We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
-T. S. Eliot
The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it.
—Sigmund Freud
./Indrea’s father’s hobby was woodcarving. Once he spent a year carving a chess set: all the pieces, black and white, and a board inlaid with squares of different woods. By Christmas Eve, Andrea remembers, the chess set was completed. The first game he played was with Andrea’s mother. They sat before the fireplace, the chessboard between them, as Andrea watched. Her mother won the game. Whereupon, in a rage, Andrea’s father threw the chess set into the fire. When Andrea met her husband-to-be, she played chess with him and won—twice. He fell into a dark mood. Thereafter, for much of her marriage, she inhibited her very considerable strengths; she “played dumb,” and not just at chess.
Refinding, however, is more than the ability to reexperience aspects of the past in the present, for we do this as involuntarily as we breathe. As a resource that enhances love, healthy refinding is the capacity to appreciate what is positive in this partial revival of the past while mastering, or at least tolerating, what is negative.
If integration has enabled love to last, refinding will deepen it. The ability to rediscover in our partner qualities that were pivotal in our initial love relationships adds a dimension of depth to our capacity to love. Refinding allows us to feel passionate intensity, familiarity, and effortless rapport with our partner. Yet it can also represent the ultimate turn-off, the pain and heartache of love’s disappointments, the re-creation of past conflicts (“Oh God, not again”) in the present. While refinding enables us to experience depth in relationships, it is often the dynamic that people most consciously seek to avoid: the rediscovery of aspects of mother and father in our lovers is not generally felt to be desirable or to generate sexual chemistry.
Refinding is at work when our relationship begins to feel like a rendezvous with the past. As an undercurrent that imbues present love with what was desirable in the intimacy of the past, pleasurable refinding draws us to our partner. Refinding that is laden with conflict, on the other hand, casts a shadow over our relationship. Overwhelming the defenses that shield us from the impact of painful, unresolved experiences with those we have loved in the past, it can provoke a potential revival of these experiences in the present.
This superimposition of past on present can be very problematic, especially when it occurs outside our conscious awareness. But when conflicts with mother and father that may previously have been too painful to resolve now reemerge with our partner, we have a second chance to work through troublingly familiar scenarios, and perhaps master them.
WHAT IS REFOUND IN REFINDING?
What we experience in the present is almost never a picture-perfect replay of the past. Andrea’s husband, for example, was not a perfect
reproduction of her father: what Andrea refound in her husband was her internal image of her father.
Consider the experience of Justine, a recently divorced woman of thirty, whose own parents divorced when she was nine:
I’ve always been very suspicious of men, including my exhusband. For years I thought that they were all exactly like my father, who I saw as an unscrupulous manipulator, a guy who just exploited women. I’d see what I thought was my father’s lack of conscience in my husband Lowell and I’d feel like, hey, the guy’s capable of anything. Which in retrospect I think was a terrible distortion. The thing is it’s only in the last two years or so that I’ve finally gotten to know my father for myself. Before that, after my parents’ divorce, I hadn’t spent that much time with him. I’d just absorbed this picture of him from my mother. . .which was like a guy on a wanted poster, one of the ten most dangerous or whatever. . .1 just saw him through her eyes.
Now I feel really angry at my mother, because she made it impossible for me to have a relationship with my father. . . she just spoiled him for me, I guess because she was so enraged at him for leaving. . . .
Justine implies that in her husband she refound her father— but her father as seen through her mother’s eyes. Justine’s experience may not be typical, but it emphasizes that what we refind in our partners are our internal images. Interestingly, when her image of her father changed, what she refound in the men she loved also subtly changed.
Sometimes, as in Justine’s case, the images that describe the landscape of intimate relationships are conscious: “I’d see what I thought was my father’s lack of conscience in my husband Lowell.” Much more commonly, we are aware of the results of refinding (as Justine was aware of her suspiciousness), but without being conscious of the process that has provoked them. Instead of recognizing the influence of refinding, we simply feel that our
partner bears an unfortunate and uncanny psychological resemblance to our father (or mother, or whomever).
While the process of refinding often distorts our perceptions of our partner in the present, refinding is impartial in terms of what it carries forward from the past. Consequently, refinding is both desired and dreaded: we want to relive what we have consciously found to be the strengths of our past loves, but we dread the repetition of the painful difficulties that marred these same intimacies. It is the emotional complexity of this conflict that makes refinding, for many of us, the single most powerful and problematic force in love.
A Case of Refinding
Mark was a forty-one-year-old corporate manager who came to therapy for help with his difficulty in making a decision to marry. He had spent his twenties and thirties in a series of “committed” relationships, each of which had eventually unraveled. The women he’d been involved with had appealed to him in different ways, but they all shared a common trait: they were, in his words, “unusually sweet and nurturing.” This quality was a significant aspect of their initial allure for him, but later Mark reacted to it as though it were a shortcoming:
I feel like all my past girlfriends were too mushy, too yielding.
I never felt I was coming up against someone I could fight with, someone who could take me on. I’d usually get my way and then feel disappointed or guilty, and also alone, somehow. It’s as if something was missing, something about me or something about them, I’m not sure which. There was a lot that was good about these relationships... I learned a lot about accepting the ups and downs of living with someone. . .But this feeling of missing something was so strong I always wound up leaving, or else the woman got fed up and she’d leave me.
Now Mark was worried that, once again, he was about to leave or be left. He had lived for the past six months with Lauren, a
thirty-four-year-old organizational consultant who had been hired by his company to resolve some interdepartmental tensions. Ah most immediately, Mark had been intensely attacted to Lauren, but also somewhat intimidated by her. She was strong, assertive, and very adept at reading people. Once Mark became involved with Lauren, he quickly fell in love:
From the start, I thought she had what was important to me. She was powerful, she cared about me, there’s a whole lot we share. And unlike the other women I’d lived with, she was more than willing to argue with me. . . She didn’t feel like she had to yield to my every whim. At the beginning, everything seemed unbelievably great. We loved to talk to each other, we both liked to cuddle for hours, sex was intense. . . Every time we were about to get together, I’d feel my heart start to pound, anticipating what it was going be like... I’d feel this weird combination of longing for her and being afraid. . . Being with someone like Lauren was exactly what I’d decided I wanted, but for some reason it was scary.
Lauren seemed to embody many aspects of Mark’s romantic ideal. It was easy to admire her, and the two of them had enough in common that he could see himself in her, which made him feel comfortable. He could both argue with her and enjoy feeling “merged” with her.
Mark said that when he was with Lauren, he felt that he was “home.” This had a double meaning for him. He thought he had finally found the person with whom he could make the home he wanted. And there was a feeling that she was familiar, which reminded him of his first home.
Lauren was both different from and similar to his mother. She was much more independent than his mother had been, and she was less demanding. But like his mother, Lauren was genuinely interested in him, and enjoyed the same playful aggression his mother had. He and Lauren could banter for hours. There was usually an ironic edge to their humor. It was an oblique way of being close. Mark’s mother had constantly tried to connect with
him in the same way, through irony and playful argument. At the time, he had engaged with her, but without getting much pleasure from their verbal jousting. Secretly, he hated the feeling that his mother couldn’t do without this kind of involvement with him, as if it were the only form of intimacy with which she was comfortable:
My mother was always in my face. I loved her a lot, and I’m sure her admiration, her desire to be involved with me, all that stuff gave me a lot of confidence. . . But I got sick of the endless arguments she’d instigate about politics or how you should lead your life or some stupid TV show or the food at a restaurant. . .Sometimes she’d preface these beloved debates of hers with something about playing the devil’s advocate. The devil needs an advocate? I never understood that concept. Anyway, I just felt like I had to get very far away from her and as soon as I could, I did.
Prior to Lauren, Mark had chosen women with personalities as different from his mother’s as he could find. This freed him from his mother’s kind of intrusiveness. But in these relationships, he never felt challenged or stimulated. By the time he was forty, he had determined that he wanted to find someone who was more of a peer, someone, in his words, “who could handle him.” Mark’s intensely ambivalent relationship with his mother had apparently left him with a significant problem: How could he be with a woman who was strong and challenging like his mother without feeling he was with someone who wouldn’t let him be? In Lauren he felt that he had found the ideal solution. But a year and a half into his relationship with her, he was dismayed to find himself standing again at a familiar crossroads, simultaneously drawn to her and eager to get away.
The Refound Past: Positive and Negative
Mark’s dilemma—how to reconcile the positive and negative aspects of refinding—is one that many of us face in love. Mark wanted to refind in his partner only those aspects of his mother
that he believed were worth reexperiencing: her unfailing interest in him, her nurturing domesticity, her intellectual energy and feistiness. At the same time, he hoped to avoid aspects of his relationship with her that had left him feeling invaded and corralled. But no one has this kind of control over refinding. Because so much of the process is unconscious, refinding works its problematic (or magical) effects regardless of our conscious wishes or intentions.
The impact of refinding on our love lives will differ depending on the nature of the images that make up our inner map and on whether our internal images, positive and negative, are integrated or not. The more integrated our images of past love, the more these images facilitate love in the present. Why should this be so?
Recall that integrated images have a both-and rather than an either-or quality: they let us see other people as possessing a mixture of positive and negative attributes. Integrated images of past love that are neither overwhelmingly positive nor frighteningly negative draw us to new love, and enhance it, for at least two reasons. First, we’re motivated to refind in the present what was pleasurable in the past. Because we aren’t comparing current love with an impossibly idealized version of childhood love, we aren’t acutely vulnerable to disappointment. Second, we’re motivated to refind in the present what was problematic in the past, for the purpose of mastering it. We aren’t so dominated by images of old disasters in love that we compulsively re-create them—or, to protect ourselves, avoid love altogether.
