Why do most relationships fail?
It's not due to the causes traditionally ascribed to the failure of marriages, such as religious incompatibilities, cultural differences, sexual difficulties and financial problems. They primarily fail because real closeness is precluded by psychological defenses formed early in life.
Most people say that they want love and positive acknowledgment, but relatively few people can tolerate real love and respect from another person because it threatens their defenses. They tend to retreat, pass over it and sometimes react with actual aggression.
Many movies and songs focus on this phenomenon, saying people have a hard shell and self-protective tendencies that must be overcome before they can accept love from a caring person. Just watch how most people react to a simple compliment. They usually parry it, evade it, deny the reality and many times respond with annoyance or provocation. An unavoidable truth about human beings is that, very often, the beloved is compelled to punish the lover who appreciates and acknowledges [the beloved's] positive traits.
What are we defending ourselves against?
Pain. We suffer pain when we are emotionally deprived, beginning in infancy. And we suffer anxiety and deep sadness when we learn of our personal death, often at a far earlier age than most people realize. We develop psychological defenses to protect ourselves against this pain.
You seem to be saying that we all develop these defenses, and that they damage us.
Yes, absolutely. All children suffer varying degrees of emotional deprivation. When the parental climate is characterized by emotional rejection, insensitivity or outright hostility, the child forms defenses to cope with psychological pain.
The parental environment can vary considerably in meeting the emotional needs of the child. The more positive the original attachment, the more likely the child is to find satisfaction in adult relationships. The converse is also true. The extent to which people come to rely on psychological defenses is proportional to the degree of pain they experienced in their formative years.
Why do you call the "fantasy bond" the core defense?
The fantasy bond is originally an imagined fusion formed by the infant with the mother or primary parenting figure. We imagine that we are fully protected from deprivation and death. It is highly effective as a defense because a human being's capacity for imagination provides partial gratification of needs and reduces tension. When we project this childhood fantasy bond onto our adult partner, and inevitably find they cannot meet our unconscious emotional hunger, we increasingly move away from loving operations and real affection and friendship.
What would be an example, from your therapy practice, of how the fantasy bond operates?
An angry couple came to see me in therapy. The husband criticized his wife from one end to the other, and then she did the same. As far as I could see, they were both pretty accurate. I then asked them: "Why do you stay with each other if you hate each other so much?" They replied: "Because we love each other." It was difficult for me to see the love in this type of warring couple. A fantasy bond creates an illusion of closeness at the expense of real closeness.
Most married couples are involved in a pretense of love, a mutual pact of self-deception, that other people -- including many therapists -- are reluctant to address. Intense anxiety and rage are aroused in both partners when their pretense or illusion of love is challenged.
People claim love and closeness is their primary goal, yet so many couples become estranged. Why the contradiction?
We bring our childhood defenses into our adult relationships. These defenses keep us from being vulnerable, the key quality needed for the development of intimacy. The very defenses that we form early in life in an attempt to cope with emotional pain make us dysfunctional to varying degrees in our adult personal relationships.
As a result, most people can only tolerate affection, love and respect in fantasy. They react adversely when they are acknowledged and loved in reality, because being loved threatens defenses formed early in life, when the child faced emotional stress.
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