The Capacity for Self-Transcendence

A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

I am not thine. I am a part of thee.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley

When our psychological foundations are solid, self-transcendence can expand our sense of self and liberate us from what Aldous Huxley calls “that tiny island universe, within which every individual finds himself confined.” At the deepest levels, selftranscendence in love transforms our feelings about who we are, adding to “I” the experience of “we.” This is a profound alteration in the inner map that changes both the boundary between self and other, and the image of the self, as it has for Helen (see Chapter Four):

After you’ve been married for a while you have a sort of double identity. There’s me, of course, but there’s also an “us” which feels very different from just “me and Leonard.” There’s this other identity that’s the two of us, and in the basement of my soul, I know I’m more willing to do things for Leonard

I might not otherwise want to do, because of the “us”... Deeply accepting that there’s somebody else who’s part of you makes you grow—you have to, to keep on valuing someone who’s different from you but whose reality you welcome and nurture as much as your own.

The feeling Helen describes, that “there’s somebody else who’s part of you,” is a direct consequence—and a reward—of the healthy exercise of the capacity for self-transcendence. The same feeling can be associated with both self-enhancement (it “makes you grow”) and self-sacrifice (“I’m more willing to do things for Leonard I might not otherwise want to do, because of the ‘us’ ”).

Self-transcendence affects us, and potentially transforms us, through the twin processes of empathy and identification. When they are fully developed, empathy and identification enable us to put our partner’s needs on a par with our own—and at times to feel one with our partner.

EMPATHY: FEELING WITH OUR PARTNER

Empathizing in an ongoing way with our partner’s subjective experience gives us a vantage point that we lack when we’re alone. While letting us see through our partner’s eyes as well as our own, empathy also gives us access to our partner’s private inner world. Thus we see and feel what would otherwise have been invisible and inaccessible to us. Empathy with our partner encourages compassion and helps us transcend the confining boundaries of our own subjectivity.

IDENTIFICATION:

BECOMING LIKE OUR PARTNER

While empathy enlarges our moment-to-moment experience, the process of identification can permanently change us. Judith, a twice-married psychologist and mother in her late forties, describes this process of change in herself:

The other day I was comparing Jake with my first husband, Bobby, and how I was with the two of them... I realized that with Jake I’ve discovered this freedom to take chances and bet on myself, to take steps forward even if I don’t quite know whether I’m capable of them. And this is very much a function of Jake. It’s not the same as learning from him. I mean, you can pick and choose what you most love about someone and try to make that part of yourself, but what I’m talking about is much deeper. I saw this new part of myself, this freedom to be bolder, and it just dawned on me: I didn’t use to do that, this is Jake!. . . It’s amazing to me at this age how you can just keep on developing. It doesn’t seem to stop.

Judith’s language (“I saw this new part of myself.. . and it just dawned on me. . .this is Jake!”) reflects precisely the means by which identification with our partner changes us. When we identify, we take in (internalize) an attitude, ability, or perspective that is our partner’s—and we make it a part of ourselves. Thus, identification is an aspect of self-transcendence that transforms and enlarges us. It is often, though not always, an unconscious process, and generally it occurs over a lengthy period of time. Identification may be the key psychological mechanism through which, at the deepest levels, we continue to grow as adults.

Outside our awareness, the wish to be transformed through identifications with our partner is one of the most powerful sources of our original attraction. We often have an intuition about possibilities in ourselves that have been stifled, important abilities or qualities of character that we’ve never been able to develop. When we sense the presence of these nascent qualities of ours in a potential partner who has developed them more fully, it can be very alluring. For we have the instinctive awareness that, through identification, we could make these qualities our own.

Brenda, a professor of literature in her late thirties, describes the unfolding of this process in her relationship with her partner:

When Linda and I first got together I was very much aware of her ability to express her anger. It impressed me and scared

me both. I hated it when she was angry at me, but I could see that there was a kind of power there that I lacked. I was too damn contained... I knew that about myself... I couldn’t be any other way. Most of the time I didn’t even know that I was angry, I just got sort of depressed.... Linda was the opposite, sort of volcanic... she couldn’t contain her anger even when she wanted to. .. She was too angry and I was too “unangry.” Looking backward, it’s obvious to me that part of my attraction to her was this anger she could express. But as time’s gone on I’ve gotten better at being like her and now she’s more like me. She’s less angry and more contained and I’m less contained and more angry. Basically, we’re more similar now.

Over time, as Brenda’s account suggests, our identifications with our partner change us. The process, however, is two-sided: our partner, through identifying with us, is also changed. Mutual identifications transform us as individuals and transform the identity of the couple. As partners transcend their individual boundaries of the self, the area of their “overlap” and similarity tends to grow. Self-transcendence gradually diminishes the polarization between two partners, remaking their inner maps, so that more and more, they come to coincide.

SELF-TRANSCENDENCE AND “CO-CREATION”

Through empathy and identification, the capacity for selftranscendence transforms our internal experience and alters our identity. In addition to these psychological changes, however, selftranscendence changes what we do. To the extent that two partners in a couple strongly experience themselves as “we,” they often have a desire to create something together in the world. Just as most of us desire to realize our creative potential as individuals, we may wish to realize our creative potential as partners. Often this desire for “co-creation” leads a couple to conceive and raise a child, but the shared project we choose can take many forms.

