Psychoanalytic Reflections in the Journey of Self-Discovery

PSYCHOANALYTIC REFLECTIONS

An Ecosystem of Displacement, New Associations

E. De Marchi

Reflections on the consequences of displacement and trauma

link to New Association archives – BPC website

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Shame

April 2023

In the ‘Interpretation of dreams’ (1899) Freud described shame as an affect, a lived experience, caused by the reaction to the external environment, to the gaze of the other. Dreams about shame leave one “incapable of altering the disagreeable situation”, naked of scantly clothes in front of “…almost always strangers with faces that have been left undetermined.” Incapable to tolerate the gaze of people known to them, the shamed transform the familiar into the unfamiliar, through “magical transformations of the world” (Sartre, 1939), emotions and affective experiences. What is considered shameful and what makes one feel ashamed varies across time and space, but the core of what it means to experience shame and to live with it and with its consequences runs deep in both the body and the mind beyond time and space.

Phenomenologically, shame is a relational and intersubjective experience. As I write and I see the letters that, one by one, appear on the screen a fraction of a second after I type them, I can see clearly how the way we understand ourselves is shaped in relation to others, as these letters, one by one, create words and meaning according to their order, their proximity to each other and the meaning that the reader attributes to them. Shame is a relational experience, that connects individuals to the external world whilst paradoxically, excluding them from it, as it manifests as an attack to the identity system and to the order they have become accustomed to.

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La Chimera

Reflections on Alice Rohrwacher’s film

June 2024

Myths always tell us something that is sufficiently universal about ourselves, without becoming fables, where the illusional reality is aimed at assuring always one is never disappointed when the end comes. On the contrary, myths, despite also using fantasised depictions of reality, ensure we remain in touch with what collectively makes us human and as such, fallible, vulnerable, and scared.

The chimera belongs to the mythological world, a fantastical (belonging to the world of fantasy) creature composed of different animal parts. A lion, with the head of a goat protruding from its back, sometimes with wings, also a bit woman, (the daughter of Typhon and Echidna) and always a monster. An implausible hybrid human/animal made up of parts that are not supposed to be together and yet – they are.

In the Jungian world, chimera would be an archetype – the archetype of the primitive omnipotent mother who – in the mind of the infant – has yet to be differentiated from her partner and the less available parent, but who has already stopped being the illusionary, all good, available, giving mother. Similarly, in Kleinian terms, she would be a primitive, frightening, unconscious phantasy inhabiting infants’ minds – the image of the parents together, merged, fantasised as an unknown, unknowable, excluding and disturbing monster who repels as well as attracting.

However, in the modern collective mind – the word “chimera” doesn’t immediately recall the mythological monster described by Homer, or an archetype, or even a terrifying primary unconscious phantasy. It is rather a signifier of unfulfillable wishes, desires, defined by the frustration of their impossibility.

Alice Rohrwacher’s choice of calling her latest film “La Chimera” probably stems from what “chimera” has come to symbolise in modern times. It is a film about the impossible, longing for what lost and that can never be returned, reaching its peak when the beautiful, 2000 years old and fully intact and preserved statue of an Etruscan goddess is found by chance by the tombaroli and cruelly beheaded, never to be returned to her original state.

It is a revelatory and often painful moment when one realises that nothing can be returned to its original state once that original state has been altered. The delusion and denial perpetuated by Arthur and Flora, for example, aim at removing the intolerable – the chimera has to lose its frightening, monstrous parts and maintain only the good ones. The frightening mythological chimera reappears to be quickly replaced by the longing for the return of what it once was: an ideal state of bliss and love instead of welcoming a new and different path that integrates elements of that original state into a new life – in an abandoned train station oozing new life and possibilities.

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The Possibility of Repair in Couples

Couples’ Therapy

June 2026

Contemporary psychoanalytic thinking about couples begins from a counterintuitive premise: that a relationship is not simply two people interacting, but something more – a shared psychological system, a relational field in which each partner’s inner world continuously shapes, provokes, and is reshaped by the other’s. What this means in practice is that the dynamics of couple life exceed what either partner consciously intends or understands. The relationship takes on a life of its own, organised around unconscious complementarities that both partners have, in some sense, been searching for long before they met.

Over time I have come to understand something the literature on couples’ therapy rarely says directly: that we do not simply fall in love with another person. We also fall in love with the version of ourselves that a particular person makes possible. And when that version can no longer be sustained – when the relationship ceases to hold the self we built inside it – we experience the loss not only as losing them, but as losing ourselves. The couple does not break down despite the connection. It breaks down, in some essential way, because of it: because the very fit that made the relationship feel like homecoming was built, at least partly, on what remained unresolved in each of us.

