The Emotional Background of Marital Difficulties

Abstract

I N THE POPULAR MIND, marital difficulties and psychoanalysis are almost synonymous. There is a widespread belief that the majority of individuals who consult a psychoanalyst come because of with marriage. If for conscious dissatisfaction is substituted unconscious with the marital state, the popular belief is correct, for no matter how diverse the symptoms which the psychoneurotic patient presents to the psychoanalyst, closer scrutiny always reveals some psychosexual dissatisfaction. A marital relation in which the ideals of the man's or the woman's personality are realized while at the same time their diverse instinctual needs also find adequate expression is the goal for which men and women are striving in marriage. Yet it is increasingly evident that a large percentage of men and women either cannot marry or, if marriage occurs, can find little happiness in it. Their discontent may find expression in illness, unfaithfulness, psychosexual difficulties such as frigidity and impotence, psychoneurotic or even psychotic manifestations such as depression, delusional jealousy, or alcoholism. Anyone who goes through the case records of any psychiatrist or psychiatric clinic will immediately be struck by the frequent coincidence between an engagement or marriage and the onset of the psychosomatic, psychoneurotic, or psychotic disorder for which the patient is consulting a physician. The patient may be completely unconscious, or more or less of a causal connection between the marriage and the illness. One striking example of the desperate measures which an individual unconsciously took in order to preserve the illusion of a perfect marriage comes to my mind. A married woman of forty was sent by an internist who had been treating her for spastic colitis. In the course of the treatment, he had been struck by something queer in her personality. The woman came to the psychiatric consultation with a very sweet, fixed smile on her face. She protested immediately, before any question could be asked, that she had no need of psychiatric help since her marriage was an absolutely ideal one. When the psychiatrist made only a nonargumentative neutral reply to this statement, she continued her story. She had been married some fifteen to twenty years. She had wanted a child very much, but her husband did not. Of course she did not mind at all, she was sure she did not care whether she had a child. Throughout the last ten years of her marriage, she had had various illnesses which were always diagnosed as nothing wrong-or functional -in character. Five years ago, her husband became impotent-which she