For Alex, a veterinarian, the project of co-creation with his second wife is a farm:

There’s something natural about doing a project together. Across species, males and females, creatures in general share tasks for a common purpose. It’s part of the nature of union, why people get together. . . .if lives are tangential, if people just get together for dinner, to me that’s aberrant.. .The project is the current “live” thing. . .For us, it’s the farm.

Self-transcendence “gives birth” to collaborative efforts that often go beyond the individual capabilities of one partner or the other. This collaboration reflects our shared values and dreams as a couple. Sometimes it involves a commitment less to a project than to a practice, such as following a spiritual path or engaging passionately in joint political activism.

In many modern marriages, partners, living parallel lives, do relatively little in collaboration. The shared commitment, project or practice, can both anchor and invigorate an intimate relationship; it may even be vital for the health of that relationship. Listen again to Judith, the psychologist:

Jake and I had to find a way to be partners together. Both of us have been married before and we knew that the “relationship” alone wouldn’t do it. This isn’t the only reason we wanted a child, but it’s one of the big ones. If it hadn’t been a child, it would have been something else. Part of my greatest joy is watching Jake as a father, but if it hadn’t been as Ellie’s father, it would have to be as the father of something else. It’s a funny word to use, but there’s this reflected glory in watching someone you love participating with you in something you both love.

I’m sure this is part of what sustains us when our interactions start to get too complicated at the “who took out the garbage” level.. .You’ve got this larger thing to keep you on track, and remind you what you’re doing, what’s really important.

The jointly created project or practice has a two-way relationship to the capacity for self-transcendence. On the one hand, the couple’s urge to generate something together in the world is an outgrowth of this capacity. Our desire for co-creation reflects the longing to express ourselves as a couple, to make good the promise that in a relationship the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. On the other hand, our collaborative efforts as a couple also provide a setting in which our capacity for self-transcendence can be strengthened. By generating a context in which we “overlap” as partners, the process of joint creation multiplies our opportunities for empathy and identification, and profoundly deepens the shared feeling of “we.”

SELF-TRANSCENDENCE AND EROTIC INVOLVEMENT

Self-transcendence enables partners to cross the boundaries that keep them separate. For many of us, it is our sexual encounters with our partner that allow us most readily to transcend the limits of our psychological separateness. To make a bridge between two solitudes, we use our bodies.

Having sex per se has relatively little to do with self-transcendence. By contrast, making love with our partner, over and over again in the course of a sustained involvement, makes possible profound experiences of empathy, identification, and oneness. When sexuality becomes a way to express self-transcendence and our bodies bridge our separateness, then we can “feel along with” our partner. Our hearts open and the walls come down. We can be equally and simultaneously aware of our emotion and our partner’s emotion, our touch and our partner’s sensation in response to that touch. The heightening of mutual sensitivity in these transcendent erotic encounters is such that the two partners’ separate experiences seem to become one.

In pleasing our partner, we please ourselves, which pleases our partner, and so on. “Sex feels better to me when it feels better

to my wife. It also feels better to my wife when it feels better to me” is the way one man put it. To clarify this point through a contrast, consider the experience of another man, who said, “I don’t like to come at the same time as my girlfriend, because then I can’t pay as much attention to myself.”

Sexuality can be a key context within which partners solidify their sense of shared identity. Erotic involvement deepens the feeling of “we” in several ways. Partly it is a matter of intention: Some of us think of the long-term emotional commitment we’ve made to our partner as, additionally, a pledge to a partnership of sexual pleasure. The feeling of safety that comes with commitment can also facilitate sexual flexibility and openness. With the freedom to experiment, partners can develop a sexual history and identity that is very much their own. Here’s one woman’s version of this development:

After the years of being together, the time-after-time of it, there’s the strange awareness of being both in the moment and having a whole film library of resonant images and memories. It’s kind of a giggle.. . Being pretty experimental, I think there’s been a lot of stuff in bed that neither of us expected to do or feel.. .We’ve broken out of our childhood stereotypes together. . .which is part of the bond between us at this stage. It’s not a question of good sex or bad sex, it’s just part of our life. . .it’s only bad if it goes out of our life. . .

As this account suggests, there can be a synergistic, upwardly spiraling relationship between commitment, sexual flexibility, and self-transcendence. Feeling secure in our commitment permits a more complete expression and exploration of our sexuality. And this fosters, in turn, a heightened empathy and identification with our partner. This kind of upward spiral means that contrary to the conventional wisdom—that erotic interest always wanes over time—sexual passion actually has the potential to become more fulfilling as a relationship matures.

WHAT MAKES SELF-TRANSCENDENCE POSSIBLE?

Whether we can make use of this capacity depends, not surprisingly, on both individual and interpersonal factors.

Separateness and Self-Transcendence

To transcend our individuality, we must possess a solid sense of self, as reflected in our ability both to tolerate separateness and to enjoy our closeness to another person. If being alone is bearable and being intimate is no serious threat to our autonomy or identity, then we are capable of temporarily dissolving the boundaries that separate us from our partner. With a secure feeling of “I,” the new experience of “we” can expand and enhance our sense of self.

