The Neurotic Couple

Dialectics in Couple Therapy

Josep M. Moreno Alavedra - Barcelona, Spain. October, 2016

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to articulate the dialectical mode of interpretation to the phenomena that I have to deal with on
daily basis as a couple therapist. It started as a curiosity to consider whether the problems of the couple can be explai-
ned by the neurosis of each member and/or by psychic factors, as if only the symptoms of each person can make them
intelligible. This question lead me to ask if the couple's pressing problems can be addressed as the workings of an inter-
nal logic of the soul opus and its particular articulation in our present time.

Keywords: Couple therapy, Psychology as Discipline of Interiority (PDI), neurotic couple, dialectical mode of inter-
pretation, couple crisis.

Mainstream Couple Therapy

"What makes love such a chronic source of discomfort, disorientation, and even despair, I argue, can be adequately
explained only by sociology and by understanding the cultural and institutional core of modernity." E. Illouz1

While agreeing with the main conclusion of Illouz about the role of modernity in the mentioned
despair and discomfort, I would argue that Psychology has something even more significant to say
about it. Usually, in mainstream couple therapy there are two basic psycho-technological approac-
hes. One comes from the more personalistic and positivistic stance where the conflict between the
partners is seen as the conflict that arises when two people and their cognitions, expectations, desi-
res and pathologies clash2. Relationship, on this account, is the result of two distinct entities co-
ming into contact. Two otherwise selves, that are fundamentally two separate units with individual
problems that when in relationship manifest themselves as arguing, exchanging criticisms, mutual
blaming, etc. Therapy has the mission of teaching and/or helping them to relate better to each other.
The other approach, called the systemic, assumes that the members of the couple form a sys-
tem and the attitudes and behaviours of each one is conditioned by the dynamic and roles acted out

1 Illouz E. 2012 p.12.

2For Giegerich that is what belongs to the psychic "behaviour clearly motivated by subjective emotions, fears, desires
and informed by subjective mindsets and personality traits" (2012, p. 109).
Josep M. Moreno Alavedra The Neurotic Couple Pàgina 1 de 18
in the system, being its main epistemological foundation circular causality3 . The focus of attention
then shifts from the individual to the intra systemic dynamics and the analysis is directed to the flow
of communication in the system. The idea is then to see the dysfunctional couple as a "system de-
termined by the problems"4. In this approach we see the first emergence of an entity, the couple as a
living system but framed in a positivistic notion of system that is forced to act out the idea of relati-
onship of two entities to excess. From the standpoint of the external observer the two members of
the couple act as two opponent psychological forces. Their dynamic interactions and the resulting
conflicts are conceived as factual, irrational or dysfunctional events. The therapist focuses on how
the system can be changed. Classic is the work of the Milan school of therapy, and the development
of circular questioning as a method to change the communication pattern of the couple.
From these points of view conflicts are associated with power differences and violence (Sa-
grestano, Heavey, & Christensen, 1999), differences in desire for closeness and independence, fe-
mininity–masculinity, gender roles, and division of labor (Eldridge & Christensen, 2002), etc. The
goals of therapy are to attempt to modify behaviour exchanges, emotional and communication pat-
terns, biased and negative cognitions, etc., and therapeutic techniques are built to foster problem
solving training, emotional intimacy, behaviour change and psychological compatibility. Without
discrediting the merits of these strategies in relation to effectively help couples improve their relati-
ons, we already are aware of the personalistic reductionism that emerges from these approaches. In
this paper, I want to make an effort to work these phenomena up from the level of conventional the-
rapeutic thinking to that of psychological awareness as it is understood in Psychology as a Discipli-
ne of Interiority (PDI). I consider that the symptoms manifested in problematic couples offer a pri-
vileged lens through which we can perceive the psycho-logic structure of modernity and its contra-
dictory forms and movements.
Giegerich's work (2013), "Neurosis. The logic of a Metaphysical illness" has made us all
aware of the highly complex dialectic process that pervades the symptoms of individual neurosis.
The interplay of soul with itself, the engagement between the civil person and the logic of the neu-
rotic soul is very well described in Giegerich's seminal work. In my private practice I work in-dis-
tinctively with individual and couple therapy. Giegerich´s insights have helped me cope and deal

