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Phillips introduces his theme with a clinical vignette — a middle-aged woman suffering from a repetitive pattern of all or nothing relationships. It was not that her feelings were necessarily unreciprocated, but that whilst for her partners the relationship could be experienced as an enrichment of the ongoing continuity of their lives, for her it was felt as an absolute, and its ending threatened rupture. Much incidental talk of actual pragmatic contracts — wedding and divorce settlements, etc. — led the analytic pair to explore the notion that much unconscious contractual work was also going on: she was, in effect, implicitly, inarticulately, seeking to bind her prospective partners into all or nothing ‘contracts’. Her unconscious intention being to pre-empt ‘contingency’ or happenstance, from having any significant role in determining her fate.
Yet the position she adopted towards her would-be partners was consequently of such rigidity that it provoked reaction; tension, spiralling into conflict and war with all the out-of-controlness and dramatic contingency that she so sought to avoid. For Jungians this is a lovely example of ‘enantiodromia’ — of an unconscious dynamic calling forth