The paradox of self-transcendence is that without a separate sense of self, there can be no transcendence, but only surrender or submission. Without a separate identity, we may become a slave to our partner, or a burden, or a nonentity. Recall that we transcend the boundaries of the self through empathizing and identifying with our partner. If we are without a separate sense of self, there is no distinct, independent subjectivity with which our partner can empathize or identify. In surrendering or submitting, we deprive our partner of ourselves—and of the opportunity for self-transcendence.

Each of the capacities in love is influenced by the others, but self-transcendence uniquely rests on our relative mastery of all five prior capacities. More than any of the other capacities, selftranscendence expresses a synthesis of our abilities and reflects our overall capacity to love. Our strengths in the earlier capacities all support self-transcendence in different ways. The capacity for erotic involvement contributes to self-transcendence a pleasure in physical closeness and the ability to slide across boundaries in the context of sexuality. Merging adds the permeability of boundaries that is crucial to self-transcendence. Idealization contributes the basic desire to empathize and, particularly, to identify with our partner. Integration enables us to accept our own imper

The Capacity for Self-Transcendence 247

fections and those of our partner, thus preserving the desire to identify. Lastly, healthy refinding furthers self-transcendence because it promotes our desire to revive or create with our partner a new “family feeling.”

Self-Transcendence, Commitment, and the Third Stage of Intimacy

Only when we’ve emerged from the second stage of intimacy are we in a secure position to mobilize the capacity for self-transcendence. Until this second stage is concluded, we are still grappling with our uncertainties about commitment. When our grasp on integration is solid, however, and when the most pressing conflicts of refinding have been recognized and understood (if not resolved), then we can say that we have finally “become a couple.” With the issue of commitment settled, we experience a heightened feeling of security and involvement during the third stage of intimacy. Often, couples experience the beginning of this period as a “honeymoon.” There is a revival of the intense feelings we first knew when we were falling in love. Once again, the relationship can have a “dream-come-true” quality. Sometimes this stage of a relationship is initiated by the decision to marry or by marriage itself, sometimes by pregnancy or the birth of a child. At other times, it is a crisis such as the death of a parent that crystallizes our awareness of the depth of our commitment.

Whatever the catalyst, several factors can now converge to activate our capacity for self-transcendence. Primary among these are a solid sense of self in each partner, a good-enough grasp on the five earlier capacities, and the security, longevity, and multidimensionality of a deeply committed relationship. In addition, each partner needs a willingness to be profoundly involved with and influenced by the other. The psychological “overlap” that selftranscendence entails virtually guarantees that each partner’s inner world will be profoundly affected, if not transformed, by the other. Not uncommonly, one or both partners question whether this will be a change for the better or the worse.

SELF-TRANSCENDENCE: SELF-ENHANCEMENT OR SELF-SACRIFICE?

Consider the experience of raising children. By no means the only setting in which the capacity for self-transcendence plays a vital role, it is certainly a vivid one. In large part, the strength or vulnerability of this capacity determines whether the experience of having children feels more like an enhancement of the self or a sacrifice. Listen to two points of view that represent opposite ends of a continuum. The first is expressed by a mother of two children, a social worker in her early thirties:

When you have kids, you can’t do everything you want to do, you put someone else’s needs first.. . But I don’t feel this as a loss. At worst, it’s a postponement. There’s so much more that you get in return. When Jenny was born I said to myself, I’m not going to wish for her to grow up faster, even though things get frustrating and hard. . . And it’s been easy to stay with that because being with her, and watching her, and seeing Jack be a father is so amazingly satisfying. . .You change your priorities and expectations... If you’re going to try and be the same person you were before becoming a parent you’re gonna be resentful and sad. . . but if you know you’re creating something bigger, it’s remarkable and wonderful. It’s way beyond anything that’s gone on for me before. . .

A different viewpoint is that of a former dancer, also in her early thirties, a mother with one child:

I love my child, but as soon as he was born, I felt like my own life was over. My pregnancy took my body and I’ve never gotten it back. Dance was the most important thing to me before I married Nathan. Now I have my marriage and my son, but the thing that gave my life its specialness, what I had that was unique that I could contribute as a person, I’ve lost that... it s gone. I know I had something to give, through my dancing. . . and now I’ll never be able to do that. I can choreograph and I can teach—I’m doing those things now,

but it’s not the same. . .that’s other people dancing. I feel about my life that the climax has already come. .. and that’s too soon.

A love relationship invariably involves compromise; because all of us are different, the compromises we make will be different. Nonetheless, the way we experience our compromises—as tradeoffs that benefit us or losses that deplete us—depends largely on our capacity for self-transcendence. The social worker’s experience of raising children (“It’s way beyond anything that’s gone on for me before”) and the dancer’s (“I felt like my own life was over”) reflect opposite extremes. For most of us, however, the capacity for self-transcendence is not an either-or proposition that defines our compromises in love exclusively as enhancements or as sacrifices. Usually our feelings are more mixed.