3According to Gergen (2009, p. 376) "Systems thinking begins when one realises that all effects are also causes of ot-
her effects. Thus, rainfall may affect vegetation, and plant growth may affect wild-life, which in turn may affect the
consumption of vegetation. Attention shifts away from single cause/effect relations to larger patterns of inter-related
sequences. Systems analyst, Anatol Rapaport, describes a system as “a whole which functions as a whole by virtue of
the interdependence of its parts."
4The idea here is that a problem creates a social system and not the opposite, the social system "has" a problem. See
Ludewig, K. (1990).
Josep M. Moreno Alavedra The Neurotic Couple Pàgina 2 de 18
with the phenomena that my patients bring in search for help, where I am confronted with a patho-
logical relationship where both partners are suffering intense conflictive interactions that slowly
condemn the relationship to an unavoidable and traumatic ending after a more or less prolonged
process of deterioration. I have had to fully assume and follow the thinking process that emerged
from the question: Are these interactions conditioned/produced by a neurotic soul logic or perhaps
by the influence of merely psychic and neurotic factors in each member?

The Couple as Notion

"I do not mean relationships between otherwise separate selves, but rather, a process of coordination that precedes the
very concept of the self. " K. Gergen.5

The analytic stance of this work is that the PDI principles and methodological tools can be used
when you consider the problems of today's couple as the prime matter, and the couple an existing
concept. Consequently, I envision The Couple not merely the gathering of two people to have a re-
lationship, not as an entity, neither as a system, but as a living Notion, a logical form of conscious-
ness, a soul's self-expression, a logical process that entails and expresses through two people a dia-
lectical movement with its own internal complexities. The partners are embebed in a logical relati-
onship between identity and otherness that takes paramount relevance when we seek understanding
of their psychological relationships and the problems that they show when they come to the therapy
room. To perceive the logical relationship requires seeing through the individuals embebed in their
literality, as sociologist Gergen (2009, p. xxvi) notes,

"... using a language that inherently divides the world into bounded entities... I will in-
variably rely on nouns and pronouns, both of which designate bounded or identifiable
units. The very phrase,” I rely on you....” already defines me as separate from you. Si-
milarly, transitive verbs typically imply causal relations, with the action of one unit im-
pinging on another... the conventions of language resist. They virtually insist that sepa-
rate entities exist prior to relationship."

The modern experience of the couple goes along the vision of two subjectivities that commit
themselves to a close, durable and intimate relationship. This commitment is intended through two

5 Gergen K. (2012, p. xv).

Josep M. Moreno Alavedra The Neurotic Couple Pàgina 3 de 18
very different concepts, Individualism and Romantic Love. In relation to the first concept, Individu-
alism, each member of the couple, as an ego, lives according to its logical status as an individual
who only accepts as truth what comes from his interior: "be yourself, live your life, accept only
what it sounds as truly to your inner self” (Taylor 2006, p. 110). This consciousness seems to have
an inevitable resort to act as possessing and "using" other people in the form of a collusion. Besides,
the individualistic. The uprooted ego of modernity is grounded in the split subject/object, and is
built as a being whose reality is the act of choosing, i.e. to choose a couple, and whose aim is to
have the only experiences that he/she is attuned to.
The glueing together of two people based on the sense of one's own ego inevitably amounts
to the logic of appropriation, of treating the other to a greater or lesser extent as commodity that
one may possess, an object to a subject. The logic of the interaction that emerges is at odds with in-
ternal otherness, the other is merely experienced as an external other, and never realised as its own
internal otherness. As I have said above, this split amounts to the logic of having a couple versus
being a couple. Each partner, deeply rooted in the idea of individuality, wants to live that experience
of partnership yet also wants to keep a personal sphere that is non-negotiable and results in a type of
union that can only exist in a space of collusion (my needs, my desires, versus yours). As Gergen,
(2009, p. 176-7) says:

