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The Middle Years book

"Today we can be more precise in noting the almost universal presence in unhappy marriages of shared conscious and unconscious fantasies and conflicts. Also, we might see interpersonal conflict not as superseding a neurosis but rather as the inevitable resonance of neurotic processes with an external reality that fits the neurotic structure."

Sam Vaknin describes in many of his videos, the "shared fantasy" for narcistic relationships. In one video he mentions where the phrase originates from: the 1989 book The Middle Years.

  • The Middle Years
  • Yale University Press 1989
  • Edited by John M Oldham, M.D & Robert S.Liebert M.D
  • ISBN 0-300-04418-6

Here are some quotes from it:

"Consists of elaborations of papers originally presented at a symposium held in 1987 organised by the Association of Psychoanaltic Medicine." (inlay)

"Why has so little psychoanalytic thought been devoted to the psychological life of the middle years?" (introduction)

"The circumstances of middle life, and our opportunity to examine them psychoanalytically, give us a newly discovered mental landscape: middle age as a development phase. In this phase, a new anxiety is added to the sequence described by Freud, the anxiety of loss of function, decay, and death." (Chapter 1)

The book has many interesting papers centering around pyschoanalytic topics in middle age.

The shared fantasy Sam Vaknin had adpated is discussed in Chapter 12: Marital Conflict and Psychoanalytic Therapy in Middle Years (p160) by Fred M. Sander MD. I've summarised Fred M. Sander's main points here, some of which I've written verbatim.

Freud and neuroses superseding an unhealthy marriage

Freud noted the tendency of many patients to act out their neuroses by prematurely forming an anappropriate attachment (leading to an unhealthy marriage).

A marital bond was described by Stein 1956 in Pyschoanalytic Quarterly as possibly representing on unconscious fantasy. Stein noted a frequent unconscious male fantasy that sees the wife as an intrapsychic representation of the man's phallus. Sander then notes the female version of this could exist and an unconscious shared fantasy occurs.

[The fantasies] are consciously or unconsciously shared....They are occur from earliest childhood aggressive and libidinal impulses projected onto objects in the outside world.

Sander notes the fantasies can become a source of conflict themselves.

"It continues in varying degrees into adult life as the catastrophic anxieties of childhood, projected onto a spouse or child. It's a defense mechanism - "altruistic surrender" described by Anna Freud. Another person is used by the ego for defensive purposes."

A willing other

Sander goes on to describe something Sam Vaknin borrows and adapts for Narcissism:

What is minimised by this perspective and Freud's observation of an unhappy marriage superseding neurosis is the requirement of a willing other, a colluding reality.

An unhappy marriage taking the place of neurosis - neurosis is a coping strategy caused by unsuccessfully repressed emotions from past experiences. So needing someone to act this neurosis out with, and they are used by the ego as a defense.

The Sander chapter ends by describing two case studies, and talks about therapists in the 1930s and 1940s noticing that couples' marriage health got worst when they were both in therapy - transferrence was occurring onto both the spouse and the therapist. More recently, the book continues, family therapists have described "shared externalization of internal conflicts".

..."we are noting explicitly what earlier authors from Freud on[wards] implicitly noted: the shared participation in neurotic conflicts. The threats of object loss, loss of love, castration, and superego disapproval - the calamities of childhood in all ages and cultures -- continue to affect our relations to others, especially with whom we live and work".

And then the book goes to describe how this plays out as repetition compulsion in marriages:

"The repression of such universal childhood experiences and conflicts leads to their repetition with important others who reciprocally enact similar or complementary unconscious conflicts."

Sam Vaknin describes one form of a repetition compulsion he believes narcisists play out in their relationships - the compulsion to (internally) discard, de-value, and then leave the partner (or their partner leaves them as they don't like this) which Sam Vaknin calls "separation individuation" (from Jung). The sad (??) part is the narcisist will never individuate as they needed to, as their partner acting as their mother is symbolic - the introject of their bad mother will live on.

This is Vaknin's theory about what drives a narcissist in a relationship, the need to right the wrongs of the past. You both enter into a shared fantasy at the beginning of the relationship, in which the Narcisist takes on characteristics of your mother/father, and this is reciprocated with you taking on their mother/father. The narcissist has had trauma early on in life, and possibly later in the formative years via another care giver, and so will have "catastrophic anxieties".

At the end of the chapter, Sander describes how there is hope in modern times, that if the neuroses are brought into pyschoanalysis, patients can become aware of their defense mechanisms. Unfortunately for Narcissists, as Vaknin describes in many of his videos, their alloplastic defenses (for example blaming others, projection) would make the pyschoanalysis unlikely to happen, or it being abandoned within months.