In the optimal case, the empathy and identification at the heart of self-transcendence shift the balance toward self-enhancement and away from feelings of painful sacrifice and loss. When our own identity has expanded to include our partner, then our partner’s experience becomes as important as our own. To the extent that we empathize and identify—that is, “feel along with” and “feel one with” our partner—then sacrifice may not be sacrifice.

When we care for a partner who is ill, for example, is this a sacrifice? And when we do our best to take care of ourselves when we’re ill, is this a sacrifice? The point is that self-transcendence can promote a feeling of “we,” a feeling of oneness, so compelling that it places the needs of the couple and of our partner on a par with our own. When we possess such a feeling, the choices we make in deference to our partner’s needs are made freely and naturally, rather than out of a sense of duty, obligation, or guilt.

On the other hand, conflicts of interest always arise in a longterm love relationship. Self-transcendence can enable us to feel one with our partner, but not steadily: at times partners will invariably find themselves on opposite sides of the fence. In these instances, the awareness of the possibility of self-transcendence may

250 a MappingtheTerrainoftheHeart

take the edge off the struggle, as Helen, whose reflection began this chapter, tells us:

There are times when I don’t want to put myself in Leonard’s place. I don’t want to make room for him. But I also know we’re better off together when we stretch to accommodate each other. As we’ve done that over the years, it’s gotten easier. There’s the feeling now that we’ve built something together .. . But I’ve also got to have the freedom to complain. There has to be lots of room to bitch and moan... ’cause if you have resentment, you have resentment. There’s no way around it.

Sometimes what looks from the outside like a sacrifice can also feel like a sacrifice. Striking a balance between our own needs and those of our partner, of the couple, or of the family is almost never easy. A well-developed capacity for self-transcendence, however, can make this balance a great deal easier to find.

INTIMACY WITHOUT SELF-TRANSCENDENCE

A forty-four-year-old architect with three children, Tom has been married for nearly twenty years. He thinks of himself as realistic and reasonably happy. The experience he describes in his relationship is not an uncommon one:

In the very best of times, I’m able to get pleasure from Annie’s triumphs, but most of the time I’m in my own head... In terms of seeing things from her point of view, I get rare glimpses, and then it’s really fun. . . the more I can get into her frame of mind and see things from her point of view the more fun we have. But then there’s the fear of being consumed or losing identity or giving it up. . .

I think there’s less empathy as time goes on. You think you already know someone, so you don’t make as much effort to know them better. This is my experience anyway, and also my parents’. . . Sometimes I feel guilty about it and sad. . . But sometimes I feel like, Oh well, that’s just the way things are. ..

Once you have kids, it’s mostly figuring out the strategic issues and making sure we’re taking care of the basics, so it’s a lot of practical stuff, practical compromises.

For many of us, self-transcendence through empathy and identification is an ideal; for others it is a fiction of questionable value. Like Tom, we may have joined our partner in taking on the challenges and pleasures of a shared commitment. But while it may be deeply satisfying, the experience of raising children—or of any other joint project or practice—does not require, nor does it guarantee, that our capacity for self-transcendence will be engaged. Unfortunately, many relationships, perhaps even the majority, succeed or fail without the benefit of this capacity.

If we have difficulty transcending the boundaries of the self, or if our partner does, then the intimacy of love’s third phase can have a superficial quality. We may find ourselves committed to a relationship that lacks passionate involvement. We may feel a frustrated longing for common ground that seems impossible to locate. More and more, our partner’s interests and values may diverge from our own. We may begin to feel that we’re going through the motions. Or we may find ourselves entrapped in endless competition or battles for control.

Partners with a limited capacity for self-transcendence are less likely to successfully weather the ordinary crises of adult development. Frustrations within the relationship may provoke affairs. Major shifts in work or lifestyle are more likely to result in separation or divorce. The couple struggling with infertility may be unable to generate a comparable involvement to take the place of the longed-for child. While the capacity for self-transcendence certainly offers no guarantees, it helps us to cope with the stressful changes, planned and unforeseen, that can place a relationship in jeopardy.

Intimacy without self-transcendence may keep the structure of a love relationship intact—but without the passionate involvement, the emotional overlap, that fosters the deepest growth and personal fulfillment.

THE BARRIERS TO SELF-TRANSCENDENCE

For most of us in intimate relationships, the capacity for selftranscendence waxes and wanes. Once the conditions for its emergence have been met, the capacity can be awakened. There will be times when we feel one with our partner; our destinies seem irrevocably joined and we can act on our partner’s behalf as easily as we act on our own. But then, unexpectedly and often inexplicably, we may find ourselves again feeling divided from our partner, burdened with the awareness of our divergent natures and conflicting needs. Like a muse that comes and goes, the capacity for self-transcendence graces our love less steadily than we’d like.

These fluctuations in our ability to empathize and identify are no mystery, however. They can be understood in terms of three distinct influences. First, limitations in one or more of the prior five capacities can inhibit the capacity for self-transcendence. Second, our culture’s idealized and devalued images of love can be a barrier to the self-transcendence that is part of real love. Third, the problematic fit between two partners can set up obstacles to self-transcendence.

