Analysing the Dynamics in a Couple with Primitive Defences

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Because of severe early trauma experienced by one member of a married couple and the unresolved oedipal issues lingering within the other, maintaining a holding environment for both and moving them from the paranoid–schizoid position toward the depressive was nearly impossible at first. Once I became aware of how both partners, using projective identification, had put split-off parts of self into the other, and that the husband was having major dissociative episodes—for example, screaming, into the air, at his wife, and nearly everywhere—I could more readily see the pair as individuals and pick up the unconscious collusion between them as a couple who relied on primitive defences.