As for Mark, his images of his mother were integrated, but only barely. He “loved her a lot” and he “had to get very far away from her.” He didn’t have an image of her as either all bad or all good. Yet his positive and negative images of his mother were both very highly charged. He was capable of ambivalence, but not acceptance. “Can’t live with them, can’t live without them” summed up Mark’s feeling about refinding in relation to women like his mother. This unresolved tension between his desire to refind and his dread of refinding dominated his romantic involvements.
Mark’s conflict of wish and fear is a version of what most of us experience. Perhaps, given this conflict, the most auspicious
romantic match is one with a partner who is similar enough to the “original” to encourage pleasurable refinding, but dissimilar enough that problematic refinding does not overwhelm us. This “moderate” choice may heighten the potential for mastery as well as pleasure; similarity to the original love helps bring the past into the present, while dissimilarity may help us differentiate the past from the present. When one lover says to another, “I feel as if I’ve known you all my life,” he or she is probably responding to the factor of similarity. But if the past is refound without enough dissimilarity, it may only be repeated (or fled) rather than mastered.
WHAT MOTIVATES REFINDING?
Refinding is driven by the same three motives that energize all six of the capacities in love: the desire for pleasure, the need for self-esteem, and the urge for mastery. Our understanding of these motives in refinding derives in part from what may seem an odd source: the exploration of transference in psychotherapy.
Transference and Refinding
In treating his patients, Freud found that most people were inclined to transfer onto their physician (or analyst or therapist) feelings, thoughts, and behavior that they had originally experienced in relation to significant figures during childhood. The child saw the parents as all-powerful and responded with intense and contradictory feelings. Now, with very much the same mixture of feelings, the patient empowers the doctor.
Early in this century, Freud wrote about an especially hazardous form of transference in which the patient falls in love with the analyst. The “erotic transference,” in Freud’s initial assessment, was an obstacle that had the potential to derail treatment altogether. Over time, however, Freud and others came to recognize that if transference (including erotic transference) were explored rather than acted out, it could provide, alongside dreams, a second “royal road to the unconscious.”
Freud’s observations of the erotic transference crucially informed his understanding of refinding. He saw that romantic and transference love alike were new editions of original childhood love. In the decades since Freud first wrote, explorations of transference have continued to deepen our understanding of the role of refinding in love.
The study of transference reveals that people bring the past into the present in various ways in order to satisfy various needs. The first evidence of a patient’s transference may be glimpsed in his or her choice of a therapist. Similarly, refinding exerts its initial influence on love as it shapes our choice of a romantic partner. In general, patients choose therapists, and lovers choose their partners, to satisfy needs for pleasure, self-esteem, and mastery that stem from their most significant early relationships. 1 When we fall in love, we are usually aware (albeit dimly) of the kinds of refinding, positive and negative, that our partner will provoke—and the needs that this refinding will satisfy.
The Pleasure of Refinding
The refinding of experiences that were positive is usually pleasurable. Paradoxically, perhaps, there can also be pleasure in the refinding of experiences that were negative.
Positive refinding fuels passion, as we reexperience the excitement, mystery, and allure of what was longed for but unobtainable in our earliest love relations. It’s as though we revisit the past
1. Nearly every student of psychotherapy has an opportunity to research this matter informally when he or she watches a film that has become a staple in training programs across the country. In this film, the same patient is shown in successive therapy hours with three different therapists: Fritz Peris, Carl Rogers, and Albert Ellis. After the film, it is common for students to speculate about which of the three they would select as their own therapist: Peris, who is often seen as a challenging, aggressive, erotically exciting father? Rogers, whose presence is suggestive of a calm, accepting, almost “maternal” father? Or Ellis, whose demeanor is rational and disinterested, calling to mind the image of a consultant, rather than a parent? Students with different pasts choose with different needs in mind.
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by bringing it alive in the present: now there is the exhilarating potential to satisfy desires that, when we were very young, we could satisfy only in fantasy. We feel we are again with someone very familiar, but with whom, in the past, sexual closeness in particular was taboo. Unless anxiety or guilt is dominant, this mixture of the familiar and the forbidden can create a very powerful chemistry. Unconsciously, we may have chosen our partner precisely because he or she embodied certain qualities or physical attributes of the intimate other who was forbidden to us or lost: mother, father, a sibling, or someone else.
Positive experiences of many kinds can be relived through refinding. The closeness and support, security and stimulation, that we enjoyed in the past can be revived in the present where they add a dimension of depth to current intimacy. To the extent that pleasurable refinding dominates the picture, our partner becomes all the more appealing, and this in turn intensifies our desires for intimacy and commitment.
The refinding of pleasurable experience also enables us to make a bridge between our present love and our broad family legacy. When Mark fell in love with Lauren, he was responding not just to his recognition in her of his mother’s strengths; he also saw his grandmother’s wit, his uncle’s shrewdness, his sister’s sophistication. He refound with Lauren the best that his family had to offer, and through doing so, he made a statement about what he valued in his family heritage. In a sense, through refinding we honor our past: we carry forward what we loved in our original family into the new family we are now creating. This aspect of refinding may enable two partners to feel more comfortable with one another when they share a common cultural heritage and the values, beliefs, and rituals that go with it.
The legacy of our families, however, is always mixed. We refind in our partner the worst of our past as well as the best. How could this painful refinding possibly be a source of pleasure?
To answer the question, we must consider not only the conscious but also the unconscious aspects of refinding. Before he met Lauren, Mark had already become aware that his relationships
with women were marred by control struggles, for which he acknowledged partial responsibility. He knew that his mother had been very dominating and, therefore, that he was always much too ready to see (or imagine) the same quality in the women with whom he became involved. Mark hoped, a little too optimistically, that with Lauren his self-knowledge would inoculate him against the old fear of feeling controlled.
None of us consciously invites painful refinding. We hope to avoid it or diminish its influence. Like Mark, we may hope that understanding our patterns in love will protect us. But when it comes to our own habits of refinding, our knowledge is always incomplete. The refinding we confront in every particular relationship is unique; it brings to the surface new, sometimes unexpected aspects of the original experience. Mark had every reason to worry that he might refind in Lauren some of his mother’s unwanted control—and in fact this is exactly what occurred. What he failed to anticipate was how confused and angry he would find himself feeling—and how compelled he would be to play out the painful drama.
In the course of his struggles with Lauren (over everything from whose tastes in decorating would prevail to who would be in charge sexually), Mark became guiltily aware of the pleasure he took from confrontations that were ostensibly painful. Whenever his will and Lauren’s were about to collide, Mark detected a strange sense of satisfaction in himself. In trying to understand this feeling, he realized that while he had hated the confrontations with his mother, they had been charged with an emotional intensity that felt very intimate. Battling with his mother had been a way to feel separate while also feeling close. Now with Lauren, fighting seemed to provide the same reward. In addition, there was the undeniable pleasure of releasing pent-up anger. Lauren was the immediate target, but Mark knew she was also a convenient standin for his rather intimidating mother, in relation to whom his anger had had to be suppressed.
Painful refinding often brings with it these kinds of unconscious, or hidden, pleasures. But they are pleasures that often exact a
high price. In part, the failure of Mark’s involvements can be understood in these terms: he traded love for the pleasures of painful refinding. When Mark said he now wanted a partner “who could handle him,” he meant a woman strong enough both to tolerate this painful refinding and to help him transcend it.
Refinding and Self-Esteem
The relationship of pleasurable refinding to self-esteem is straightforward: self-esteem is enhanced when positive experiences are refound, whereas refinding negative experiences usually diminishes self-esteem. Under certain circumstances, however, painful refinding can protect, if not enhance, our self-esteem by enabling us to attribute the negativity in a relationship to our partner rather than ourselves. Once Mark decided that his first serious girlfriend was impossibly controlling, exactly as his mother had been, he had an explanation for his difficulty in the relationship that kept his self-esteem entirely intact. To the extent that painful refinding facilitates blaming, it preserves self-esteem. This is one more reason why, in current love, we may refind even those experiences we wish we had never had in the first place.
Refinding and Mastery: Repetition vs. Repair
With the hope of transcending our limitations in love, we often challenge ourselves by unconsciously choosing partners with whom the problematic past can be replayed. The opportunity in this refinding is to repair the emotional damage inflicted, inadvertently or otherwise, in the course of our earliest relationships. The risk is that the troubling past will only be repeated.
For purposes of mastery, it is usually our negative experiences in love that we refind in the present. But past experiences that are ostensibly positive, such as closeness and success, can also be conflicted. To master them, the unresolved aspects of such positive experiences often make their way into our relationships.
At thirty-three, Celine’s relationships with men had been disappointing for as long as she could remember. Her assumption, which she traced to her relationship with her father, was that men
didn’t care. Her father had died when she was twelve; while he was alive, she believed, he hadn’t really cared about her. An experience of refinding, however, was reparative: it helped her to see her father differently—and this in turn allowed her to trust a man’s love for the first time in many years:
I was with my boyfriend Terry the night before he was leaving town for a three-week vacation. I’m not sure why, but it made me think about my father.. .1 guess because Terry was leaving, and my father’s death was a kind of leaving... I started talking about all these feelings I was having about him, about my father, that made me really sad... not so much about how he didn’t care, but more about how I really missed him. . . how terrible it was for a girl to lose her father like I did, when I was so young, when I really needed him... And as I was saying this, I looked at Terry and saw his eyes welling up with tears... he was almost crying. . . He was feeling right along with me. Then we hugged. I started crying, and I felt, my God! he’s really here with me, he really does care. . . And I’d never, ever felt this about him before. I’d always taken it for granted he didn’t really feel that much for me. . .you know, my usual attitude about men, none of them care.