"We recognise each other as fundamentally embarked on separate journeys. In this case,
bonding requires that we accept “unnatural” constraints on individual autonomy. Choo-
sing to “go my own way” is seldom questioned. However, we may well wonder why a
friend chose to marry, or join a religion. And, in replying to such questions the answer is
typically in terms of some individual need, desire, or inadequacy. One desires children,
wants security, needs to settle down, and so on. Or one chooses, for instrumental rea-
sons. One marries so that she will bear my children; he will be a good breadwinner; she
will make me happy; he gives me support."

In relation to the second concept, Romantic Love, we live a couple relationship anchored in
relation to a neurotic form of an Absolute which has been sunk in a form of otherness that only con-
templates the literality of the empirical ego. To elucidate the contradiction that stems from this it is
necessary to consider the historical process that the notion has undergone, whose analysis I will de-
velop in the next section.

Josep M. Moreno Alavedra The Neurotic Couple Pàgina 4 de 18

Historicity of the notion of Couple

"Spirit has broken with the world it has hitherto inhabited and imagined, and it is of a mind to submerge it in the past,
and in the labour of its own transformation.... The frivolity and boredom which unsettles the established order, the va-
gue foreboding of something unknown, these are the heralds of approaching change." G. W. Hegel.

The couple has a soul or better said, is a soul form and as soul is essentially related to his-
tory. In order to think and understand the problems of the couples of our times it is mandatory to
review the historical changes that its notion has undergone. I will shortly reflect about the last chan-
ges, those which Giegerich has thought as a result of a great revolution in consciousness.
According to the author (2012, p. 174) in premodern experience, "the prevailing essential
relation of people (individuals) during those ages was, rather than between each other, the relation
to the "metaphysical" or "religious" substance, to the truth of the whole culture or people of whom
they were members". But Modernity drastically changed the soul status. The birth of man out of the
inness and the emergence of the split subject/object as the epistemological horizon of positivism set
the foundation of a subjectivity anchored in individualism with the psychological expression of the
centrality of the ego in human experience and its associated ideas of freedom, will, self-reflexivity,
and personal "inner life". In the late eighteenth century, it begins to be noted in Europe the ideal of
romantic love, which implies in its definition the ideas of freedom and self-realization. These ideas
are the building blocks of the modern notion of subjectivity that also needs to be related to the idea
of choice (the defining cultural hallmark of modernity, and according to Illouz (2012, p. 19), emoti-
onal authenticity, rationality and autonomy. In his words:

"one of the most fruitful ways to understand the transformation of love in modernity is
through the category of choice. This is not only because to love is to single out one per-
son among other possibilities and thus to constitute one’s individuality in the very act of
choosing a love object, but also because to love someone is to be confronted with ques-
tions of choice: 'Is s/he the right one?', 'How do I know this person is right for me?',
'Won’t there be a better person along the way?'."

Romantic Love also presupposes some degree of self-interrogation. 'How do I feel about the
other?', 'How does the other feel about me?', 'Are our feelings 'profound' enough to support a long-
term involvement?'. On the other hand, sociologists state that "...what is properly modern in modern

Josep M. Moreno Alavedra The Neurotic Couple Pàgina 5 de 18

couple suffering is the overwhelming importance of love for the constitution of a social sense of
worth. The logic of emotional authenticity demands from people a great deal of self-scrutiny, 'Do I
really love him/her, or is it just lust?', 'If I love him/her, how deep, intense, and real is my love?', 'Is
this love healthy or narcissistic?'

