Whose Disgust Is It Anyway?: Projection and Projective Identification in the Couple Relationship

Abstract

In this commentary on Josephs’s paper on Oedipal disgust, I emphasize that disgust is best viewed as a symptom of an interpersonal dynamic that may reflect a range of underlying unconscious issues beyond threats to attachment. Disgust, like all affective experience, doesn’t only arise in response to interpersonal experience; it is also created interpersonally through projection and projective identification. In my view, disgust signals a breakdown, a failure in the couple’s capacity to engage in the communicative processes essential to all intimate relationships for negotiating the fragile balances between separation and merger, love and hate, creativity and destruction.