So this was a revelation. .. And then suddenly it triggered this old feeling, of being held by my father. I just started sobbing. I realized that the same way Terry cared for me, my father had really cared, too. I just knew it. I felt it. I’d been wrong about him, the idea that he didn’t care. I took out this photo album I have that I’d never looked at much. Terry and I looked at it... I saw pictures of my father holding me when I was little.. . and his look, the way he held me, this big smile he had. It just said what now I know was true, that he really loved me. ..
I think when I was twelve I just had to pretend that he didn’t. . .otherwise, I think I was afraid I’d never stop crying, that I’d never have a normal life, his dying would have ended everything.
Celine’s experience with her boyfriend allowed her to refind her father. In this refinding, she was able to master her childhood terror of loss and grief that had forced her to deny her father’s love, and the love of other men as well.
Mourning and Mastery
For there to be repair rather than repetition, the past must come alive, but with a difference. In Celine’s case her boyfriend’s tears were the difference. As evidence of his caring, they jarred Celine’s assumption that Terry was just like her uncaring father. Once her basic assumption about men (“none of them care”) was shaken, the door opened to a past she had denied. She reexperienced with Terry the love she had known from her father when she was a child. And this left her sobbing, moved by feelings of gratitude and loss. It also left her more capable of loving.
Celine’s example makes the point that becoming aware of the goodness of love in the present can, unexpectedly, trigger grief. Like Celine, we may grieve for what we have had and lost. Or we may grieve for what the past has never given us. But this grieving can lead to mastery. Mourning frees us from the inhibitions imposed by the past and lets us love more fully in the present.
THE STAGES OF LOVE AND REFINDING
In the first moments of meeting, we register microcues that either stimulate our desire for deeper involvement or turn us off. Partly, the silent question we ask ourselves has to do with idealization: Are we in the presence of someone who could conceivably personify our romantic ideal? Just as important, however, we’re unconsciously assessing whether this is someone who could play the various roles called for in our dramas of refinding. When we experience an exciting sense of possibility, it’s often because we’ve found someone who fits the part (or parts) we’re trying to cast.
Falling in Love
During the first stage of intimacy, refinding colors the relationship in broad strokes. We’re becoming aware in a rudimentary way of the kinds of refinding that our partner will provoke. We’re also unconsciously deciding whether we’re willing to take on the refinding that we provoke in our partner. Usually, if the relationship is to survive the first stage of love, the refinding that we (and our partner) dimly anticipate must be more positive than negative. Of course, the accuracy of our conscious assessment may well be marred by the idealization of early love. By diminishing our awareness of whatever we might find problematic in our partner, idealization often distracts us from the potential for refinding painful experience.
Becoming a Couple
Refinding begins to exert both a more profound and a more obvious influence once we enter the second stage of love. In relation to love’s early promise, refinding ensures that “what you see isn’t what you get.” Remember Adam and Rachel, whose story was summarized in the Introduction? Adam’s view of Rachel had shifted 180 degrees: the smart, strong, and supportive woman he had fallen in love with now seemed to be a coolly castrating adversary who saw him as weak and clinging. Adam and Rachel had refound in one another their most painful images of their mothers. This dispiriting refinding provoked nearly overwhelming feelings of disappointment and resentment. What began for Rachel and Adam as a “made for each other” romance nearly unraveled due to the influence of the reanimated past.
In the second phase of love, refinding’s themes emerge in sharper relief because we are now establishing a “family life” together that is likely to evoke the past. We may begin to live together, to set up a household, or to make joint, long-term plans. Our view of our partner, at this point, is likely to be overlaid with impressions of past intimacies, including but not limited to our images of mother and father. Often we begin to notice how similar our
partner is to one or more past loves. These similarities are partly observed (for we chose our partner purposefully) and partly imagined or projected. Now that our partner is relating to us in a more overtly familial role, we’re inclined to see him or her filling that role in a way that’s consistent with our models from the past. When Adam began to see his mother in Rachel, therefore, he defensively reenacted what he had learned as a child: namely, to sulk and/or demand attention. When Rachel noticed Adam’s psychological resemblance to her mother, she became increasingly critical and withdrawn.
Unconsciously, we also treat our partner in such a way that he or she actually comes to identify with the internal images we project. We enlist our partner to play a role in the old drama and, in so doing, we enhance the likelihood that our current relationship will replicate a previous one.
For many of us, the results of refinding are not as obvious or dramatic as they were for Rachel and Adam. We may experience its influence only indirectly, or in small and subtle ways. We may be aware of a nagging uncertainty about our commitment to our partner as we come to feel more and more “coupled.” We may find specific behaviors of our partner increasingly annoying, without understanding quite why. Usually, we are not only struggling with the capacity for integration, attempting to accept the bad with the good; we are also experiencing the as-yet-unidentified influence of the ghosts of our past loves, hovering over a relationship that previously seemed free of such influences.
The challenge of the second phase of intimacy is not to resolve the dilemmas of refinding, this would probably be too ambitious, but to be able to recognize the impact of refinding for what it is: an incursion of the past into the present. Hopefully, we can also come up with ways to grapple with problematic refinding, so that its destructive potential is minimized.
Ultimately, we hope we can enjoy what is positive in the revival of the past while accepting what is negative. In this connection, our prior experiences as adults in love can be a considerable help. Previous relationships may have allowed us to become aware of
our vulnerabilities to particular kinds of refinding. In addition, they may have helped us recognize the near-inevitability of refinding, and thus made possible a more relaxed and accepting attitude toward it.
Mark and Lauren shared the advantage of these kinds of prior experiences in love. Both had suffered in their past relationships from a lack of understanding of the role of refinding. After one particularly disappointing relationship, Lauren had sought the help of a therapist. Now she wanted to make use of what she had learned to help ensure that her relationship with Mark would not be similarly disappointing. Mark was in very much the same position. The two of them talked about the troubling impact of the past on their previous relationships. They realized that they shared a vocabulary and a perspective that made them more confident of their ability to resolve their problems together. There was something both realistic and romantic about this conversation. Talking together about their future as a couple symbolized a deeper commitment and helped them feel closer to one another.
Deepening Love over Time
The third stage of intimacy further heightens the potential for refinding. In part, this is because greater commitment means greater safety. Feeling more secure and more relaxed, we’re more willing to take the risk of being fully ourselves, which can elicit more transference, more refinding. In addition, with marriage (or a comparable commitment), our living arrangement usually comes to resemble more closely the one in which we grew up—and this too evokes refinding. Finally, if and when children enter the picture, refinding our experience with our parents becomes an absolute inevitability. In this connection, consider the couples (oldfashioned couples, perhaps) who address one another as “Mother” and “Father.”
In the third phase of love, we’re hoping for a lifelong involvement with our partner. Often, this raises our expectations, and rising expectations heighten both the risk of disappointment and
the wish to be close. We may want our beloved not only to be a good companion but also to continue to meet our romantic ideals. In addition, and this may be the most ambitious desire of all, we want our partner to remedy the injustices of the past, to compensate us for what we missed when we were young. We want our lover to be a healer.
Love’s potential to satisfy and to heal is considerable but not unlimited. Finding ourselves again in the bosom of a family can stimulate very powerful longings, only some of which will be fulfilled. Whether our own refinding is merely a painful repetition or turns out to be reparative depends on the details of our personal history and, just as important, our reactions to them. If we only experience problematic refinding, without recognizing and understanding it, we’re in trouble. If, by contrast, we can recognize the experience for what it is and learn from it, then refinding can become a resource for personal transformation and for enhancing our relationship.
PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT AND REFINDING
Healthy refinding enables us to experience with our partner both the passion that makes love exciting and the tenderness that makes it comforting. Aspects of every previous relationship that has mattered to us from infancy through adulthood can be revived through refinding; refinding is never limited to a single phase of development. For the most part, however, it is our first and most influential experiences of intimacy that shape our habits of refinding. It’s not surprising that we most commonly refind experiences from the family in which we grew up, for this was the setting in which we first knew love, and the problems associated with love.
When our first relationships (especially those with our parents) were “good enough,” they can be refound with our partner without too much pain, guilt, or disappointment. In this happy instance, refinding will be a subtle backdrop that mainly enhances our current relationship, rather than a factor in the foreground
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that dominates it. Our childhood involvements will have encouraged an optimism about the involvements to come and, consequently, we will have been able to develop deep and lasting adult commitments. To the extent that the original relationships are refound, they will bring to new love a reassuring continuity with the old.
But when our early relationships were troubling, refinding them can cause problems that are difficult to avoid because troubling experiences press for repeated expression. Partly, this allows mastery; as we’ve seen, however, painful refinding can also serve other less progressive purposes, such as defensive loyalty or revenge.
Refinding—When Earlier Capacities Are Vulnerable
Problems in refinding originate primarily in two ways. First, like Mark, we can be vulnerable in one (or more) of the capacities in love that precede refinding in the course of our development. Mark’s Achilles’ heel was merging:
My mother was very loving and she expressed a lot of this physically. Pm sure physical affection is healthy for a kid, but when I was still pretty young, I began to feel like it was getting to be too much. She’d come and tuck me in, and I’d just feel like I had to get away. . .but I’d pretend everything was fine. . .otherwise she’d be hurt or angry. I remember how strong the smell of her perfume was. .. she’d be bending over me in bed and I’d almost feel like I couldn’t breathe. . .Now it’s ridiculously easy for me to feel smothered by women. Obviously, this goes back to my mother.
