Beyond idealization: Understanding the unconscious dynamics of couples

Idealization and early expectations

Couples often enter relationships with a degree of idealization, focusing on their partner’s positive qualities. This does not have to be extreme or blind to the other person’s psychological difficulties, but it usually emphasizes traits such as creativity, generosity, curiosity, or warmth. Early in the relationship, this focus can create a sense that the partner is a source of deep connection, validation, growth, or even emotional security. While these perceptions are not entirely unrealistic, as partners can provide love and acceptance previously unavailable, they are often higher than what the other person, with their own limitations and developmental experiences, can consistently provide.

Unconscious expectations and relationship strains

As the relationship progresses, particularly when couples move in together, get married, or have children, each partner increasingly struggles to meet the unconscious expectations of the other, while simultaneously perceiving that their own expectations are not being fulfilled. Over time, this dynamic establishes a system of unmet, unspoken expectations intertwined with projections and projective identifications. This system can dominate the relationship and sometimes make each partner appear disturbed or irrational within it.

Projection in couples

Projection occurs when one partner interprets the other’s actions through a lens shaped by early relational experiences. For example, if X forgets to respond to a message Y sent about an important plan, Y may feel dismissed, interpreting X’s behavior as a profound act of indifference or betrayal. These feelings are not solely generated by X’s action; they are partially projected from Y’s own past experiences of emotional neglect or criticism.

Projective identification

Projective identification is more complex. It occurs when the partner who is the target of projection begins to enact the qualities they are imagined to possess. For example, if one partner is perceived as detached and unfeeling, their quiet or reflective nature may be interpreted as emotional coldness. Over time, in response to the partner’s frustration or disappointment, they may genuinely withdraw or appear more distant, embodying the very coldness they were imagined to have.

Repetitive patterns and shared disturbance

At this stage, couples often become caught in a repetitive relational pattern. Some may occasionally recognize this as a shared unconscious disturbance, a temporary madness for two, while others remain fully immersed and unable to step outside it. At its most intense, recurring arguments often share two characteristics:

• Each partner strongly experiences the other as projecting, misunderstanding, or misperceiving them.
• Each interprets the other’s behavior as an indisputable fact, for example, “She always criticizes me unfairly” or “He never listens to what I need.”

Therapy’s approach to recurrent patterns

Couples frequently arrive in therapy already enmeshed in this pattern, describing it and demonstrating it in session. The goal of couples therapy is not to eliminate the pattern, as unconscious projections, projective identifications, and expectations cannot be fully stopped.

The aim is instead to cultivate emotional reflection, the capacity to step back and recognize that what feels obvious about the partner’s behavior is a constructed narrative influenced by early relational experiences and internalized lenses. Helping each partner understand the other through joint reflection is challenging. Therapy that focuses on each partner individually, without mutual engagement, is insufficient. The therapist must foster what Tavistock couples therapists refer to as a “couples state of mind.”

Developing a “Couples state of mind”.

This involves developing a shared awareness that the relationship itself, the “third” entity beyond self and other, requires attention, reflection, and understanding. Within this shared sense of “us,” partners learn to observe recurring patterns and consider why they become trapped in the cycle. This reflective stance increases empathy, can reduce many—but not all—arguments, and facilitates deeper emotional communication.

Loss, Growth, and Connection

Growth within the couple inevitably involves loss. Each partner must relinquish the unconscious idealizations and expectations they once held and confront the recognition that their own limitations prevent them from fully meeting the other’s hopes. Yet within this grief and acknowledgment of personal constraints, new forms of connection and meaning can emerge.

This work lies at the heart of couples therapy and is most coherently understood within the context of psychodynamic and analytic principles. All effective couples therapy is, in essence, psychodynamic, even if this is rarely acknowledged in mainstream practice.

                                                                © 2025 by Shabnam Sadigova