Self-Transcendence When Earlier Capacities Are Vulnerable

If we’re not entirely confident in our ability to swim and we find ourselves in deep water, our stroke can become uneven and, in a panic, we may head for shore. This is roughly the situation we confront at a psychological level during the third stage of intimacy. Emotionally speaking, the water is deeper now and we can be overcome or panicked by feelings associated with the capacities we haven’t fully mastered.

Suppose, for example, that we have problems with merging. As a rule, these will be manifest either in merger wariness or merger hunger. Tom, the married architect with three children, has revealed that his problems with self-transcendence in relation to his wife Annie are associated with merger wariness: “The more I can get into her frame of mind and see things from her point

of view the more fun we have. But then there’s the fear of being consumed or losing identity or giving it up. ...” In contrast, the experience of Danielle, a singer in her late thirties, married without children, illustrates the impact of merger hunger on the capacity for self-transcendence:

I’m a little too good at putting myself in the other guy’s place.

I think if I’d been less empathetic I’d only have stayed with my first husband for five years instead of ten. . . My own ambitions get kind of submerged in the other person because the relationship’s so important to me. Only then I get resentful and eventually I’m out of there.

A limited capacity for integration can also undermine selftranscendence. The either-or thinking associated with poorly developed integration makes reciprocity and collaboration very difficult. One husband described his wife’s problem with integration in this way:

Junie makes a joke of it, you know: ‘‘It’s my way or the highway” is what she says. . .but she acts like she means it. She can’t get with the idea of “our way.” The other thing is that when we have a fight, it seems to put the whole relationship in jeopardy, at least in her mind. My feeling is more, we’re going through ups and downs and that’s just how it is.. . her attitude makes it tough... I feel like I can see things from her side sometimes, but she can’t seem to see things from my side.

If one capacity compromises self-transcendence more frequently than any other, it is our capacity for refinding. As we enter the third phase of intimacy, it is nearly impossible to avoid a reencounter with the past, particularly if the relationship with our partner involves marriage and children. The unfinished emotional business associated with our first family experience almost always reemerges when, once again, we find ourselves living in a family.

Ron and Joan had their first child in their late thirties. After his son’s birth, the intensity of Ron’s feelings took him by surprise:

Sex took on this momentous significance once we were trying to conceive. We were creating our future together and it felt thrilling and very close, but it was also scary. . .Then when Josh was born, I remember looking into his eyes and most of that fear dissolved... in the amazement of having a son, my own son... 1 was filled with a kind of love I’d never felt before. .. Holding him that first day, I felt so complete. . . But then a few days later I got very scared again... I had this feeling that was sort of ominous really, that who I was before Joshua was born, I would never be again. . .1 only had an inkling of this when Joan was p^gnant... And now the reality of it. . . shocked me. I felt overwhelmed.

Even though the birth of their son was a well-planned, longawaited event, Ron was utterly unprepared for its emotional impact and its effect upon his marriage. That Josh was a colicky baby left both parents feeling frayed with lack of sleep. But whereas Joan seemed to be nourished by her bonding with Josh, Ron found his initial euphoria replaced with a troubling perception of his son as an intruder into his marriage.

Alongside his own deep love for Josh, Ron also felt that he had somehow lost his wife to the baby. He hated this feeling but couldn’t escape it. He was tormented by his ambivalent emotions. He wanted very much to be a good father, but he was angry at feeling displaced by his son. He also felt inadequate as he compared his performance as a parent with his wife’s. Her mothering seemed natural and unforced, and her bond with Josh seemed effortless. Ron was deeply ashamed of all these feelings and did his best to hide them. Before Josh was six months old, Ron was finding reasons to spend more and more time away from home. He sought refuge in work, exaggerating his role as the primary breadwinner to justify his withdrawal from his wife and son. When Joan wanted to make love, Ron could hardly maintain an erection. Shortly after Josh’s first birthday, the distance between Ron and Joan became so unbearable, and the deterioration of their sex life so undeniable, that they sought therapy.

In therapy, Ron came to understand how the birth of his son had provoked the reemergence of buried childhood feelings about another, earlier birth. When Ron was five, his brother had been born. Feeling painfully displaced at that time, Ron had suffered a number of simultaneous losses including the loss of his status as the revered “only child,” the loss of his grandparents’ special attention, and most acutely, the loss of his mother’s exclusive love for him. He remembered his rage at his brother and his effort to talk to his mother, which seemed only to provoke her impatience at his jealousy of the new baby. These childhood events had left Ron feeling devastated. Now, years later, with the birth of his son, Ron’s grief, rage, and sense of betrayal were all refound with his wife. And this painful refinding made it temporarily impossible for him to exercise his capacity for self-transcendence.

When Joan became aware of the depth of her husband’s old and new pain, she was able to empathize with him in a way that his mother had not. This enabled him not only to reexperience the past but also to reexperience it with a difference—and to grieve. The healing combination of his wife’s empathy, his own insight, and his grieving permitted Ron to feel like a husband and father again. Grappling successfully with the crisis of unresolved refinding freed Ron to experience a strengthened feeling of oneness with Joan. Fortunately, the same crises that provoke our awareness of limitations in one capacity or another can also provide us with opportunities for mastery.