Mark complained about being smothered, but secretly he also loved his mother’s adoring attention, even when it felt overwhelming. It was a heady experience to feel so utterly confident that he was the apple of his mother’s eye. For Mark, merging came to have two contradictory faces: on the one hand, being close to his mother was to feel adored; on the other hand, being close to her was also to feel suffocated.
This conflict about merging was intensified by Mark’s belief that in order to be adored, he had to submit (“I’d just feel like I had to get away. . . but I’d pretend everything was fine.”) His mother’s adoration helped him feel good about himself, but submitting to her was humiliating. It became impossible for Mark to separate his positive imagery of being deeply cared for from his negative imagery of being intruded upon and feeling compelled to submit.
As an adult, whenever Mark began to feel close to a woman, he invariably refound these contradictory images. He loved to feel loved, of course; but to the extent that he refound his mother’s affection, as he did with Lauren, he was also burdened by the old images of intrusiveness, submission, and weakness. In addition, Mark felt that his mother had “spoiled” him. Living in the aura of her overwhelming affection had been very compelling— and because this childhood experience was impossible to duplicate as an adult man with an adult woman, he frequently wound up feeling disappointed. Mark’s conflicted imagery of merging made him a very ambivalent lover.
In his twenties and thirties, his solution had been to dilute refinding by consciously choosing partners who bore little resemblance to his mother. But these relationships had felt incomplete. Now, in his forties and living with Lauren, Mark chose to grapple with the challenging refinding that he had previously sought to avoid.
Mark’s experience illustrates the way in which a vulnerability in merging can make refinding problematic. Conflicts or vulnerabilities in the capacities for erotic involvement, idealization, and integration can create comparably challenging problems with refinding. Integration, when it is not securely achieved, can be especially destructive, for it gives all the old images we refind in adult love an exaggerated, black-or-white quality that makes them very difficult to cope with.
Refinding the Oedipal Past
When as children we compete with one parent for the love of the other, we play a high-stakes game. During this period (roughly
ages three to six), emotionally charged experiences involving passion, tenderness, and competition register as internal images. Shaping our map of love, these early images have lasting consequences and are the other primary source of problems in refinding. Listen to two fathers describing the Oedipal triangle from opposite vantage points:
I was talking to my four-year-old son, Lenny, the other day about who sleeps with who in our house. Very nonchalantly, he announced that he was going to sleep with his mother from now on. Then he was going to marry her. I asked him, What about your brother Mike? What’s he going to do? Lenny said he could sleep with Marie. Marie’s the au pair. Then I said, But what about me? Who am I supposed to sleep with? Lenny told me I could sleep with Byron. Byron’s the dog.
You asked me if I ever felt jealous of Brent, my son. I didn’t think so. But then I woke up one morning, this was about six months after Brent was born... and I was feeling so upset that I was almost shaking. My wife asked me what was wrong, and I said, I just had a terrible dream. It’s completely freaked me out. I told her that, in the dream, I’d gone to work—but somehow I’d discovered that she was at home having an affair with another man. To which my wife replied, “Was he short and bald?” Very smart woman, my wife.
Generally, people either accept the influence of the Oedipal triangle as a psychological given or reject the whole notion as preposterous. How could a little boy take seriously the possibility of displacing his father as his mother’s mate? How could a little girl think she could replace her mother in her father’s affections? Indeed, these kinds of wishes (which children regularly reveal, both in words and play) are unrealistic, but only if we look at them from our perspective as adults. Through the eyes of a child, as yet incapable of clearly differentiating fantasy from reality, the same wishes can seem entirely realistic, and as such they can be both very motivating and very frightening.
As children, it’s scary for us to compete with one parent for the love of the other. What will the consequences be? Will our competition be tolerated or punished? What if we are successful? What if we fail? Can we have the love of both parents, or must we choose between them? These are the kinds of questions that are answered through the real and fantasized events of the Oedipal period of development. The playing out of these dilemmas is central to our imagery of ourselves and others in love. The Oedipal romance of childhood is the first edition of the romance that is refound when we love as adults.
When Oedipal Dilemmas Are Resolved
One of the rewards of healthy Oedipal development is the ability as adults to experience both passionate excitement and tender comfort with the same lover. The pathway to this happy destination is somewhat circuitous, for this potential is alternately encouraged and discouraged by the circumstances of development. At age three or four, we first experience affection and sexuality in relation to the same person, usually mother or father (or both). Boys and girls become aware of their genitals as a source of pleasure much earlier, but it is only at three or four that the child’s genital pleasure becomes associated (in fantasy) with interaction with other people. Partly, it is this first fusion of affection and erotic fantasy in relation to the parents that animates the Oedipal romance.
In the healthiest case, our parents were neither seductively encouraging nor angrily rejecting when we tried to play out the childhood drama of romance and rivalry. Competition, then, will not have been experienced as a terrifying danger. Nor will sexuality have been frighteningly complicated either by overstimulation or punitive intolerance. Typically, in such an atmosphere, we can give up our romantic pursuit of the parent gradually, without feeling burdened by guilt or shamed by defeat. Our sexual feelings now go underground, for the time being, while our feelings of love for both parents persist. Our compensation for what we might feel we’ve lost is not only our parents’ continuing love but also our identification with their strengths, especially the strengths
of the parent of the same sex. The little girl, for example, might not marry her father, but she begins to experience as her own the strengths that enabled her mother to marry him.
Then, in adolescence, puberty threatens to revive some of the old erotic longings. Given a healthy passage through the Oedipal straits, however, these feelings will be redirected toward nonincestuous partners. The amicable divorce from our parents, emotionally speaking, frees us to choose new lovers. In this context, passion and tenderness, sex and affection, can once again be experienced in the same relationship. To the extent that our parents are refound in adult love, their presence will only, subtly, enhance it.
When Oedipal Dilemmas Are Unresolved
PRE-Oedipal Problems. As if the Oedipal situation weren’t complex enough, there are pre-Oedipal difficulties that can complicate it still further. Consider the relationship we have with our parents in the first two or three years of life. Suppose, for example, that a little girl’s mother was too depressed or too ill to give her the nurturing attention she needed early in her life. Then she will arrive on the Oedipal scene like a child who is desperate for dinner, having been deprived of the first two meals of the day. Her desire for her father to love her, as he loves her mother, will be much more intense than it would otherwise be. But the same early frustration that intensifies her desire, and propels her into the Oedipal rivalry, can generate intense anger. And this anger can make the rivalry much more frightening, by coloring it with themes of revenge and retaliation.
If, as children, our fear of competing with the same-sex parent prevails, we may pull back from the Oedipal rivalry, regressing to a preoccupation with earlier issues in development, such as dependency or control. And this can turn our passion as adults into something more closely resembling the relationship of parent and child.
A middle-aged man, for example, found it difficult to be comfortable with his wife. While he wanted her to take care of him, he was terrified of losing his autonomy. One night he dreamed
that he was in the kitchen, while on just the other side of the wall his wife was in their bedroom with another man. He couldn’t deal with this adulterous triangle, however, because he was too preoccupied with repairing a device that stood against the kitchen wall: a curious combination of a stove and a toilet. Whatever else it meant to him, this dream reflected his fear of competing with other men and his difficulty responding sexually to his wife—not to mention his preoccupation with concerns that predate the Oedipal period.
On the other hand, the intensification of our childhood desire for the opposite-sex parent may be more potent than our fear of competing. The inability to relinquish the object of our Oedipal desires can be reflected in our choice, as adults, never to pursue partners who are available. This keeps the original Oedipal pursuit alive. A forty-year-old man, never married and recurrently involved with unavailable women, told the following story:
When my mother remarried after my father’s death, I was very, very upset. It wasn’t that I expected her to stay single, but I never thought that she would act as though this new husband was more important to her than her children. My brother and I used to be so important to her.. . she obviously loved her boys. It’s weird, but now I feel betrayed. It’s almost like I thought maybe she’d really be there for me even more, once my father was gone. But it turned out to be almost the opposite and it still really pisses me off.
Oedipal Success, Oedipal Failure. Freud said that the man who is unquestionably his mother’s favorite has an inestimable advantage in life. While this may be true for some men, there are others for whom success with mother is no success at all. While it may convey certain rewards, the son’s Oedipal victory (or more commonly the fantasy of Oedipal victory) always comes at a high price. When a man believes he has triumphed over his father in the contest for his mother, he is doubly disadvantaged. First, he bears the guilt of defeating a man who loves
him and whose love he desires. Second, as a role model for the son to identify with, the father who is defeated is no great source of strength. A daughter who feels she has triumphed over her mother is comparably disadvantaged.
Mark tended to see himself as a victim of his mother’s intrusiveness, but he also felt that he was very special to her. Mark’s father was a formidable man, a successful surgeon, but he was largely absent. He ceded home and family to his wife. Mark’s mother seems to have compensated for her husband’s invisibility at home by turning to her son. Her loving attention, her endless interest, and her eroticized banter all reflected her efforts to find with Mark what was lacking in her relationship with her husband. Mark was vaguely aware that he occupied a place in her life that should have been his father’s. But rather than focus on his special status, Mark preferred to concentrate on the ways in which he experienced his mother as a burden. This choice was a reflection of his guilty “triumph” over his father.
The same choice complicated his refinding in adult love. Unconsciously, he was compelled by his guilt to focus on the ways in which Lauren, for example, was a burden to him rather than a pleasure. This was both a defense (against his guilt) and an irrational penance for having “wronged” his father. As we’ll see, Mark’s guilt also affected his sexual relationship with Lauren. One of the most common manifestations of guilty Oedipal triumph is the enforced separation of passion from tenderness.
