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This paper is an interesting and representative example of a group of articles that have dealt with complementary neurotic, or even psychotic, interaction in marriage. They signalize the growing acknowledgment of this very important alloplastic area of adjustive techniques and defensive interactions on the part of two adults—an area that more and more concerns the psychoanalyst-clinician.
Dr. Giovacchini's central thesis is, I believe, that “object relationships are not only important determinants of emotional development, but once optimal development has been achieved, they continue to be vital for the maintenance of ego integration.” This is somewhat ambiguous insofar as it holds true only for borderline adjustment. Moreover, it is here unwarrantedly generalized and connected with a fashionable but increasingly loosely conceived concept in the psychoanalytic literature, namely, that of “symbiotic relationships.”
When one studies carefully the infant's emergence from the socio-biological symbiotic fusion with the mother, as he goes through the subphases of separation-individuation—i.e., differentiation; then practicing, within a more or less short-lived “love affair with the world”; thence to spurt of locomotion and to the dawning awareness of separateness—one notes how some measure of identity is already achieved at even that early age. When one observes how this awareness prepares for rapprochement with the object on a higher emotional level, the limited and limiting quality of the original symbiosis is apparent. The struggle for individual autonomy in the normal or near-normal human
being commences very early, just as the longing for symbiosis may last “up to the grave.”1 In the rapprochement subphase of individuation, the child does increasingly relate to the whole object—that is, he relates to the object whether or not he has obtained satisfaction of his needs.2 During the second 18 months of life, the toddler and the pre-nursery child is well on his way to ob