Self-Transcendence and Culture’s Conventional Imagery of Love

All of us are affected by our culture’s imagery of men and women in love. As we marry or “settle down,” we tend to be increasingly influenced by the social norms and expectations that express the conventional values of the culture. While the force of conventionality can contribute, at times, to keeping relationships afloat, the culture’s idealized and devalued images of love can also act as obstacles to self-transcendence.

Idealized images of love glamorize the rewards of relationship and downplay its difficulties. These images are seductive, but when we compare the reality of our own relationship to the ideal, the glamorous images usually wind up casting our own experience in a very unflattering light. If we are too much under the sway of these unrealizable ideal images, we may react in ways that work against the empathy and identification central to self-transcendence. When the cultural ideal becomes our own ideal, it encourages at once an overabsorption in ourselves and a lack of respect for ourselves as we are—both of which can compromise our capacity to be with our partner. Feeling that we fall short of the ideal, we may too easily blame ourselves and hide. Or we may blame our partner and withdraw. Or, denying the reality and importance of our actual experience, we may lose ourselves—or our relationship—in the vain struggle to live up to the ideal. Couples can be driven apart by their efforts to “keep up with the Joneses” or to maintain a harmony more fictitious than real.

Like the conventionally idealized images, our culture’s devalued images of men and women in love also discourage empathy and identification. These images stereotype women as dependent, sexually passive, and so on; they stereotype men as indifferent, sexually obsessed, or exploitative, and so on. To the extent that we are unable to free ourselves from dependence on these sorts of images, our impulses to “feel along with” and to “feel one with” our partner will be inhibited.

Self-Transcendence When the Fit between Partners Is Problematic

The fit between two partners can be less than optimal in a number of ways: The particular characteristics of the partners’ personalities can be poorly matched. The unfolding of their psychological development can be discontinuous. Or their timing can simply be off.

The Partners’ Personalities

One of the rewards of self-transcendence is personal growth. We choose our partners for many different reasons, among which is our intuitive recognition that our partner possesses, in a more developed form, crucial qualities that are only nascent in ourselves. We are instinctively aware that identifying with these qualities in our partner can help make them our own.

This potential for identification is something that Roxanne feels is frustratingly absent in her decade-long relationship with her husband:

Brad and I both feel like we’re too similar. . .looking at each other is like we’re looking into the mirror, maybe because we met when we were so young and developed along the same lines.. .We’re good where we’re strong together.. .but the way other couples support each other in the areas where the other one is weak, we don’t do that. It’s more the opposite where his weak points and mine get into kind of a vicious cycle. . . He feels insecure which makes me feel insecure which makes him feel lousy and it just gets worse. . .with Brad, it’s so frustrating because I feel he has nothing to teach me. Which is his feeling about me too. We love each other to death, but it’s the blind leading the blind.

The Partners’ Psychological Development

Self-transcendence takes two. If at a certain point in a couple’s relationship, one partner is capable of empathy and identification while the other is not, the possibilities for self-transcendence will be very limited. Recall how the birth of Ron and Joan’s son became a wedge between them, rather than an opportunity to heighten their feeling of shared identity. Joan appeared to be capable of enlarging her sense of self to include her husband and her child, while Ron’s psychological development had temporarily stalled in the cul-de-sac of refinding: his development lagged behind hers. Such discontinuities can trigger defensive collisions

or collusions that must be resolved if the couple’s potential for self'transcendence is to be realized.

Timing

Timing isn’t everything, but it is significant. Whether the issue is intimacy, career, or family, each of us functions according to his or her own timetable. Our priorities concerning what we wish to do and when we wish to do it may or may not coincide with the priorities of our partner. Perhaps the most common conflict arises around the timing of family. Both partners may have the desire for children, but one partner may feel readier to begin a family than the other. Obviously, partners who are out of synch will have to contend with their differences. Barring a shared solution that genuinely takes both partners’ needs and desires into account, joint activation of the capacity for self-transcendence is impossible.

Even when the fit between two partners is very good, there will be conflicts to resolve. Our vision of a shared future may duplicate our partner’s, yet when it comes to living out the details there are usually significant differences that emerge. We may both want a child, for example, but find ourselves at loggerheads about how to parent once the child is born. If the sense of shared identity associated with self-transcendence is to persist through such conflicts, partners must continue to strengthen their ability to collaborate.

SELF-TRANSCENDENCE AND COLLABORATION

Collaboration is the way out of the collusions and collisions that either conceal or reveal the conflicts that come up between two separate human beings attempting to mingle their lives. Collaboration facilitates self-transcendence and self-transcendence facilitates collaboration.

What about we ?” one woman said to her husband, with some exasperation. You’re not letting me in, you’re not letting me help

The Capacity for Self Transcendence

you. You say, ‘I this’ and ‘I that.’ What about ‘we’?” Her question redirected her husband’s attention to the overlap between them, the shared identity and sense of purpose that self-transcendence implies. Her question made collaboration possible. And in the wake of renewed collaboration (involving talk, tears, then making love), his experience of empathy and identification with her was dramatically intensified.