Romantic Love was embraced by early modernity as a source of existential transcendence6,

as a power that can transcend daily life, but at the same time individualism was emerging as an all
powerful idea that pervaded the entire experience of life. This ambivalent perspective of modernity
is at the heart of the "conflicts" that as an epidemic questions and shatters the foundation of the
Couple in our era. In Illouz (2012, p. 9) terms: "the individualisation of lifestyles and the intensifi-
cation of emotional life projects generates a (and is the result of a) profound split in consciousness."
The inflation of the notion of the couple experienced in early modernity through the idea of Roman-
tic Love is the result of this split that has been deeply thought by Giegerich as the condition through
which the logical life of soul has been articulated in modernity. On one hand, according to the au-
thor (2013, p. 322), we have that "the modern soul's project of establishing itself -in its present-day
form as private, solitary subjectivity and personalistically conceived individual -as the focus and
target, the new battleground where the essential action is." Modern Man is born out of the soul as
an autonomous individual, an ego, and has lost the "inness" with its logically associated look up to
verticality, the Absolute in Religion or Metaphysics. This loss and its impact can be traced in the
shift to Romantic Love and the transformation of the other into the Other, Giegerich (2012, p. 175)
says it as follows "In a truth-less age 'personal relationship'... had to become so important, so loa-
ded, the sphere of the personal was the only 'truth'- substitute left."
This historical process is phenomenologically experienced in the model of romantic love as
a type of couple relationship that diverts the pressure of the Absolute to the partners. The Couple
becomes itself an Absolute in the sense that people expectation´s condemn it to bear the prior dig-
nity and unconditionality of the metaphysical Absolute that in former ages was experienced via Re-
ligion or Metaphysics. Giegerich (2012, p.165) affirms that "neurosis comprehended as a project
means the soul wants something, it wants to establish “The Absolute” as an unshakeable powerful
truth and principle … It wants this principle to become real in lived life: a present reality, an obli-
ging, committing truth, a fact…" Partners are surrounded, embebed, in an atmosphere of shoulds

6 "Motzkin’s argument is that the process of secularization of culture consisted, among other things, in secularizing reli-
gious love. Such secularization took two different forms: it made profane love into a sacred sentiment (later celebrated
as romantic love), and it made romantic love into an emotion opposed to the restrictions imposed by religion." Cited in
Illouz (2012, p.11).
Josep M. Moreno Alavedra The Neurotic Couple Pàgina 6 de 18
and oughts that become easily unbearable, "The unbearably exaggerated I-You relationship"7 . Each
partner has to bear the weight of and ideal that inherently exists in the Absolute. The relation of the
ego with this ideal or Absolute is a self-relation, encapsulated in its opaqueness and closeness
towards the real other. In this sense, we might argue that pathological dependency is the experience
of the relationship with an absolute Other without which the person cannot exist. That's why many
couples very easily break, or they stay together despite deep suffering, even more, it seems that
their quarrels, breakdowns and turmoils are experienced with the intensest devotion. These are the
neurotic couples.

The neurotic couple

"As deplorable as the exaggerated I-You relationship may be, the fundamental soul-lesness of man and the irreducible
otherness of the other together with the easily appearing feeling of victimisation and indignation are irrevocably the
modern situation, our situation, our truth." W. Giegerich.

There is a powerful trend that leads many people from romantic fantasy to disappointment.
An old friend of mine used to say ironically, "it does not really matter who you marry, because first
she is the Princess, later she becomes the Mother and she always ends up as the Bitch and vicever-
sa, from Prince to Father to finally ending up as Blue Beard". In Firestone (1970, p.129) words:

"For every successful contemporary love experience, for every short period of enrich-
ment, there are ten destructive love experiences, post-love "downs" of much longer du-
ration– often resulting in the destruction of the individual, or at least an emotional cy-
nicism that makes it difficult or impossible ever to love again. Why should this be so, if
it is not actually inherent in the love process itself?"