What is called “Oedipal failure” can reflect either of two different scenarios. In the less-damaging, the child feels helpless to make a dent in the parental relationship. Mother and father seem so utterly absorbed in their love for one another that the child feels there’s little room for him or her and that, consequently, any romantic pursuit of the parent would be doomed. In the moredamaging scenario, the child is actually mocked, teased, or punished for his or her pursuit of the parent. To different degrees, these scenarios undermine the child’s confidence in his or her sexuality and power. In terms of adult refinding, there may be a tendency to seek out rejecting partners with whom the Oedipal
drama can be replicated or to pursue inadequate partners whose neediness ensures that they won’t be rejecting.
Inadequate Identifications. Without the opportunity as children to identify with the same-sex parent, we may feel that the labyrinth of Oedipal rivalry has no exit. When, by contrast, we can identify with our parents, we have a way out. Rather than continue to compete with mother or father, we can take on the strengths of our rival. When the little girl, for example, begins to feel that she is like her mother, she reaps a number of rewards: She maintains her love for her mother and ensures her mother’s love for her. She avoids the risks of competition with a formidable competitor. She learns about reality (you can’t always get what you want), which is different from fantasy (in which the little girl’s omnipotence has no limits). Finally, in identifying with an admired figure of her own gender, the little girl solidifies her confidence in herself as a female. And this preserves the hope that someday she’ll be able to possess a man like the father she’s now “surrendering” to her mother. The little boy’s Oedipal identification with his father serves the same ends.
For various reasons, however, the path of identification can be more or less closed to us as children. A mother, for example, may treat her husband with such utter contempt that it becomes difficult for their son to identify with his father. Or the father himself, through debilitating illness or some other misfortune, may simply be difficult for the son to admire. Sometimes a son may feel so corralled by his mother’s need in relation to him that identifying with his father becomes a dangerous betrayal of his mother. To understand more about the consequences of inadequate identification, let’s turn to the experience of Mark’s partner, Lauren.
Lauren has told Mark that she can’t separate her images of herself in relation to men from her image of her mother. From the time she was five, she has never been able to think very highly of this quiet, adaptable woman whose identity seemed molded around her husband’s needs. Lauren felt loved by her mother, but she could never admire nor feel close to her. She always
wondered why her father, a somewhat dominating man with a keen intellect and cultured tastes, had married her rather drab mother. In fact Lauren and her father were allied in their (mainly covert) depreciation of her mother, who seemed incapable of keeping up intellectually with the two of them. Lauren sometimes felt that the specialness of her relationship with her father depended on joining with him in seeing her mother as inadequate. The last thing in the world Lauren wanted was to feel that she was anything at all like her mother.
Now, however, with the benefit of some therapy, she has become aware of the consequences of this flight from her “maternal identification.” First, it has left her with the disturbing feeling that men are the only game in town, for they’re the ones with whom she associates intelligence, power, and sexuality. As defined by her image of her mother, being female means being nurturing and patient, but also weak, overcompliant, and asexual. As a result of this imagery, Lauren’s relationships with men (including Mark) are full of psychological conflict.
She wants to win Mark’s love, as she won her father’s, but doing so fills her with guilt. To have a successful relationship is to surpass her mother once again. Lauren’s compromise is to enjoy certain aspects of the relationship with Mark but to spoil others. She tells him that she suspects she picks fights with him to make sure that their intimacy “doesn’t get too good.” Lauren has learned that she has more than one reason to fight: if she doesn’t, she’s also worried that she’ll become too much like her overcompliant mother. While she may not be aware of it, Lauren probably has a third motive for spoiling her relationship with Mark.
Because she couldn’t comfortably identify with her mother, she remained overly involved with her father. As a result there may well be a profound dependency upon her relationship with her father. This leads her to re-create elements of that original relationship in all subsequent relationships with men. Unconsciously, it may also lead her to subvert these relationships, so that she might be able to remain psychologically “married” to her father.
The Partner or the Parent?
To the extent that our original romance with our parents remains unresolved, it is always either refound (or avoided) in our relationship with our partner. Mark consistently refound his mother in Lauren, while she refound her father in him. Their images of the past interlocked in a way that was initially stimulating and later unsettling. Originally Mark and Lauren were both excited to recognize in the other the best of their parents: the intellectual energy, the power, and the love. This was the pleasurable side of refinding. It easily enabled them to fall in love. They saw their power struggles during this period as minor skirmishes that only gave their intimacy an added electricity.
After a year they chose to live together. Six months later, however, it was not the pleasurable but the problematic aspects of refinding that had started to dominate. Mark was beginning to feel “claustrophobic,” just as he had with his mother. A new image of Lauren crystallized. In his eyes she was now obsessively preoccupied with planning every detail of their lives together:
We couldn’t seem to do anything spontaneously anymore. It seemed like we were spending all our time haggling about how to decorate the apartment, or who was going to take care of what, or what we were going to do three weekends from now.
I felt like I needed a Day-Timer for all the lists and appointments that our living together seemed to involve. .. And meanwhile, sex was getting to be sort of an obligation, almost like another item on the list. It was that old feeling again of being trapped.
While Mark was becoming more concerned about Lauren’s intrusiveness, she was beginning to see him as self-absorbed and controlling. He acted, in her view, as if everything had to go his way. And this recalled a side of her father that she had found very unappealing.
218 a Mapping the Terr ain of the He art
Mark and Lauren’s ability to experience passion and tenderness together was a casualty of their problematic refinding. Neither of them could completely separate the image of the partner from the image of the parent. And with the ghosts of old love in bed with them, it was increasingly difficult to feel turned on.
Juggling the demands of work and home life, and especially parenting, can challenge the capacity of many of us to keep passion alive, and this challenge is compounded by refinding. The presence of six people in the bedroom—the couple and the shadow company of two sets of parents—can be very inhibiting indeed. For passion to survive, there must be an emotional divorce from our past loves and rivals. Sometimes, however, it’s easier to separate from our partner.
While acknowledging her love for Mark, and her desire for the relationship to continue in some form, Lauren suggested that perhaps the two of them should resume their lives apart, that their decision to live together might have been premature. The ghosts of refinding (and the pressures of everyday life) had taken their toll. Feeling rejected, Mark angrily dismissed her suggestion, telling her that she had a problem with intimacy and should get back into therapy. He said that if she were to move out, the relationship might just as well be over. He proposed that the two of them declare a truce and take a week apart from one another.
When Lauren left for a weeklong trip with a girlfriend, Mark found himself missing her a great deal. He became aware once again of how deeply he loved her. But while she was gone, he called an old girlfriend, implying that he was available for an affair. Eventually he chose not to act on his sexual impulse, but the strength of this desire, coupled with his renewed passion for Lauren, confused and troubled him. It was at this point that he decided to see a therapist himself. Caught in a tide of emotion, he was worried about how out of control he felt. He had used an affair to exit a relationship once before, and he was wary of his impulse to do so again.
DEFENSES AGAINST REFINDING AND REFINDING AS A DEFENSE
When refinding threatens to generate painful feelings, we defend against it, just as Mark and Lauren did. The greater the threat, the more drastic the defense. If the prospect of refinding the past is truly terrifying, we may protect ourselves by avoiding romantic relationships altogether.
Short of this wholesale avoidance, we have several other alternatives. We can choose partners with whom there is little hope for a deep or lasting involvement (including partners who are married, uninterested in or intimidated by commitment, and so on). By selecting someone who is likely to remain unavailable, we ensure that our relationship won’t develop past love’s opening phase. Then, so long as the spell of idealization remains unbroken, we are relatively immune from the threat of problematic refinding. We can also try to minimize the likelihood of refinding by choosing partners who are as unlike our original loves as possible. Lastly, once we are in a relationship, we may protect ourselves by avoiding intimacy. Whatever we ordinarily do to avoid being close also helps us to avoid refinding. Merger-wary defenses, for example, can function as defenses against refinding.
Prior to her involvement with Mark, Lauren apparently made use of a combination of these protective strategies to defend against refinding. Her first line of defense was to choose men whose availability, or interest in her, was uncertain at best. Several of these men were married. Because their primary commitment was to their wives, Lauren’s participation in these romantic triangles meant that her involvement with men remained relatively superficial. Whenever she found herself becoming more deeply involved with a man, she dealt with her unconscious fears of refinding by creating distance. To dilute intimacy she withdrew emotionally or retreated from her partner more overtly, going so far at times as to refuse to speak with him. And the consequence? Lauren could enjoy falling in love, but as long as she defended against refinding in these ways, she could never remain in love.
Refinding as a Defense
It is exceedingly common to refind one aspect of our past as an unconscious defense against another. For most of us, the past is a mosaic of significant experiences, positive and negative, and through refinding most of these have the potential to make their way into our current relationship, do protect ourselves from the most disturbing aspects of the past, we often refind experiences that are less disturbing, even though they may still be unwelcome.
In therapy, Mark began to develop some insight into his use of this defense:
The combination of Lauren and me almost breaking up and some problems I was having with my boss at work had me feeling pretty overwhelmed.... I think I really wanted some support from Lauren but didn’t quite know it. Anyway, we’d gone out to dinner and the place had booths, so the next thing I know she’s sitting next to me—not across from me, next to me. And she’s got her arm around me and I was just feeling like, Back off! It was just too much of this suffocating stuff I remember with my mother. So I kind of pushed her away, she moved around to the other side of the table, and meanwhile the waiter saw all of this, and Lauren and I were both sort of embarrassed. Then the waiter left, and I felt kind of tearful and apologetic, and Lauren was very understanding. And then I realized, I actually wanted her to hug me, probably I’d wanted that before, but I always get this bad-mother thing going, you know, she’s going to swallow me, instead of just letting Lauren take care of me sometimes. I don’t know why it’s so scary to just let that happen, but apparently it is.