This couple’s interaction reflects one of those upward spirals that are always a potential in love. Here, a reminder of selftranscendence encouraged collaboration that fostered heightened self-transcendence. No reliable formulas exist to help us respond to the endlessly variable crises and dilemmas we face in love, yet there is a clue in this interaction. More often than not, the path out of the labyrinth is found collectively, if it is found at all. Partners fare best when they rely on the collectively generated wisdom of the couple, rather than the individual approach of one partner or the other. The synergy in couples can be their saving grace.

Especially when partners have committed themselves to a shared future (through, say, the decision to raise children), their individual solutions to joint problems are no longer viable. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts; more important, however, the whole can’t survive unless the parts mold to each other and mesh. This theme runs consistently through the accounts of partners who have been together contentedly for many years. Tolstoy said all happy families are alike; the happily coupled, too, are alike, at least in their agreement on the necessity for what a man in one of these couples called “mutual modification”:

The only way a relationship lasts over the long haul is if you’re willing to take on aspects of your partner.

You have to find a balance of what you can get out of not living completely within the idea you had for yourself of who you are. When you accept that both of you have a right to a life and that things don’t always work out as you want, you grow together in ways you don’t expect to.

Our relationship works when we don’t stay too circumscribed in our views of ourselves. . .especially old ones. . .We don’t stay too locked in our previous ideas about what we will or won’t do, what we will or won’t give in on... Especially when things are tough, when I feel like I’ve just about had it. . . Right then it’s about “kissing the frog,” instead of wishing the frog was a prince... . Giving up my feelings about how Doug’s supposed to be or how “things” are supposed to be.

Unless Adelle and I are willing to be changed by each other, we don’t make it as a couple. . .otherwise we’re too attached to our own ideas about how things should be.. .and this means we can’t deal with change. . .The couples we know either change each other or they break apart. . . It’s mutual modification. That’s the explanation for what people talk about, when they say husbands and wives start to resemble each other as time passes. I don’t know about physically, but definitely personality-wise.

A couple’s collaboration can be a way out of their distress, but not necessarily or exclusively on the terms of each partner as an individual. The capacity for self-transcendence bolsters this kind of collaboration through strengthening the feeling of “we.” This feeling can enable us as individuals to experience our accommodation in the relationship less as a sacrifice that benefits our partner and more as a compromise that meets our shared needs as a couple.

SELF-APPRAISAL: THREE PROFILES Irene: Self-Transcendence as a Resource

Divorced nearly ten years ago, Irene now feels she has found a soul mate in her second husband, although earlier in their relationship she wondered whether they were going to make it at all. Irene had lived alone with her son from her first marriage for more

than six years before she met and married Dennis, an English professor at the university where she worked as a librarian. Dennis had a nine-year-old daughter from a previous marriage, and for a time the challenge of blending the two families seemed insurmountable. The children got along badly with each other. They seemed to have nothing in common at first, except their shared ability to provoke fights between their newlywed parents.

In this crucible, however, Irene was eventually able to forge a powerful bond with Dennis. Both of them had originally fallen deeply in love with the other, both were in their late forties, and both had a determination to make their relationship work. After a period of months, during which the children had become more and more miserable, and Irene and Dennis were unable to extricate themselves from their own angry conflicts, the couple joined a group for stepparents. This group was no panacea, but it confirmed their intuition that the most important precondition for a cohesive family was a cohesive relationship between the parents.

In spite of her frustration, Irene was able to empathize with her husband’s struggle to balance his conflicting loyalties to his daughter and Irene’s son, to his old family and his new one. She was able to feel that his struggle was very much like her own— and that, in fact, their separate efforts to balance family loyalties were more usefully and truly viewed as their struggle, rather than her struggle or his. Dennis was touched by Irene’s empathy and her ability to take a step back from her anger. He had seen his ex-wife as vengeful and unforgiving, and it moved him that Irene could continue to care for him even if he didn’t take her side at every opportunity. Irene, in turn, was moved when Dennis, seemingly reading her mind, began initiating a separate relationship with her son, teaching him football and taking him to games. Irene’s conflicts with her husband didn’t cease at this point, but the intermittent capacity of both partners to empathize and be moved by the needs of the other helped cement the bond that was growing between them.

Irene’s previous marriage had suffered when the birth of her son played a role in interrupting her sexual relationship with her husband at the time. Dennis, on the other hand, had had no such problem, because he had always made sexuality a priority. Now, in their new marriage, his commitment to preserving sexual passion came up against Irene’s inhibitions. As long as she could remember, Irene had felt sexually shy and somewhat repressed. In addition, the guilt she experienced toward her son now made it difficult for her to keep the bedroom door closed to him. Over time, Irene began to identify with her husband’s greater freedom to enjoy and to preserve sexuality, even in the face of the children’s demands. Through this identification, she became gradually more comfortable with both her own sexuality and her limit setting with her son.

Michael: Self-Transcendence That Is Compromised

Michael is a forceful yet incongruously soft-spoken attorney who has just turned fifty. Shelley, his wife, is a lively and articulate woman who manages the office of the firm that Michael began nearly twenty years ago. Together they have raised two sons, both of whom are now away at college. On the surface Michael and Shelley appear to have thoroughly interlaced their lives and created a shared identity as a couple. For some time, however, there has been a lack of reciprocity in their relationship that reflects Michael’s problems with self-transcendence. Two years ago this lack of reciprocity led Shelley to threaten Michael with a separation.

