Discussion of Peter L. Giovacchini's Article, Characterological Aspects of Marital Interaction

Dr. Giovacchini asks us to look in an important direction with respect to psychoanalytic theory. The capacity for object relations, or its incapacity, is measurable in the observations which he has reported. The success or failure of a partnership such as in marriage depends on the whole range of psychic libido and ego development, from the pregenital to the more mature, from the fragmented ego to the more mature ego. Striking, too, are the repeated observations—which should be old hat to analysts but yet never fail to be impressive—that the needs of one person, no matter at what level they are organized, find gratification in the menu of suitable partners which society offers. A marital relationship in particular confirms repeatedly that each partner's needs dovetail the needs of the other. It is as though the search and discovery of a marital partner discards the rules of logic and conscious thinking and is conducted rather at the level of invisible pseudopodia of the unconscious. The meeting of needs and requirements is decided by the invisible and the underground.

The author's clinical case reports are very helpful in enabling us to understand what he is trying to say theoretically. Marital partnerships lend themselves as propitious experiments in nature for study of the operational aspects of object relations. The behavioral qualities observed in these experiments then serve to help us understand the intrapsychic mechanisms at work.

I am not wholly satisfied with Dr. Giovacchini's arbitrary classification with respect to the total problem of object relations in marriage,

although I think he has teased out something significant in his “character object relations” and “symptom object relations.” While I cannot quarrel too much with the theoretical substrate implied by these terms, I think it would have been helpful to have had a much larger group of cases for a classification. I am aware that Dr. Giovacchini has spoken to this point elsewhere and that he states s