By positing that the problem resides (is inherent) in the love process itself the author is poin-
ting out the need of going beyond the positivistic view with its focus on the personalistic and the
empirical. In order to go beyond we have to consider that these conflicts despite being apparently
caused by external circumstances to the couple or by the attitudes or behaviour of each partner,
constitute an opus, with a complex structure (logical life). According to PDI we should say that
what is inherent is the contradictory logic that pervades the modern experience, so well established

7"Modernity is characterised by the fact that the whole dimension of "heaven" has dropped out from our scheme alto-
gether, so that the absolute fulfilment is sought as positive fact ("immediate experience"). Giegerich (2012, p. 178).
Josep M. Moreno Alavedra The Neurotic Couple Pàgina 7 de 18
by Giegerich's approach (2013, p. 418), "Coniunctio: union of unity and separation. As far as ma-
trimony is concerned, the usual sequence in our time is: first marriage, then divorce. But psycholo-
gically a true relationship should from the outset be the logical unity of both. A marriage should be
based on a (logical) divorce." This logical divorce amounts, in my opinion, to the realisation of the
otherness in oneself, which in itself implies a consciousness that is able to relate with its own other
as an inner relationship.
The dialectical notion of the Couple by definition stems from the idea that two partners are
the unity in which they exist, being this unity the expression of the logic of the unity of unity and
difference. In the experience of the neurotic couple, this type of dialectical unity cannot be achieved
because the couple is trapped in the fixity of the two elements above mentioned:

1. The horizontal gap between subject/object position of the ego that amounts to a form of other-
ness that it is not allowed to sublate into the form of a self-relation and therefore it is no
allowed to undergo the process of Negation of the Negation.

2. The vertical absolutisation of the Other 8, where she/he should bear the weight of my ideal and
ideal that inherently exists in the Absolute. The relation of the ego with this ideal is a self-rela-
tion, encapsulated in its opaqueness to the other.

The phenomena in which my analytical attention focuses is the fact that the contradictions
that can be observed in the dynamics of an individual symptom, often acquire, in the case of the
neurotic couple relationship, the form of conflicts between the members of the couple positions,9
where two contradictory logical moments are encapsulated and frozen in the fixed empirical con-
flictive position of each member's attitude and behaviour. Conflict inside the couple, always starts
as the clash of two independent positions, but logically this amounts to the systematic work of the
negation, where partners are compelled again and again to experience the negation of their position
as an unbearable threat. Each time the "conflict" arises a "ritual" of negation is compulsively acted
out. The couple despite the theme on dispute encloses itself in a hermetic vessel where the putrefac-
tion of the congealed positions is loosened at the cost of immense suffering. Eventually this decom-

8Herbert Simon calls a shift from satisfying to maximizing. Satisfiers are people who are happy to settle for the first
available, “good enough” option; maximizers look for the best possible option. (Illouz, 2012, p. 95).
9In the words of Giegerich, "[conflicts] have their own internal dialectics and may develop in a dialectical fashion; they
may also be the expression of a certain stage in the dialectics of political, social, personal development." Giegerich, W.;
Miller, D.L.; Mogenson, G. (2005, p. 1)
Josep M. Moreno Alavedra The Neurotic Couple Pàgina 8 de 18
position is acted out to the dissolution of the couple itself. When quarrelling, each member negates
the position of the other in a scenario where each interaction:

1. It is aimed to the behaviour or the attitude of each one, which is contained in the realm of posi-
tivity, therefore the undialectical negation starts and ends up as egoic self-assertiveness. Ego
primarily stands for endurance and security to continually exists as it is. Ego, therefore is attu-
ned with the logic of control, the control as which it exists via an unbroken oneness.
2. Each participant experiences the position of the other as an absolute contrary position, an abso-
lute opposition, where "... one's being rejected, has the effect of a metaphysical annihilation, not
merely on an empirical wound. The necessity inherent in a neurotic compulsion has the charac-
ter of metaphysical indispensability, not of practical unavoidability" (Giegerich, 2013, p. 36).