As Mark would later become aware, refinding the image of his suffocating mother protected him from his early boyhood image of her as romantically exciting. This Oedipal image frightened him for several reasons: Because it made his mother (and the women who followed her) too enticing, the image left him feeling vulnerable and potentially dependent. In addition, because it drew him to
her, this image made Mark feel guilty and fearful in relation to his father, whom he felt he had usurped in his mother’s affections.
Refinding as a Defense against Change
When we enlist our partner (or a series of partners) in a repetition of old scenarios, we can convince ourselves that nothing new in romance is possible. This may then serve to justify our unwillingness to take risks or to seize the initiative in mastering our difficulties with intimacy. A variation on this theme is to use our “understanding” of the past as a story we hide behind:
It makes sense to behave as cautiously as I do in relationships: just look at how unsafe I was in my relationship with my father [or mother, or whomever].
Of course I tend to get angry at my mate now. . .I’ve got a lot of anger to express after all those years of being treated as badly as I was by my mother [or father, or whomever].
I do expect more from a relationship than other people might —and with good reason: after getting nothing from my parents,
I think I’m entitled to something special at this point.
Using the past to understand and come to terms with our selfdefeating habits in the present is one thing. Using the past as a justification for maintaining these habits is an altogether different matter. The first is a vital part of healing; the second is a defense that can make it very difficult for us to heal at all.
The Romantic Triangle as a Defense
There are essentially two types of romantic triangles, either of which can serve defensive purposes.
The Rivalrous Triangle
Here we compete with an adversary for the lover we desire. This can be seen as a re-creation of the original Oedipal threesome, in which we competed with one parent for the love of the other.
Participation in a rivalrous triangle can have multiple meanings. Often, however, the choice to compete for a partner who is already “taken” is determined by self-protective needs. By diluting intimacy, threesomes shield us from whatever we have come to regard as the hazards of being part of a couple. When we regularly wind up as the excluded third party, the defensive motive behind our preference for triangles may become obvious.
For Lauren, being part of a couple was dangerous because of the refinding it invited. By pursuing men who proved unattainable, she protected herself from refinding the difficulties she’d known with her overly controlling father. She also avoided the old guilt of Oedipal success; in fact, her “defeat” in the triangular rivalries may have been a kind of penance.
The Reverse Triangle
The second variation on the triangular theme turns this Oedipal rivalry on its head. In the “reverse” triangle, rather than compete, we become the object of competition: our love is the prize for which two rivals now contend. When Mark considered having an affair after Lauren suggested they separate, he was (probably unconsciously) generating a reverse triangle. That is, he was defensively setting up a rivalry between Lauren and his old girlfriend. What a relief it would have been for Mark to feel himself the object of a romantic rivalry between two desirable women— rather than a child with his mother or a man about to be rejected by his lover.
As a reversal of the Oedipal rivalry, the reverse triangle is a defense against all the anxieties of Oedipal refinding. Perhaps most particularly, it is a defense against the humbling scenario of Oedipal defeat. Instead of feeling like the loser, the reverse triangle enables us to feel twice the winner—for two rivals now compete for our love. But the reverse triangle is also a defense against the refinding of Oedipal victory: to the extent that we are torn by the choice between two lovers, we are fully involved with neither. In this way the reverse triangle dilutes intimacy, just as the rivalrous
triangle does. The difference, usually, is that the reverse triangle is more likely to bolster our self-esteem.
An important variation of the reverse triangle is the “splitobject” triangle. This is the defensive solution for someone who is too frightened to experience a “whole” relationship with one person. Consequently, the whole is split in two: usually, then, sexuality is experienced with one partner and nurturing affection with the other. Like most romantic triangles, the split-object triangle is a defense against problematic refinding.
Whether we defend against refinding or use refinding as a defense, this capacity can be so influenced by our self-protective needs that instead of deepening love, refinding restricts it. Then the music of our relationships can begin to sound repetitive, as if the same songs were playing over and over, with only minor changes in instrumentation. It is crucial to assess whether we are trading the possibility of a passionate, tender, and lasting love for the limited rewards of psychological safety.
REFINDING AND THE INTERACTION OF DEFENSES
The fate of our relationship hinges on how our refinding—and our defenses against refinding—interact with those of our partner. In collusion with our partner, we may keep the most problematic aspects of refinding at bay but limit the intimacy and personal growth that our relationship can make possible. If and when we find ourselves in collision with our partner, some of the most painful aspects of the past are likely to be refound. In the worst case, this difficult refinding can make the relationship unlivable; in the best case, collision sets the stage for collaboration. If collusions involving refinding allow us to avoid the problems of our past, collisions compel us to relive them. Both ensure that our energies in love are largely absorbed in keeping the past in place. Only collaboration can enable us to work through these problems, diminishing their destructive impact and permitting love to deepen.
Collusions That Defend against Refinding
These collusions are the norm during the first phase of a relationship. Two partners who are falling in love usually banish the ghosts of the painful past by focusing on the pleasures of sexuality, closeness, and idealization. Later, when they are becoming a couple, partners can continue to defend against refinding by colluding to minimize intimacy—like a workaholic pair who spend the vast proportion of their waking hours absorbed in careers that keep them apart. For some partners this way of life is chosen for its own rewards. For others it is a choice based on the defensive need to avoid the refinding that comes with deeper involvement.
Collusions Based on Refinding as a Defense
Often, especially early in a relationship, we collude with our partner to refind exclusively those aspects of our respective pasts that are pleasurable. Lauren was happy for Mark’s admiration of her for qualities she possessed that were reminiscent of his mother. Meanwhile, Mark played to Lauren’s appreciation of his strengths, which reminded her of her father. Simultaneously, Mark and Lauren both ignored in the other traits that might remind them of difficulties in their past relationships. To complete the collusion, they also managed to hide from each other aspects of themselves that could conceivably evoke the painful past.
As intimacy deepens, such collusions become more difficult to sustain. What we may previously have concealed (by tacit agreement with our partner) now emerges as a source of conflict and tension. One partner may refuse to play his or her part as it was written, so to speak, by the other.
Recall Adam and Rachel again. When Adam revealed the depth of his vulnerability to Rachel, her sexual interest in him vanished. Adam had breached an unspoken covenant that lay at the foundation of their first falling in love. To help her defend against the painful refinding of her needy mother, Adam had been assigned to play the role of the “strong, sensitive” type: an up-to-date version of Rachel’s powerful father. When Adam ceased to collude,
he became in Rachel’s eyes not her ambivalently loved father but her mother, a woman with no cachet whatsoever.
Our collusions can break down when we realize that our partner lacks qualities that are central to our refinding of the pleasurable past. Then there is danger that the problematic past may come rushing into our relationship. Disappointed and probably fearful, we may then complain, like Rachel, or we may try to change our partner, who winds up feeling criticized, hurt, and/or angry. In this way our collusion to avoid the past can quickly become a collision.
Defensive Collisions and Refinding
Our collisions with our partner are always painful, but they can reveal two interlocking dramas. We assign roles to our partner, while our partner in turn assigns roles to us. In the heat of collision, one partner may find himself protesting, “But I’m not your father!” while the other partner cries despairingly, “And I’m not your mother!” Of course, this scenario is an oversimplification, but it suggests how two partners simultaneously attempt to impose their internal images upon one another, and how this can lead to conflict.
Unconsciously, for the most part, each of us is the director of our own drama of refinding, and each of us tries to shape the performance of our partner. In this light, the complaint that “You’re not the man/woman you said you were” can be reinterpreted to mean, “You’re not playing your role as I imagined and expected you would.” Projective identification, which was discussed in Chapter Four, is the primary defense that enables us to enlist our partner in playing the roles called for in our drama of refinding.
Through projective identification we unconsciously encourage our partner to identify with the internal image that we are projecting. Mark, for example, treated Lauren in such a way that she gradually came to identify with his image of his mother. In Mark’s version his mother was a woman with no respect for his boundaries: she was contrary, controlling, and intrusive. Through various means Mark succeeded in eliciting from Lauren an aspect of her
personality that duplicated his mother’s. By acting at times as though he couldn’t tolerate Lauren’s independence, Mark evoked an angry contrariness from her which he could associate with his mother. He also led Lauren to believe that their shared life together would be chaotic unless she helped him get things organized. When she responded to this invitation to take a hand in his affairs, however, Mark accused her of being intrusive—exactly as his mother had been.
Like Mark, most of us unconsciously influence our partner’s “performance” so that it conforms to our imagery of past intimacy. But as we play out the drama of refinding, there is always a “directorial tension” between our desires to re-create the familiar past and to master it. When our present relationship repeats the past, it can be exasperating but also strangely satisfying. And when something new occurs that represents a departure from the past, it can be a refreshing relief, but a little disorienting at the same time.
Mark and Lauren were aware of this tension in their relationship. Both of them knew that they had the potential as a couple either to repeat the past or to experience something new. The defensive collision that was nearly their undoing came about when their respective refinding dramas seemed to interlock and escalate. From Mark’s perspective, he was battling with Lauren to ensure that he wouldn’t suffer her controlling him as his mother had. From Lauren’s perspective, she was battling with Mark to ensure that she wouldn’t be victimized again by a self-absorbed and dominating man like her father. Each partner blamed the other, while minimizing personal responsibility for the conflict between them. Each fought for vindication, as if in a court of law.
