Divorce: Separation or Separation-Individuation?

The divorce rate in the United States has been on an upsurge during the last decade. In the period 1975-1977 there were 1,070,000 divorces in the United States. The rate of divorce has climbed to 37 per thousand married women 14 to 44 years old.1 The increase in the divorce rate is certainly related to the decrease in negative social sanctions and the reform in divorce laws. However, the relationship is not clearly one of cause and effect.

Social psychologists conceive of marital pairs as a special case of all social groups; and as such, their cohesiveness is analogous to group cohesiveness.2 Cohesiveness in marriage is related to material rewards, symbolic rewards, and affectional rewards. Others have explored such issues as the intergenerational transmission of marital instability and the economic determinants of breakup.

Kernberg observed recently that “psychoanalytic contributions have dealt more with the psychology and psychopathology of sexual life than with the psychology and psychopathology of love relations.”3 Indeed, a review of the literature turned up no analytic writings which specifically address divorce, although both Benedek4 and Kernberg3 have observed that the changes in women in our society may threaten men, shift the balance between the sexes, and increase the aggressive component of marriages.

Karen Horney, in her paper “Problems in Marriage,”5 considered the impact of the early Oedipal love experiences on later relationships with the opposite sex. In the male, Horney observed the recoiling from the forbidding female, the notion of the saintliness of women which interferes with sexual desires for the wife, and the dread of being unable to satisfy the woman. “The less such attitudes have been overcome in the course of his development, the more uncomfortable the husband must feel in relation to his wife.”9 Horney postulated that these unconscious feelings could lead to