In every conflict there are two elements, the first is created as a difference of opinion, of in-
terests, proposals of solutions to a problem, which acts as a semantic trigger for many different to-
pics of discussion. The second element is the scenario in which the situation and representation that
takes place, despite its various themes, topics and their importance or meaning, it always relate to
the logical presence of the Absolute, embodied in the form of the confronting other. Then the attitu-
de of the other partner, or behaviour, or their motivations becomes a form of absolute impossibility.
Both members, beyond the semantic level of their dispute are embebed in a pattern of mutual denial
that only creates fatigue, weariness or intolerable rise in emotional stress. This is called the symme-
trical escalation, a negation process that is not allowed to sublate itself. We are facing an endless
semantic diversity of content and, at the same time, a single neurotic form that hides a syntactic
identity. The mise en scène that occurs involves the "unconscious" intention of the couple to always
represent and act out the same logical position. The couple transforms these contradictions into a
kind of folie à deux, in a new scenario, which expresses the psychological contradictions in which
the soul of the epoch is immersed.

From the logic of control to the logic of love and truth

"Since anxiety is existential, it cannot be removed. But courage takes the anxiety of non-being into itself. Courage is
self-affirmation "in spite of," namely in spite of non-being. He who acts courageously takes, in his self-affirmation, the
anxiety of non-being upon himself. ... Anxiety turns us toward courage, because the other alternative is despair. Coura-
ge resists despair by taking anxiety into itself." I. Tillich.
Josep M. Moreno Alavedra The Neurotic Couple Pàgina 9 de 18
 By way of illustration, I want to explore this stance by reflecting on the dialectics of the
conflictive tensions and disputes that take place in the well known demand/withdraw neurotic pat-
tern of couple interaction. It is commonly accepted, in several therapeutic theories, that in this pat-
tern one of the partners suffers from an avoiding compulsive hyper sensibility and the other with its
opposite, a demanding need that confronts and hyper reacts to the attitudes and evasive behaviour
of the avoiding partner. The demanding partner acts out a compulsive need of feeling loved via and
insistence on responsibility, the other acts out compulsively its need to be respected and accepted
via its insistence on freedom and privacy. In the back the neurotic anxieties of separation and fusi-
on are at work.
The result of it is an escalation process that generates a vicious circle where the couple falls
and remains trapped in feelings of frustration, anger, disqualification, resentment, pain, and their
polar opposites, disconnection, loss of intimacy, emotional isolation, etc. Other times, the polarity in
demand/withdraw roles is varied in strength and direction depending on which the topic for discus-
sion is. In some areas of the common life one partner positions himself or herself in the demanding
role and in other areas viceversa. Partners are always trying to find a solution for their conflictive
differences, without realising that it is precisely this (ego)intention of making efforts to solve the
problems what really perseverates them and makes them worst. That often results in a situation
where each partner tries to control, to "win the battle", defending stubbornly an idea, an interest
and/or a need as an absolute stance in front and against the other.10 Power battles are an everyday
experience and every aspect of the couple's life or interaction can act as a trigger for it. From love to
war, is the title of a chapter in Jacobson and Christensen book (1996) that metaphorically describes
the couple relationship's fate.
The undialectical opposition between demanding/avoiding interactions is ruled by a self-as-
sertion versus self-reservation pattern, a fixed, neurotic way to solve a conflict that, despite the ap-
pearances, has nothing to do with the empirical, with the contents or topics on dispute, and has
everything to do with the logical form of the ego and the logical status of absoluteness that pervades
the form of the otherness. By avoiding or demanding, the ego of each partner is stubbornly trying to
be in control of the situation and/or the other partner. That opposition is, dialectically seen, an iden-
tity, because beyond the opposing views, attitudes and strategies, both share a common stance. and

