What is the Fate of Love?
As couple therapists, we spend a great deal of time thinking about conflict, projection, attachment, trauma, enactment, sexuality, and unconscious phantasy. But perhaps the most obvious question can sometimes receive the least attention:
What happens to love?
I have been thinking about this question while reading the newly published Love, its Meaning and Exploration in Couple Therapy, edited by Mary Morgan and Julie Friend. The collection brings love itself back into the center of psychoanalytic thinking about couples, not sentimentally, but as something psychologically complex, developmental, creative, and at times extraordinarily difficult to sustain.
Mary Morgan opens the volume with a chapter entitled “The Fate of Love in Some Couple Relationships.” The title itself captures something essential about clinical work. Couples rarely arrive saying that love has simply disappeared. More often, we encounter what love has become.
Love may become obscured by grievance. It may become entangled with projection and unconscious expectations of the other. It may be recruited into systems of dependency, control, idealization, disappointment, or retaliation. Sometimes the very person who once represented possibility becomes the person onto whom our most primitive fears and longings are projected.
The clinical question therefore becomes more interesting than whether two people still love one another. We might instead ask: What has happened to their capacity to love?
Julie Friend approaches the question from another direction in “Does Love Matter in the Consulting Room?” Her work has long emphasized the importance of creative illusion and transitional experience in couple relationships. Love cannot consist only of seeing the other accurately. Something imaginative also occurs between two people. Couples create a world together—a shared psychic space that belongs completely to neither partner.
The therapeutic task is therefore not simply to dismantle illusion. It is to help couples distinguish between an illusion that imprisons the other and an imaginative space in which something new can be created.
This brings us surprisingly close to Bion.
Bion, Love, and O
Judith Pickering has explored one of Bion’s most difficult and evocative ideas: O. For Bion, O refers to ultimate reality or truth—something that cannot simply be known in the ordinary intellectual sense. It must instead be encountered or “become.” This is one reason Bion asks the analyst to approach the session without memory, desire, or a premature insistence upon understanding.
There is something deeply relevant here for couple work.
When two people become fixed in certainty about one another—I know who you are. I know why you do this. I know what you are going to say—the relationship can become closed. The other person ceases to be encountered as an other and instead becomes increasingly experienced through the accumulated projections, injuries, expectations, and unconscious phantasies of the relationship.
Pickering makes a beautiful connection between Bion’s idea of transformation in O and the experience of being in love. Love requires an encounter with another person whose reality can never be entirely possessed or known.
Perhaps this is one of the paradoxes of intimacy: we become close to another person not by finally knowing them completely, but by remaining capable of discovering them.
For the couple therapist, this also means tolerating our own not-knowing. The consulting room constantly tempts us toward certainty. One partner appears unreasonable. The other appears injured. A familiar explanatory narrative begins to form.
Bion asks something more difficult of us.
Can we remain receptive long enough for something not yet thought to emerge?
Can we help the couple become curious about one another again?
And can the therapeutic space become a place in which neither partner, nor therapist, already knows exactly who the other is?
Perhaps this is one of the conditions under which love can begin to move again.
Continuing the Conversation at CPCP
As we think about love, couple space, and what becomes possible between two people, I also want to remind our CPCP community of three very special opportunities to think directly with clinicians whose work has shaped contemporary psychoanalytic couple therapy.
Julie Friend will be presenting to CPCP registrants on Creative Illusion in Couples. On October 9th. Julie’s work asks us to consider the imaginative life of the couple, and the shared psychic space partners create together. Creative illusion is not simply fantasy or distortion. It can become part of the couple’s capacity to play, to imagine, and to create something between them that neither partner could create alone.
On December 11th, Mary Morgan will present on The Dynamics of Merger. Morgan’s thinking has been foundational to our understanding of the couple state of mind and the unconscious systems that develop between partners. Merger raises a particularly important question: how do we remain deeply connected to another person without losing the experience of separateness that makes relationship possible?
On December 4th, we have the rare opportunity to welcome Judith Pickering, who will present Bion in Love: Transformations in O, exploring Bion’s concepts of container-contained, reverie, alpha function, the emotional links of Love, Hate, and Knowledge, negative capability, and transformations in O in relation to psychoanalytic couple therapy.
Pickering brings Bion’s thinking about Love, Hate, Knowledge, and ultimately O into the realm of intimate relationships. Her presence at CPCP is a rarity and an opportunity to encounter this difficult and evocative area of Bion’s thought with someone who has spent many years thinking about its relationship to love.
What links these three presentations for me is a question that lies at the heart of couple work: How do two people create a relationship in which there can be both intimacy and separateness, illusion and reality, knowing and not-knowing?
Friend, Morgan, and Pickering approach that question from very different directions. Together, their work reminds us that love is not a static possession or something a couple simply has or loses. It is an ongoing psychic achievement, dependent upon our capacity to remain curious about the other, to tolerate difference, and to create a space in which something new can continue to emerge.
I hope you will join us for these conversations.
These seminars invite us to think about something fundamental to our work: not simply how relationships break down, but what allows two people to remain alive to one another.
Perhaps the fate of love depends, in part, upon our capacity to tolerate that the person beside us will always remain partly unknown.
These questions will be at the center of two upcoming CPCP seminars.
On December 4, Judith Pickering will present Bion in Love: Transformations in O, exploring Bion’s concepts of container-contained, reverie, alpha function, the emotional links of Love, Hate, and Knowledge, negative capability, and transformations in O in relation to psychoanalytic couple therapy.
And on December 11, Mary Morgan will join us to continue our exploration of contemporary psychoanalytic couple work.
These seminars invite us to think about something fundamental to our work: not simply how relationships break down, but what allows two people to remain alive to one another.
Perhaps the fate of love depends, in part, upon our capacity to tolerate that the person beside us will always remain partly unknown.