When communicating about their shared experience, Shelley commonly talks about what “we” did, while Michael usually refers to what he did, or she did, as if together they’d actually done very little. This habit of speech of his strikes an especially discordant note when the two of them are side by side, talking with someone else. Almost as if Shelley weren’t there, Michael typically fixes his gaze on the third party; then, recounting a shared family experience, he refers to Shelley as “her,” rather than including

his wife in the conversation by using the pronoun you or calling her by name. Meanwhile, she continues to talk in terms of “we.”

For years Shelley privately upbraided her husband for what she calls this “verbal tic” of his. While she loved and admired him, and appreciated his devotion to her, she also complained about his inability to take her seriously and his rigid unwillingness to yield control. Not until her dissatisfaction threatened to jeopardize their marriage, however, did Michael really begin to question his role in their relationship.

He had a suspicion that his general style of being with people was outdated and, perhaps, problematic. He knew he derived a sense of security from playing what he saw as the conventional masculine role; at the same time, he was ashamed when the authoritarian aspects of this role were exposed in relation to his wife or sons. Michael felt torn. His guilt, his love for Shelley, and his fear of losing her all motivated him to “stretch” emotionally: he wanted to be able to accommodate and extend his empathy to her. Yet he felt trapped by habits that, in his words, were “bred into him.” He came from a family with a long military tradition. And although he had rebelled against his father, an autocratic Marine colonel, it felt threatening for him to abandon family traits that seemed to have become part of his character.

Though it went against the grain, Michael agreed to Shelley’s suggestion that they try and work through their difficulties with the help of a therapist. Eventually Michael was able to see that his irrational fear of losing control stood in the way of realizing his desires. Looking back on his marriage, he was clear that the periods he had enjoyed most intensely were the periods of greatest closeness with Shelley. This closeness usually came when he was able to join with her, either sexually or around the commitment they shared to their sons. Yet the same closeness also made him uneasy because it threatened his sense of control. Gradually Michael has developed more of an ability to pay attention to the closeness he wants, rather than the loss of control he fears. And with this shift has come a heightened capacity to experience and

264 ± MappingtheTerrainoftheHeart

enjoy the feeling of “we” that he now shares, more and more comfortably, with his wife.

Jessica: Self-Transcendence as a Struggle

A highly creative television producer, Jessica has had two lengthy but disappointing marriages. Now in her mid-forties, Jessica projects an attitude of ironic amusement about romantic love. But when she talks about her own past relationships, she simply sounds bitter. Jessica now lives with a man who has recently said he is falling in love with her. She wishes she could continue to enjoy their relationship. But his love frightens her, more than she thinks it should. She wonders if her present fear can genuinely be justified by the betrayals she feels she’s suffered in the past.

Jessica’s first marriage, to her high school sweetheart, seemed full of promise for the first several years. But Rob wanted children, Jessica didn’t, and their conflict gradually became more volatile and more corrosive. Jessica felt that Rob was threatened by her ambitions. She angrily interpreted his desire for children as a cover for his need to control her and keep her home. When a careless sexual encounter between the two of them left her pregnant, she arranged, against his wishes, to have an abortion. Several months later, Rob took steps to end the marriage, leaving Jessica feeling abandoned and enraged.

Like her first marriage, her second lasted for nearly seven years. Gavin was a music teacher and an aspiring composer with whom she began to live shortly after her separation. He was generous and nurturing, but a little too passive. Initially Jessica had felt relieved to be with a man who wasn’t threatened by her strength and her aspirations. He appreciated her creativity and her commitment to her work, while Jessica felt satisfied to have joined her life to that of an artist. After several years, however, it became plain to her that he lacked the drive or talent to make a real career of his art. In addition she began to perceive him as more and more dependent: she experienced his needs as unwanted demands. She also found herself feeling critical of his sexuality: he was neither

confident nor masterful enough for her to take him seriously in bed. When he became sexually withdrawn from her, she was briefly relieved but soon felt rejected. After discovering that he was having an affair, she became enraged. There was a brief, unsuccessful effort to reconcile; then Gavin left her. Once more she felt abandoned. She resolved never again to make herself so vulnerable.

Before long, however, Jessica’s loneliness led to her present live-in arrangement, which she disparagingly refers to as a “relationship of convenience.” Frank is an airline pilot in his late forties whose work keeps him away one week out of three. She describes him as aggressive and literate, passionate about flying and the theater. From Jessica’s point of view, the relationship between them initially worked because their expectations were so low. But recently, when Frank said that he was falling in love with her, she found herself feeling threatened—as much by his affection as by the possibility of losing him if she couldn’t respond in kind.

Jessica’s three major relationships all reflect her difficulties with various aspects of self-transcendence. Empathy is particularly problematic for her. When Jessica becomes aware of the feelings or needs of someone she is close to, she feels threatened with the loss of her autonomy. Rob’s needs and Gavin’s were a threat to her, and so apparently are Frank’s. Lacking a solid, separate sense of self, the experience of “we” is a dangerous one for her. And yet she is drawn to relationships because the incompleteness of her sense of self makes it difficult for her to be alone.

CONCLUSION