10According to Giegerich "An existing conflict is an indication that one is precisely unconscious of the dialectic and
incapable of thinking dialectically and therefore has to act out the dialectic blindly, literalizing (concretizing) it." Giege-
rich, W.; Miller, D.L.; Mogenson, G. (2005) p. 2
Josep M. Moreno Alavedra The Neurotic Couple Pàgina 10 de 18
to get rid of it, as Giegerich's proposes, "instead of seeking future solution, we have to go under; to
make explicit the presuppositions... to go back and down to the deeper Ground that had been there
all the time and had merely not seen"11 . In our case, we have to help the partners “think through to
the end” the notion of control through, a dialectic movement, a process of Er-Innerung, absolute
negative inwardization of their control manoeuvres, which amounts to becoming aware of control
itself. The notion of control recursively applied to itself reveals the uncontrolled criteria upon which
it is builded. This realisation might show us a way out to the neurotic couple. The criterion (ideas,
beliefs, etc.) that determines and conditions the judgement of what is to be controlled (among the
immense variety of factor always involved in any situation) implies that there is always a selection
of some aspects to be controlled, leaving the others automatically discarded without further or dee-
per consideration. By definition, control always ends up stuck in the same situation of not allowing
real change to occur. It establishes itself and forces the situation or interaction in a horizon of same-
ness where the other and the changes are systematically excluded, negated. Effectively, as Hillman
(2012, p. 106) says, "the idea of control controls the controllers, we don't have control o the power
of controlling". Despite the intensity of the conflict and the emotions aroused, there is in the scene
an inadvertent coldness that implicitly pervades the interactions. It is the soul's coldness, the cold
logic of our-being-in-the-world in modernity.
If we follow the dialectic of the notion we discover that the negation of control is precisely
the realisation of the notion of control because by accepting and consequently reflecting about the
chaos under which we assume a control stance in a determinate situation, control has to open itself
and be pervaded by its dialectical opposite: the uncontrolled, chaos. This chaos, when allowed to be
acknowledged and thought it sublates itself in a form of control that not only does not reject chaos
but assumes it as the very necessity of its truth, obtaining a "real control without controlling"12 . The
systematic auto-application of the control to itself amounts to a control that is equal to the truth of
the situation. In other words, there is nothing to control because everything is controlled by its inhe-
rent truth. In this process the ego feels usually very threatened because for the neurotic modern ego
there is not a clearance to open itself to a dialectical relation with otherness.
The negation of the negation is the moment of the dialectical process that might be addres-
sed as the moment of love and truth. Here it is not meant the idea of love as emotion, sentiment or

11 Ibid. p. 5
12Reflecting on the contradictions experienced as a conflict so that they become aware of the bottom from which they
both stand, as Giegerich (2005, p. 5) puts it: "... the process of deepening thought discovers and reveals the opposites
had been united all along in a common Ground".
Josep M. Moreno Alavedra The Neurotic Couple Pàgina 11 de 18
feeling, I am pointing to a more logical concept of love, the sublated union resulting of the trans-
formation of the conflict and its fixed and opposing moments of immediate affirmation and nega-
tion. Love as the type of union that stems from the dialectical relation between the union and the
separation. In therapy this amounts to the couple's self exposure to the different moments of truth
that the conflict reveals. Truth is considered here as the logos eôn (the existing prevailing logos)
that wants to be made true (disclosed, unconcealed), so as to become in the first place what it impli-
citly has been all along: alêtheia. (Giegerich, 2012, p. 188). This is the basic idea that informs the
therapeutic effort towards helping the couple to become aware of the logic that is present in the in-
teraction, helping them to raise the level of consciousness of consciousness.
There are two dimensions of the logic of interpersonal love that I pay attention to here, love
as unio (surrender) and separatio (letting be). Love as unio is that stance that opens and transcends
the boundaries of individual concerns and interest in favor of some other. In this sense love relates
phenomenologically to sacrifice, surrender, which becomes the experience of union. In the last
century, Martin Buber13 used to distinguish between two modes of consciousness (phenomenologi-
cal states), in terms of one’s relation to the other. In the most common mode (I–It), the other is an
object, fundamentally separate from self. However, in his view, the I–Thou relationship demands
that the other is encountered without boundaries. In this sense he spoke of a mutually absorbing
unity where the conceptual distinction between persons disappeared.
Regarding separatio I mention a creation narration14 from the jewish tradition that expresses
well this dimension of love, it is a sacred story that belong to Kabbalah, its name Tzimtzum refers
to the process known as "the first constriction" or "tzimtzum harishon" by which the Godhead con-
tracts its essence, so to speak, by retreating “from Himself into Himself,” abandoning a space in or-
der to create an “empty” region,

