Intimate Partners: Patterns in Love and Marriage by Maggie Scarf

Author:Maggie Scarf [Scarf, Maggie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Family & Relationships, Non-Fiction, Interpersonal Relations, Marriage & Long-Term Relationships, Psychology
ISBN: 9780345418203
Google: XYg-DwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B004EPYWJ2
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2008-10-14T23:00:00+00:00

A Classic System: The Silent Husband and the Hysterical Wife

There is no clearer, more commonly encountered example of a projective identification system than that seen in the relationship of the nonexpressive husband and his voluble, highly emotional wife. In this kind of marriage, each spouse has his or her own area of specialization. One partner carries all of the expressivity, warmth and feeling in the intimate system, while the other is in charge of cool rationality, attention to detail, and logic.

Angie and Bob Carrano, in their mid thirties at the time of our interviews, happened to be from a working-class Italian background. But theirs was a type of relationship that I saw over and over again, in every social, ethnic and economic class and group. Marriages much like that of the Carranos are particularly frequent in academic families and among executives, lawyers, and scientists; the husbands, in these relationships, have a propensity to the obsessional pursuit of order, detail and knowledge, while their wives take care of “feelings” for the pair of them.

Often, in such marriages, the male partner is someone who is extremely successful and highly functional professionally. In his intimate life, however, he is patently dysfunctional—as is his spouse—for they inhabit a system which is emotionally unhealthy and deeply ungratifying for both of them. These partners are caught in a mutually collusive, projective identification arrangement, involving a husband who cannot be emotionally expressive and a wife who cannot be anything but.

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