Of course, love is never a trial in which one is found innocent and the other guilty. But we often act as if it were. Collision with our partner can leave us feeling that we’re in a fight for our emotional lives. Eventually, in exhaustion and despair, we may call a truce, only to find ourselves colliding again a short time later. If there’s an advantage to this painful repetition, it’s that we gradually become clearer about the pattern of collision in which
we’re involved. Once we do so, we have three alternatives: The first two involve new versions of defensive collusion; the third is collaboration.
Collusion Revisited: Refinding as a Defense against Change
We can choose to look at collisions as an inevitable consequence of intimacy, a limitation that is simply built into relationships. We may say, in effect, “This is the cost of being close. There will always be fights, struggles, and misunderstandings.” Through a combination of realism and resignation, we may come to accept that many of our desires will be unsatisfied. We may tell ourselves that we have a “good enough” relationship, troubled in the same way as everyone else’s. But our aspirations for a more fulfilling love will have been surrendered to painful refinding and the belief that the present cannot possibly be better than the past.
Collusion Revisited: Defending against Refinding
Exhausted by the fight and getting nowhere, we may tacitly opt for distance rather than intimacy. By diminishing the emotional intensity of our involvement, we can push refinding into the background. Essentially, we are trying to remake a collusion of avoidance, of the sort that first helped us fall in love. Unfortunately, the intensely positive feelings that made the original collusion possible are now less accessible. Nonetheless, we can often create a semblance of intimacy that both stabilizes our relationship and minimizes the most problematic aspects of refinding. In exchange for a fulfilling relationship, we will have chosen one that is secure. At its best such a relationship can be companionable and warm. At its worst this is a marriage of convenience, with none of the pleasure or depth of feeling that motivated our romance in the first place.
Collaboration and Refinding
Collusions hide the intrusion of the past into the present. Because collisions have the troubling potential to strip away the veil,
they present us with an opportunity to grapple with refinding. Without collaboration, however, the unwelcome past we refind is only repeated; it is never mastered.
Recognizing Our Own Defenses
Paradoxically, we set the stage for collaboration by shifting our focus from the couple to the individual. Collaboration is largely effective to the extent that, as individuals, we become aware of how we protect ourselves. Understanding (and diminishing) the impact of refinding on our current relationship absolutely depends upon this, for so long as we remain in the dark about our own defenses, they will continue to shape our relationship, as we either re-create the past or avoid it.
Often, to become aware of the role of our defenses, we must declare a truce, giving each partner the chance to consider his or her part in the collision. During Lauren’s absence, Mark saw how easily (and with what relief) he could assign blame to his partner. He became aware that his insistence that Lauren return to therapy was a defensively disguised reflection of his own need. This awareness both propelled him into therapy and enabled him to become more reflective, less impulsively reactive, in his relationship with Lauren.
Obviously, one such step does not complete a journey. Our habits of self-protection are deeply ingrained. In one interaction we may demonstrate impressive understanding and restraint in relation to a defense. In another we may use the defense so unconsciously that its origins (in our needs for self-protection) are invisible. Our capacity to first understand and then manage our defenses exists on a continuum, from active awareness that enables us to acknowledge them, to reactive obliviousness that permits us only to act them out.
The Continuum of Awareness
The greater our awareness of our defenses, the more likely we are to reflect on our own role in creating the problems we complain about in our relationship. We’re more inclined to consider the
possible disparity between our first impressions and what we might see at second glance. First impressions usually reflect a view of the relationship in keeping with the imagery of our inner map. Taking a second look often reveals the impact of the past and the influence of our needs for self-protection. In the short run this kind of awareness can evoke anxiety, for it heightens our uncertainty about our perceptions. In addition, to the extent that we acknowledge what we know to our partner, we let ourselves be seen as the psychologically complicated and fallible beings we really are, which can leave us feeling vulnerable. In exchange for these short-term liabilities, the long-term reward is a greater likelihood that our relationship will be lasting and fulfilling.
When we’re caught at the unconscious end of the continuum, our defenses can dominate us. Acting on impulse, pushed around by our feelings, we are likely to repeat self-defeating patterns in love. Taking our first impressions at face value, we may assume that our relationship with our partner and the emotional reality represented by our inner map are one and the same. This assumption leaves us trapped in the past.
The Benefit of a Truce
When a couple can interrupt their collision with a truce, as Mark and Lauren did, they often have room to become aware of their individual contributions to the conflict. Ideally, both partners can then acknowledge to each other what they know about their own role in the collision. The first order of business should be to clarify the experience of both partners, in as much detail as possible. To the extent that each partner can actively empathize with the experience of the other, the likelihood is enhanced that the couple’s collision will be understood. Usually this understanding reveals the impact of the partners’ defenses. Assuming that clarification and empathy have largely replaced the automatic defensiveness that led to the collision, we also want to understand the refinding that triggered the conflict in the first place.
Candidly exploring the impact of our images of the past on the present requires still more trust in our partner. The risk in this
exploration is that what we reveal may later be used against us: “Aha! I get it: you’re neurotically confusing me with your father again...” If partners can agree in advance to refrain from this kind of misuse of what they learn about each other, the exploration of refinding can occur much more freely. In the absence of such an agreement, candor can feel unsafe—and a couple (without the help of a therapist) may conceivably be better off refraining from this exploration of the past.
Awareness and Change
To free ourselves from the constraints of painful refinding requires both awareness and a willingness to change. We must ask some difficult questions: Who are the figures from the past whose images we superimpose on our partner? Who are the figures from the past whose images have become blended with our images of ourselves? What beliefs and behaviors derive from these old images? What relationships from the past are we re-creating in the present?
Changing can be even more difficult. For a variety of reasons, we are usually very attached to the images that connect us to the world of our past loves. Without some willingness to change the beliefs and behaviors that flow from these images, our current love relationship will remain problematic.
Refinding both reflects and generates deeply held beliefs about intimacy. Refinding his mother in Lauren, for example, led Mark to believe that Lauren would be out to control him. Mark’s underlying belief, derived from his childhood experience, was that women wish to control men. When, like Mark, we cease to take these beliefs entirely at face value, we can subject them to a new scrutiny, assessing their accuracy in the context of our current love relationship. Sometimes we find a particular belief doesn’t hold up; it’s simply contradicted by the “facts” of the current relationship. Sometimes we discover that the price for maintaining a belief is far greater than the payoff. All this may be enough to persuade us to change the belief. Once we are willing to do so— or at least experiment with doing so—the effects on our relationship can be profound. Changing our beliefs is tantamount to
redrawing the inner map that defines what is possible in love. When we allow new experience to modify our images of our partner and ourselves, we begin to liberate our love in the present from the confines of the past.
In her collaboration with Mark, Lauren revealed both the awareness and the willingness to change that make this process of liberation possible. She believed that her romantic relationships had all been dominated by her conviction that she could never prevail in the face of strong-willed, intelligent men. This belief, a consequence of her experience with her loved but domineering father, had generated a very ambivalent attitude. The wish to refind her father’s love led her to seek out men very much like him. But once she was involved with such a man, her fear of refinding her father’s dominance led her to keep her distance. By the time she became involved with Mark, however, Lauren was aware of the price she paid for her belief. So long as she assumed that her only possible fate with a man was to be distant or to be dominated, no relationship could last. She knew she had a stake in challenging her own belief, but she wasn’t sure how she should go about it.
Like many couples who wish to grapple with the impact of refinding, Lauren and Mark had a hard time agreeing on what was being refound: Was she superimposing the image of her domineering father on Mark—or was Mark simply a domineering man? Was Mark superimposing the image of his smothering mother on Lauren—or was Lauren simply a woman who had to control every detail of her partner’s life?
Unavoidably affected by our own defenses, each of us would usually prefer to believe that we are seeing our partner accurately, while our partner’s view of us is distorted by the past. Even when both partners acknowledge the inevitability of refinding, it can be difficult to take the risk of revealing what we know about our own refinding.
When one partner knows more about himself or herself, it may be possible for this partner (along the lines of “one leads, one follows”) to take the first steps. One partner’s courage here can
be enough to begin to break the hold of refinding on the couple’s interaction. To enlist the other partner’s collaboration, we can (ideally) confide a number of things, beginning with what we know about the beliefs that refinding has generated—beliefs about our partner, our relationship, and ourselves. What can be still more helpful (if we have this knowledge) is to communicate how we have been influencing our partner so that he or she behaves in ways that are consistent with these beliefs.
For Lauren, this meant confiding to Mark that her choice of men had always been dominated by her ambivalent feelings toward her father. She had been drawn to her father’s power but put off by his egocentric control; and this ambivalent conflict repeated itself in her attitude toward the powerful, somewhat controlling men she chose to be close to. She also let Mark know that without always being aware of it at the time, she behaved with him in ways that elicited exactly the stubborn control she found so intolerable. Part of her difficulty, she admitted, was that her parents’ marriage, in which her mother had always acquiesced to her father, gave her a model of interaction between men and women that left her ill equipped to really stand up to Mark. This explained her inclination to withdraw from him, up to and including her suggestion that perhaps the two of them should separate.
Lauren was aware that her choice to be with Mark was a choice to grapple with the unfinished issues in her relationship with her father. She was also aware that her relationship with Mark was doomed if she only repeated with him what she had experienced with her father. With this motivating her, Lauren was able to use refinding, rather than be dominated by it. In communicating what she knew to Mark, she expressed her willingness to question her beliefs and to change. As it happened, the very act of communicating with such candor and clarity challenged her old belief by enabling her to feel both powerful in relation to Mark and close to him. In addition, her candor was an invitation to Mark to respond in kind.
