CAN PSYCHOANALYSIS SAVE MARRIAGE? AND WHEN SHOULD IT?
BY ENRICO GNAULATI 
Illustration by Sarah-Jane Crowson
HOW DO WE approach patients who are experiencing a downturn in their marriage, or marriage-like commitment, even a desiccation of love? How do we help them differentiate between a harbinger of dissolution and a rough patch to be endured with the hope of restoring vital intimate bonds? The thornier issue I’ll tackle pertains to whether there are occasions when therapists have an ethical responsibility to challenge patients bent on pursuing a divorce, even to engage them in ways that hold promise for intimate bonds to be restored. This would entail an analytic attitude that deviates from the disenchanted one baked into the title of Stephen Mitchell’s acclaimed book, Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Over Time. It would beckon a more enchanted titular analytic attitude: Love Can Last: The Promise of Romance Over Time.
Perusing the history of definitions of love and marriage in the psychoanalytic literature, it’s difficult to discern whether we are invited into a psychic world of realism or cynicism. Freud once compared human relatedness to the “Hedgehog’s Dilemma,” an analogy he borrowed from German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Hedgehogs need to huddle to stay warm. However, given their sharp quills, close proximity guarantees pain. There’s a perennial dilemma of having to get close to stay warm, but in the process, calibrating the degree of closeness to avoid harm.
Freud elucidated another dilemma nested in intimate relationships that appears inescapable for many people—combining loving and lustful feelings for the same person over the long haul. Here’s how he characterized the conundrum: “Where they love, they have no desire. Where they desire, they cannot love.” This theme was taken up by Stephen Mitchell in his aforementioned book—released posthumously on Valentine’s Day, 2002—and was mined more deeply by Esther Perel in her wildly popular book Mating in Captivity. In a nutshell, these writers lend credence to the notion that love and desire work at cross purposes. The very conditions that foster love—safety, security, predictability, familiarity, and comfort—can desex a marriage. That’s because erotic desire thrives on novelty, adventure, mystery, and danger. Mitchell summed up his disenchanted view of lasting intimacy as follows: “Authentic romance is hard to find and even harder to maintain. It easily degrades into something else, much less captivating, much less enlivening, such as sober respect or purely sexual diversion, predictable companionship, or hatred, guilt, and self-pity.” Not surprisingly, in other publications Mitchell referred to marriage as a “hazardous arrangement,” predicated on his belief that robust attachments in adulthood may afford security but are “the great enemy of eroticism.” Perel claims that the countervailing nature of love and lust is such that it is a “paradox to be accepted, not a problem to be solved.”
“Does the therapist have an ethical obligation to help patients exhaust all possibilities before seriously entertaining a separation or divorce?”
It’s indisputable that individuals sometimes experience committed relationships as a lackluster partnership with a trusty mate who is always there, leaving them to vigorously tamp down their sexual predilections, or outsource them with affairs. Just because people experience this paradox in their relationships, however, doesn’t mean they must permanently accommodate to it. I would argue that such feelings are in fact life-phase dependent and changeable. We forget how commonplace it can be in the long arc of a marriage, or marriage-like commitment, for the relationship to morph in and out of being vitalizing and devitalizing, both sexually and nonsexually. A great many couples drift apart due to benign neglect that is an unintended consequence of being hyper-responsible parents and dutiful careerists. William Doherty, Professor of Family Social Science at the University of Minnesota, offers a simple axiom: “The biggest threat to a good marriage is everyday living.” It’s easier than we think for couples to fall into the trap of misconstruing unavoidable erosions in closeness and sexual intimacy—erosions that set in as a consequence of raising children, running a household, and pursuing a career—as signs of dire incompatibility.
We inheritors of Western civilization may still be marinating in sentimentalized Judeo-Christian notions regarding parenthood being the apotheosis of a marriage, bringing untold joy. This doesn’t square with the available science, at least as it pertains to new parents’ affectional bonds with each other. According to statistics supplied by the prominent marriage researcher John Gottman, after the birth of a child 67 percent of couples experience a steep decline in marital satisfaction. Rather than limit ourselves to discussing the tension between love and desire that can creep into long-term relationships, perhaps we need to shift the debate to talk more about the unmistakable transitional phenomenon in which parents fall out of love with each other in the process of falling in love with their newborn. Freud happened to be prescient on this matter. In an 1883 letter to his then fiancée, Martha Bernays, Freud bemoaned the impending diminution of romantic love in their relationship: “dangerous rivals soon appear; household and nursery.”
Under duress, many married people, understandably, presuppose they will be happier divorced than partnered to their for-the-time-being-less-than-lovable spouse. Perel, in her sequel book, The State of Affairs, observes, “we no longer divorce because we’re unhappy; we divorce because we could be happier.” Zooming out, some research counters the prudence of this aspiration. A nationally representative survey spearheaded by Linda Waite at the University of Chicago tracking over 5,000 married adults over a five-year period found that, on average, unhappily married people who then separated or divorced were no happier than unhappily married people who remained married. Remarkably, two-thirds of unhappily married adults who refrained from dissolving their union rated themselves as happily married five years out. Along these lines, according to the National Library of Medicine’s Premarital Relationship Enhancement Program data set, almost a third of divorced people regret having ended their marriage, believing that either or both could have worked harder to preserve it.
