In this fascinating and clinically useful recorded lecture, Stanley Ruszczynski offers an overview of narcissistic states from healthy to destructive and defensive. He offers a theoretical overview alongside three case studies of work with couples with a focus on the use of his countertransference.
Stan posits that the couple’s attraction may lie in the mutual receptivity to and acceptance of each other’s projections. He weaves in the psychoanalytic theories of Klein, Bion, Fisher and Britton bringing to life concepts such as projective identification and how these mechanisms can become active in couple relationships where destructive and defensive narcissism are dominant.
“The process of projective identification comes about as a product of the fact that one person can unconsciously induce in another person the experience or behaviour in accord with that which is being projected. Patients can give affect to their fantasies with verbal and non verbal behaviours through subtle unconscious enactments in tone of voice, in the verbal or body language or the emotional atmosphere they create.”
Stan references the space within which interactions between two people take place, a psychic space he has previously referred to as ‘the marital triangle’. This might be a benign place of mutual recognition, within which both connection and separateness may be recognised, and hence a space for psychic development; or, it might be a malignant place, with very fragile or no awareness of the other’s separateness, resulting in psychic stagnation and sado-masochistic dynamics as described above. The couple is not able to ‘contain’ each other’s anxieties.
“Containment as a detoxification of feared states”
Awareness of the other’s separateness creates space in relationships; lack of that awareness, results in the other being experienced as primarily an extension of the self which in turn collapses the space and the capacity to become as Mary Morgan describes a ‘creative couple’. This lecture elaborates these ideas in the context of clinical work and will support the clinician’s development in understanding the depth and complexities of challenging couple work.
Read more and purchase the recording here.