Symbiotic Pairings in Adults

It is our experience that the application of the biological concept of symbiosis to psychology provides a useful metaphor for understanding certain kinds of distorted human relatedness. The metaphor has been widely, but imprecisely, applied to pathologically intimate mother—child relationships. Sporadic attempts have also been made to apply it to other relationships which appear to have symbiotic characteristics. The purpose of this paper has been to clarify some of the resulting confusion. In the process, we have extended the concept of symbiosis to a much broader spectrum of human relationships and have identified and described several different kinds of symbiosis. We have found it useful to characterize relationships in which the original mother—child symbiosis has persisted into adulthood as "primary symbiosis, " and to group all other symbiotic patterns under the term "secondary symbiosis." The latter term embraces those relationships in which a stable symbiotic pattern is reconstituted with someone else than the mother ("Stable Secondary Symbiosis"), and relationships which are transitory and primarily imitative in character ("Floating Symbiosis"). It also embraces a pattern of behavior which we call "Negative Symbiosis" in which intimacy is avoided because it raises the fear of symbiotic regression. The need to escape a maternal presence perceived as engulfing, or the fear that intimacy will lead to symbiotic regression can be a powerful impetus to "acting out" behavior, especially in the sexual area; thus an understanding of negative symbiosis can be most helpful in clarifying the dynamic basis of acting out disorders.

Our formulation of the concept of symbiosis from the developmental, phenomenological, structural, and functional points of