What are the ramifications of these ideas for therapists working with patients who are questioning staying married or partnered to a long-term mate? Taking the matter one step further, when the indications are that a marriage is mostly good, maybe even holding a dormant promise to improve over time, but is being construed by a patient as not good enough, even unsalvageable, what are the arguments for a therapist bracketing an autonomy affirming stance—on ethical grounds—and temporarily adopting a marriage affirming stance? In other words, in marriages, based on a therapist’s best judgment, where wholesome and romantic love once existed; any acts of betrayal or deception are potentially surmountable; and the couple is bound by parental and financial obligations—though going-on-being as a couple seems intolerable—does the therapist have an eth- ical obligation to help patients exhaust all possibilities before seriously entertaining a separation or divorce?
Traditionally speaking, psychoanalysis has anchored itself to an exploratory method aimed at greater client self-understanding. In his writings, Freud was adamant in positioning psychoanalysis as a scientific endeavor whose primary goal was the attainment of self-knowledge. He largely frowned upon any notion that it might be a method to alleviate human suffering. Indeed, he famously lashed out at his junior colleague, Sandor Ferenczi, for having a furor sanandi, or a passion to cure, perceiving such personal involvement on the part of the therapist as an impediment to achieving the objective mindset worthy of accurately dissecting the client’s inner world. In the 1916–1917 Introductory Lectures Freud opined, “We are not reformers but merely observers.”
In recent years theorists like Donna Orange have spawned an “ethical turn” in psychoanalysis, shedding light on how remaining neutral can be tantamount to responding indifferently to patients’ suffering. She has toiled to reimagine the therapist’s role as including the clinical/human obligation to render patients’ suffering more avoidable, bearable, and intelligible. Therefore, consistent with the ethical turn in psychoanalysis, in cases of a salvageable marriage, arguably, the therapist has a responsibility to hold space for patients to consider how they might be setting themselves up for unexpected suffering with blithe unawareness or willful ignorance of the hardship divorce can bring to themselves and their families. The rationale here is that by avoiding a separation or divorce a couple sidesteps some of the worst life stressors known to humans.
The Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale, used by doctors for half a century to rank stressful life events that predict illnesses in adults, places the death of a spouse or child at the top of the list. Number two and three are divorce and marital separation. These are ranked more stressful and illness-producing than going to prison, sustaining a major physical injury, or having a close friend die. Divorce can also have unexpected lasting negative economic effects, especially for heterosexual women. Based on a recent analysis by Fortune, on average, once a divorce is finalized men retain 2.5 times the amount of financial resources held by women, and women’s household finances drop 41 percent. This is not to mention the behavioral and educational fallout experienced by children of divorce, detailed recently by Melissa Kearney in The Two-Parent Privilege. Speaking not as a moralist but an economist, she concludes, “Marriage is the most reliable institution for delivering a high level of resources and long-term stability to children.”
It goes without saying that in an irrefutably bad marriage, divorce can be nothing short of liberation from a form of trauma. But what about those cases where people assume divorce will be a tolerably stressful transition to a better life, when in fact it is likely to unfold as its own form of trauma, for some, or all, of the emotional stakeholders involved?
One of the leading causes of divorce is infidelity. A common psychoanalytic shibboleth is that romantic straying bespeaks attachment phobia or avoidance, or acting out of underlying intimacy problems. Doubtless, there is merit to this idea. However, a remarkable number of people who quest after extramarital sex or intimacy consider themselves to be happily or very happily married—35 to 55 percent—based a recent Archives of Sexuality article. Dylan Selterman and the coauthors of the research covered in this article studied a large population of what they cheekily refer to as “experienced and aspiring cheaters” who were active users on Ashley Madison, a website catering to those seeking extradyadic romance. They sum up their results as follows: “there are non-dyadic motivations for infidelity that stem from things like self-esteem, desire for variety, and situational factors, rather than from deficits in people’s marriages or partnerships.” This finding seems to confirm one narrative Perel delivers up about affairs: “We are not looking for a different lover so much as another version of ourselves.”
For a partner who has been cheated on, Perel adds, “divorce affords more self-respect than forgiveness.” But what if it is self-protective pride, rather than self-expansive respect, that governs decision making on the part of the partner subjected to infidelity? It is imaginable that an affair occurring within an otherwise good union was not a rejection or indictment of a marriage or marriage partner.
“Lovers who have a long history together codevelop a platform of relational safety crafted from years of jointly finding their way back from disappointments.”
