meet for something beyond schedules, rules, and logistics?
These lingering questions call for answers, and often, a reconfiguration of the couple’s shared life.
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