Collaborating with our partner to understand the painful effects of refinding can be daunting, and so it’s not surprising that many
individuals and couples seek out psychotherapy as a source of consultation and support. With a therapist’s help, it is often easier for couples to listen empathically to their dissonant versions of refinding and to move toward a view they share. This may mean that a couple will “rewrite the narrative” of their individual and shared pasts. For example, if a man has decided that his mate is exactly like his mother, psychotherapy can help him separate the truth from the distortion in his assessment. In the process, he may develop not only a different view of his wife but also a different view of his mother—and of himself. With the help of a neutral party, exploring the relation between past and present can result in an alteration of the internal imagery that we refind in our intimate relationships.
We will never fully know the “real past,” but we can develop an understanding of our history, a version of our past, that seems both more useful to us and true.
In the everyday life of most couples, collaboration to resolve refinding is an ideal, a level of communication to be sought but not always achieved. In dealing with the collisions refinding provokes, we sometimes collaborate—but often we’re either drawn irresistibly into the old dramas or we deliberately keep our distance from them. Not uncommonly, we cycle through all three of these responses trying to work our way through a single conflict. Whenever we can summon the courage, initiative, and patience that collaboration requires, this ability will be strengthened. Then, with perseverance and goodwill, we can often diminish the damaging impact of parts of the past on our present capacity to love.
SELF-APPRAISAL: THREE PROFILES Eliot: Refinding as a Resource
Married for six years and the owners of a small landscaping business, Eliot and his wife, Amy, have just adopted their second child. Eliot himself was the middle child of seven, and the oldest boy. Marrying when he was not quite thirty, Eliot was happily con
vinced that, like his parents, he too would have a large family. Three years later, when it began to seem likely that his wife would never bear a child, Eliot found himself in turmoil.
His mother had been a calm and loving but somewhat aloof woman. Whether it was her personality or the claims on her attention of seven children, Eliot felt that she had never been able to give him as much of herself as he needed. All the same, he knew that she cared for him unconditionally. Eliot’s father, whom he deeply loved, was a pediatrician. Their best times together were spent fishing at a lake where the family rented a large cabin during the summer. Warm and generous, possibly to a fault, his father was often exhausted by his work. Eliot remembers him dozing off in his big living-room chair, and occasionally falling asleep at dinner. For years, Eliot couldn’t help holding it against his father that he seemingly gave the best of himself to other people’s children rather than his own.
When Eliot was twelve, and away at camp, his father died suddenly of a heart attack. Eliot returned home, where he remembers feeling alternately comforted by, and comforting to, his mother. In the months and years following his father’s death, Eliot grew much closer to his mother, although sometimes, as the new “man” of the family, he felt burdened by the need to take care of her.
For most of his twenties, Eliot had been unwilling to settle down with a woman for any length of time. He had several girlfriends he cared deeply for, but he’d always been frustrated with the feeling that something important was missing. When he met Amy, Eliot felt that he was finally home. She was calm and loving, quietly confident about her opinions and impressively bright. Eliot found her compelling. Talking to her, he felt alive and engaged. Amy, too, had come from a large family. Their backgrounds were similar and he found the very familiarity of her somehow stirring. A year after they met, they married.
The longer they were together, the more Eliot recognized in Amy a quality he’d admired in his mother. Amy was self-contained: she seemed to have a world inside that sustained her. But like his mother, she also seemed a little removed. Sometimes her
aloofness frustrated him; sometimes it gave him a bittersweet taste of his own past. As time went on, however, Amy became less reserved, and Eliot could more easily draw her out.
When it became clear that Amy could not bear children, Eliot was overwhelmed with contradictory emotions. He had always hoped that with his own children he might improve on the experience he’d had with his parents, drawing on their strengths but making up for their shortcomings. As he felt these hopes shrivel, he couldn’t help blaming Amy: like his mother and father, she couldn’t give as much as he needed. But he also felt a surge of sympathy and concern for her that brought tears to his eyes. She had wanted her own children just as much as he had, and she was grieving. Thinking of Amy, of himself, and especially of his father, Eliot realized with clarity and relief that adopting children would not be a terrible compromise of their dreams, but another way of living them out.
In Amy, Eliot refound what was positive and mastered what was problematic about his relationship with his mother. In grappling with his own frustrated wish to improve on the past, Eliot also refound an aspect of his father, whose impartial generosity let him give himself to other people’s children. In choosing to adopt, Eliot both reconciled with his father and made his father’s generosity his own.
Maureen: Refinding That Is Compromised
Maureen has been married for more than twenty years to a minister-turned-psychologist. When they met, she was a criticalcare nurse and Tom was visiting a member of his congregation on the unit where Maureen worked. She immediately took to him: more than his his obvious kindness, his good looks and way with words gave him a quiet charisma. Although the passion quickly went out of their marriage, Maureen was so absorbed in raising their only child that, until recently, she very rarely felt discontent. Now that their son is in high school, requiring less of her attention, she has become increasingly aware of the frustration she experiences with her husband. But what she sees as Tom’s
vulnerability makes her so protective toward him that she hides her discontent.
Maureen’s parents had the most traditional of marriages. Her mother was a gentle, nurturing woman whose energies were entirely absorbed in caring for her husband and family. Maureen, as the only daughter among four children, shared a special closeness with her mother—but her feeling was one of appreciation rather than admiration. In contrast to her father, an eminent and compelling professor of theology, her mother always seemed tentative and unsure of herself. Maureen had the feeling that her mother put the needs of others first because she felt less deserving than others.
Maureen’s father was the sun around which everything seemed to orbit. She thought of him as a scholar/hero, disappearing into his study to write or holding court for students and peers who seemed in awe of him. She remembers as a teenager feeling both thrilled and uneasy to hear from her mother that the only photo her father carried in his wallet was one of Maureen. When he woke her early in the morning to walk with him while her mother was still asleep, Maureen felt vaguely worried that this important time alone with her father was somehow wrong. She thought he was uncomfortable with it as well: either he acted as though he was trying to keep it a secret or he broadcast it as if there was nothing to hide.
Maureen remembers her feelings for her husband changing shortly after they were married. Originally, she now recognizes, it was the qualities that Tom shared with her father that had drawn her to him: the fact that he was eloquent, authoritative, the leader of a congregation. Like her father, at times, Tom seemed capable of focusing all his energy on her, and this exclusive attention was exciting and seductive. Once they married, however, Maureen became aware of her husband’s insecurity. She wondered if she had only imagined the aura of charisma around him. She began to believe that Tom devoted himself to others out of a feeling that he was somehow undeserving. She became resigned to the idea that rather than finding a man with the strengths of her father,
she had instead joined her life with that of someone whose vulnerabilities reminded her of her mother. As Maureen’s involvement with her son waned, her resignation about her husband’s shortcomings turned into depression.
Outside her direct awareness, Maureen’s marriage had been compromised by the guilt of refinding her father in her relationship with her husband. Her “solution” to this conflict was to exaggerate the significance of Tom’s weaknesses by associating them with her mother’s perceived shortcomings. Maureen’s capacity to love was inhibited by her use of refinding as a defense.
Beverly: Refinding as a Struggle
At forty, Beverly is frustrated by her difficulty in making a relationship work. A strikingly attractive and markedly overweight woman, she has never lived with a man for longer than a year. She has several close women friends, all faculty members at the middle school where she teaches art. But she feels she has spent her life essentially alone. Never having expected to reach forty without a child and a husband, Beverly continues to look for a “decent” relationship with a man, while feeling increasingly pessimistic. She meets men through the personal ads, for the most part. Though she suspects it has something to do with her father, she can’t understand why the handful of men she has become involved with have all turned out to be both dependent and unreliable.
Beverly’s father was a frustrated, remote, and unsuccessful filmmaker who had been alcoholic from the time she was a child. Her mother eventually divorced him, but the three of them continued to live under one roof. The relationship between her parents was alternately distant and tempestuous. Her mother was essentially the family’s sole provider. Beverly admired her mother’s strength and resourcefulness but felt sorry for her. As a child, Beverly very much wanted to be close to her, but her mother seemed too preoccupied to give her the attention she longed for. She also craved her father’s love, but she felt she had to keep her eyes closed; otherwise she couldn’t help regarding him partly as
238 a MappingtheTerrainoftheHeart
an embarrassment. Her love for him confused her: the feelings of intense longing, pity, and angry contempt were impossible for her to disentangle.
Her confusion notwithstanding, Beverly knows that she has been on guard against men like her father all her life. This vigilance makes it difficult for her to understand how she winds up with the men she does. The one with whom she lasted the longest was an attorney, apparently solid and solvent. He was nothing like her father—or at least he shared none of her father’s most disastrous shortcomings. Like her father, however, he had creative aspirations, and this appealed to her. His desire to write fiction about the criminal law he practiced led him to spend a great deal of time researching the milieu in which his clients lived: racetracks, casinos, poker parlors. Before long Beverly realized that he was as addicted to gambling as her father had been to alcohol. This addiction explained his mood swings and his recurrent unavailability, but her awareness of it devastated her. She had become deeply attached to him. She didn’t want to believe that their relationship could duplicate her parents’. It took half a year more (and his bankruptcy) to convince her she had to leave.
Beverly suspects that her weight and her overeating are related to her unhappy experiences with men. She guesses that the weight keeps men away and that food is solace when she feels lonely. Lately she has become so mistrustful of her ability to choose a man that it almost seems safer to protect and succor herself. But she can’t stand the thought of spending the rest of her life alone, so she keeps looking.
It appears that Beverly’s profound ambivalence about refinding her father has led her to play out two equally problematic alternatives. Either she finds men who are too much like her father and relives her early experience without mastering it—or she avoids men altogether.
CHAPTER SIX