One partner may carry vulnerability while the other carries competence or detachment; one may carry the anxiety that the other has learned to suppress; one may be the one who weeps while the other remains composed, or the one who pursues while the other withdraws. These arrangements feel natural, even inevitable, from the inside – they have the quality of fit, of homecoming – but over time they tend to freeze. Each partner unconsciously depends on the other to hold and embody what they themselves cannot tolerate: fragility, fear, need. The relationship becomes a system of mutual defence, and what was initially experienced as complementarity gradually reveals itself as constraint. The person carrying vulnerability may feel chronically unseen; the person carrying strength may feel burdened and trapped by the weight of the other’s expectations. Neither is fully permitted to be more than the role they have been assigned within the relational economy they share.

The consequences of this, as Winnicott observed, extend beyond frustration. The capacity for genuine play – for exploratory, creative engagement with another person – depends on the recognition of the other as a real and separate subject, someone who can surprise you, resist you, and remain themselves even under the pressure of your projections. Where that recognition breaks down, where the partner becomes primarily a surface for one’s own anxieties and needs, play disappears. What replaces it is a kind of relational theatre: scripted, defended, in which each person is responding less to the person in front of them than to an internal figure who arrived in the relationship long before the relationship began.

Early love is sustained by idealisation — and this is not a failing but a necessity. Idealisation allows a couple to form, to imagine a shared future, to tolerate the vulnerability that genuine attachment always involves. It is rooted in something real: in the earliest developmental experience of encountering a caregiver who is, at some point in our very early life, everything one needs. The infant who experiences reliable care develops, through that experience, the first capacities for hope and trust – the foundational sense that the world can be responded to, that longing will sometimes be met. And crucially, good-enough care teaches something else: that the caregiver is not perfect, that disappointments will occur, and that they need not be catastrophic. The bond survives imperfection; trust is not shattered by frustration; the person who sometimes fails us remains, nonetheless, someone we can rely on. This is, in essence, the developmental template for all reparative work in adult relationships.

In adult love, idealisation performs a similar function: it holds the couple together through the inevitable early period of not yet knowing, of vulnerability and hope and the heightened aliveness that attachment brings. But it cannot be sustained, because no actual person can fulfil the requirements of an ideal. The partner will inevitably diverge from the figure one unconsciously needed them to be – will be less available, less understanding, less perfectly attuned – and when that divergence becomes undeniable, disappointment follows. This collapse of idealisation is not a catastrophe; it is, in fact, the necessary precondition for genuine intimacy, for sustained love. The question is what happens next. In relationships where there is sufficient trust, sufficient reflective capacity, sufficient tolerance of imperfection, the collapse of the ideal opens onto something deeper and more durable: the encounter with the other as they actually are. Where those capacities are absent or fragile, the collapse can feel, and sometimes be, final.

What I have come to understand, both through my own experience and through years of clinical work, is that couples do not simply choose each other; they recruit each other. There is an unconscious choreography at work in the formation and maintenance of intimate relationships, in which each partner’s inner world seeks out a counterpart – someone who will play the complementary role in a script that was written long before the couple met. The husband who escalates emotionally when he feels unseen is not, at the level of his deeper experience, responding only to his wife; he is responding to every moment in his history when feeling was suppressed or dismissed, when the need for recognition was met with silence or disapproval. The wife who withdraws when her husband’s distress becomes intense is not simply being cold; she is enacting a survival strategy learned in a childhood where emotional expression felt dangerous or coercive. Neither intends harm. Both are caught, as it were, in a story that is theirs but not of their own conscious making.

The possibility of repair, in any couple, depends on something quite specific: the capacity to encounter the partner as a separate subject, rather than as an extension of one’s own inner world. This is what psychoanalytic thinking calls mutual recognition, and it is, in its way, a radical act. To recognise the other as genuinely other, as having an inner life that is not simply a reflection or a continuation of one’s own, as capable of surprising, as being more than the role they have been assigned, is to surrender a certain kind of control, a certain defensive certainty, that the stuck couple cannot easily afford. It is also, paradoxically, the only condition under which the relationship can begin to move.

Therapy creates a space in which something like that surrender can be practised – tentatively, incrementally, under conditions of relative safety. The introduction of even small moments of playfulness, of genuine curiosity about the other’s experience, can begin to loosen the rigidity of entrenched positions. Couples who can access some reflective capacity – who can pause, wonder, and reconsider – are often able to repair small ruptures before they escalate, to begin to see each other’s behaviour as communication rather than attack, as an expression of unformulated need rather than a deliberate wound.

However, without sufficient reflective space, without the capacity to see what we are doing to each other and why, our complementary defences become a closed circuit – a system that reproduces itself, consuming possibility rather than generating it. Enduring love, I have come to believe, is not defined by the absence of disappointment – that is not available to any of us – but by the capacity to tolerate imperfection, to repair ruptures without being destroyed by them, and to keep returning to the encounter with the other as they actually are, rather than retreating into the safer and more manageable figure of who we needed them to be. That capacity is rooted in early experience, shaped by development, and – given sufficient time, containment, and willingness – capable of being deepened and expanded in the analytic space. This is the work: not to transcend the unconscious choreography, but to become, slowly, more aware of it – and in that awareness, to find a little more room for both.