The ethical turn in psychoanalysis advises anticipatory reflection aimed at harm reduction, or sensitively engaging patients to see how rash actions may run the gambit from anticipated, intended harmful consequences to unanticipated, unintended ones. My position is more radical still. A fuller reckoning with what the ethical turn in psychoanalysis can deliver reaches beyond a focus on the mitigation of suffering to include the maximization of happiness. The lessening of emotional misery is a noble humanitarian psychoanalytic goal; so too is helping create the fundamental conditions necessary for happiness.
A newly released study overseen by Sam Peltzman at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business shows that coupledom is the highest predictor of life happiness, more than career success and accumulated wealth. Peltzman crunched the numbers yielded from the General Social Survey (GSS), a nationally representative survey of Americans implemented since 1972. He discovered that compared to unmarried Americans, those who are married have a 30-percentage point increase in overall happiness. Similarly, based on two large surveys conducted in the United Kingdom, economists Shawn Grover and John F. Helliwell compared married and unmarried cohorts and revealed that married people are more satisfied with their lives. This was true especially during the mid-life years, when adults’ levels of life satisfaction typically are at their lowest. Added to this is a large body of evidence associating marriage with longevity, cardiac health, improved cancer recovery rates, and reduced depression. Due to legal marriage being a recent attainment for gay and lesbian adults, studies on their outcomes are sparse. That said, based on the 2013 to 2017 National Health Interview Survey, the odds of survey respondents reporting good health are approximately 36 percent greater among married gay and lesbian adults than among those who never married or were previously married.
In essence, I’m making a data-driven argument coaxing psychoanalysis to adopt a spirit of optimism about the happiness benefits of long-term marriages, or marriage-like commitments. If it were to gather metapsychological steam in the field, we would have to elevate the theoretical renderings of Virginia Goldner who in a 2006 Psychoanalytic Dialogues piece pushed back against Mitchell’s bifurcated view of love and desire. She eloquently makes a case for the “erotic charge of mutuality,” and explicates how “attachment and sexuality could be catalytic rather than inherently opposed.” Lovers who have a long history together codevelop a platform of relational safety crafted from years of jointly finding their way back from disappointments. She questions the wisdom in an approach to enduring love that requires us to “find the foreign in the familiar to make love brand new,” proposing a different pathway: “It is not necessarily the (re)discovery of the lover—soulmate alterity—that turns the heat on, but the (re)finding of that deeply known person we love and need, and the thrill and relief of discovering that they are also reaching out for us, that turns the tap on.” Israeli philosopher Aaron Ben-Ze’ev echoes this sentiment in his ideas about “romantic profundity,” as distinct from “romantic intensity.” The former is a high-quality love molded over the years from shared memorable experiences told and retold, friendship, and mutual sexual satisfaction. The latter is intensely passionate, pleasurable, and mood expanding, but ultimately short-lived. As Ben-Ze’ev would have us believe, the essential difference is between “fleeting pleasure and lasting treasure.”
Before ending, I’d be remiss if I did not mention the therapeutic value of certain psychoanalytic motifs for helping steer clients through stormy marital times. A staple feature of the psychodynamic method is to coax clients to appreciate the remarkable staying power of the emotional sensitivities they emerge out of childhood with: the unconscious expectations based on parent-child dynamics that get superimposed onto current intimate relationships; repetitive patterns of behavior that always seem to defy clients’ best efforts to reinvent themselves and refrain from overreacting as if they were caught in a never-fading childhood trauma or source of emotional injury. Typical psychodynamic insights like “I am sensitive to rejection because I grew up with a father who was uninvolved” afford not just greater self-understanding but an awareness of a relational disposition that needs to be grappled with, since, unchecked, the disposition can place an unfair burden on current significant others. The more clients gain insight into the historical sources of their problematic relationship habits, the greater likelihood they will realize that divorce might not be a gateway to radically different future intimate prospects—because emotional sensitivities with historical roots tend to be relationally portable. Family-of-origin reasons for why you may be difficult to be married to, when humbly accepted, have a tendency to take the oxygen out of idealized fantasies of a marvelously different lover existing out there whose love will make you easy to be married to.
Not all marriages are alike or salvageable, and me taking a stand in favor of marriage preservation is not intended to cast judgment on those who have chosen divorce. That said, returning to the title of my paper—Can Psychoanalysis Save Marriage? And When Should It?—I’ll say in the affirmative, that for many good marriages gone temporarily awry, psychoanalysis can and should bolster them by helping clients realize that (re)desiring the good that already imbues their abiding intimate relationships—rather than over-ruminating on better prospects that are imagined to be obtainable elsewhere—can help love flourish over time with bolder reciprocal investment.
Enrico Gnaulati is a psychologist in private practice in Pasadena, California, and Affiliate Professor of Psychology at Seattle University. He is a prominent humanistic reformer of mental health practice and policy. His latest book is Flourishing Love: A Secular Guide to Lasting Intimate Relationships (Karnac, 2023).
Published in issue 58.1, Spring 2024.