Why are we stuck? The three hidden levels of your relationship.
Couples rarely seek therapy because they believe they have “psychological disorders”. They come because something in the relationship is not working. Yet in practice, intrapsychic difficulties and relational patterns are tightly interwoven, each shaping and reinforcing the other in ways that can feel difficult to disentangle.
Couple therapy, therefore, is not simply about resolving surface conflicts. It involves creating conditions in which the relationship itself can develop. This work takes place within a triadic frame: two partners and a therapist. While this structure has parallels with individual psychotherapy it introduces a distinct relational field with its own pressures, alliances, and resistances.
A central clinical question is how the couple, as a unit, organizes its emotional life. Drawing on psychodynamic thinking, this can be understood in terms of different levels of functioning: neurotic, borderline, and psychotic. This is not a fixed classification. Couples may shift between levels depending on stress and context, although many tend to stabilize around a dominant mode over time.
At a more integrated (neurotic) level, partners are generally able to symbolize their internal states. Feelings can be named, reflected upon, and communicated. There is some recognition that the other person has a separate mind, with intentions and meanings that may differ from one’s own. Misunderstandings occur, but they can be thought about.
In sessions, this may look like one partner pausing and saying, “When you didn’t call, I told myself you didn’t care. I know that might not be true, but that’s where my mind went.” The important shift here is not the accuracy of the interpretation, but the capacity to hold it as a thought rather than act on it immediately.
At a less integrated (borderline) level, this reflective capacity becomes unstable. Under strain, the couple may lose the ability to think about experience and instead move quickly into action. Conflicts become repetitive and prolonged, often circling around the same themes without resolution. Words are used less to communicate and more to regulate distance, defend against vulnerability, or exert control.
Clinically, one often sees exchanges escalate rapidly: “You never listen” answered by “Because you’re impossible to talk to,” followed by withdrawal, silence, or abrupt exits. What is striking is not only the intensity, but how quickly the possibility of curiosity collapses. The interaction replaces reflection.
At the most disorganized (psychotic) level, the sense of the other as a psychological subject is severely compromised. There is little capacity to imagine what the partner might think or feel. The relationship becomes a space where internal states are discharged directly into behavior, often without recognition that these actions carry meaning within a shared psychological space.
For example, a partner may abruptly engage in an affair or act in a way that is deeply disruptive, yet speak about it with a kind of flat immediacy, as if it exists outside the relational context. Attempts to explore impact or intention may be met not with دفاع or guilt, but with confusion, indifference, or a concrete recounting of events without symbolic depth.
From a therapeutic standpoint, the level at which a couple is functioning has technical implications. Work below the neurotic level often requires a more active and structuring stance from the therapist, particularly in maintaining the frame and slowing down enactments. However, even here, lasting change depends not only on modifying behavior but on gradually restoring the capacity to think, symbolize, and attribute meaning to experience.
The terminology used to describe these levels can feel pathologizing. If preferred, one might speak instead of couples who primarily communicate, those who tend to enact, and those who struggle to mentalize. While less precise, such language may be more accessible without losing the underlying clinical distinction.
Finally, a relationship’s level of functioning is not reducible to the individual psychologies of the partners. The couple creates its own psychological system. Just as individuals can become more or less integrated, so too can relationships shift in how they process emotion, conflict, and meaning over time.
References and further reading:
Nancy McWilliams (2011). Psychoanalytic diagnosis: Understanding personality structure in the clinical process (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
Otto Kernberg (1975). Borderline conditions and pathological narcissism. Jason Aronson.
Otto Kernberg (1984). Severe personality disorders: Psychotherapeutic strategies. Yale University Press.
Wilfred R. Bion (1962). Learning from experience. Heinemann.
Dicks, H. V. (1967). Marital tensions: Clinical studies towards a psychological theory of interaction. Routledge.
Morgan, M. (2019). A couple state of mind: Psychoanalysis of couples and the Tavistock Relationships model. Routledge.
Thomas H. Ogden (1994). The analytic third: Working with intersubjective clinical facts. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 75, 3–19.
Ruszczynski, S. (Ed.). (1993). Psychotherapy with couples: Theory and practice at the Tavistock Institute of Marital Studies. Karnac Books.
Scharff, D. E., & Scharff, J. S. (1991). Object relations couple therapy. Jason Aronson.
© 2024 by Shabnam Sadigova