The author discusses factors that shape the subjective meanings each member of the couple gives to marital interactions and the intersubjective disjunctions between the partners that can result. These include adaptive, self-protective mechanisms, the wish for mastery, guilt, and defense against grieving. Through illuminating these factors, psychoanalytic couple therapy can enhance empathic awareness of how each partner's attitudes, actions, and once adaptive defenses can actualize the other's transference expectations and evoke his or her painful and traumatic childhood relationships and experiences.