"In the beginning there was only God... and nothing else. God was an all-encompassing
Divine Presence/Light called the Light of Infinity. Since nothing but God existed before
creation, when God decided to create something from its Ein (i.e., "nothing"), God nee-
ded to "make a space" or to "provide room" for that which was not God (i.e.,
otherness). God therefore "emptied himself" by contracting his infinite light to create a
conceptual space for the creation of the universe... " 15

13 Cited in Gergen (2009, p. xxiii)

14 I owe the knowledge of this story to my mentor, friend and colleague Enrique Eskenazi.
15 Seen in: "http://www.hebrew4christians.com/Articles/kabbalah/Creation/creation.html" date Feb 8 2026.
Josep M. Moreno Alavedra The Neurotic Couple Pàgina 12 de 18
 This self-imposed "contraction"of the Infinite Light is a picture of God "allowing" the space
for the other to exist and it is done for the sake of his love to creation. Love here means leaving
space for the other to be and exist as an other.
Sticking to the phenomenology of the neurotic interaction that we are analysing we see that
one partner embodies the concept of "love" as union (the demanding) while the other the concept of
"love" as autonomy or freedom (the withdrawing or avoiding). Both concepts keep stuck in one side
of the contradictory reality of the union of union and distance. The self-unfolding of each position
leads to the realisation of the partner's position in an interiorized/exteriorized self-relation where the
only way to live and express the union is through the distance and the only way to feel free and res-
pected is through the dialectical surrender of the withdrawing strategies union that can only be ful-
filled as distance.
Being a couple versus having a couple, the sublation of the me and you in the us, a term that
when it is considered as a psychological notion only anchors in positive and empirical reality as a
relational being (Gergen, 2009), an ontological term that points to the de-substantiation of itself to a
pure relation, movement. Love and truth instead of ego control and power, a relation of love freed
[absolved] of a union that opposes separation and the presence of an Absolute freed from its incar-
nation through the empirical other and transformed in the logical form of commitment to truth.

The obsolescence of the couple in medial modernity

"In a two-person relationship that chooses its own self-evolving definition rather than the choice of a static externally
imposed definition, there is at least the chance of a respect for the natural history of a fully lived-out relationship" D.
Cooper

Following the notion of neurosis that Giegerich (2010, p. 413) proposes "[n]eurosis and
psychological problems are exclusively due to the soul's mal-adaptation to itself, specifically to the
discrepancy (dissociation) between its self-understanding, self-interpretation, self-stylization, its
mental attitude on the one hand and the logical constitution or status that in fact happens to be on
the other hand....", we see that like in the symptoms of individual neurosis, the interactions in the
neurotic couple shows themselves as a living contradiction between couple's self definition of itself
through romantic love and the real soul status that partners as individuals live in the locus of mo-

Josep M. Moreno Alavedra The Neurotic Couple Pàgina 13 de 18

dernity16. A status in which it prevails the irrelevance of individuality, the disappearance of the ego-
consciousness in the virtuality of the networked multi-identities. By building the relationship on the
ideal of romantic love in early modernity, in which the other acquires a numinous dimension, the
soul on one side rejected its own de-substantiating process that renders the individual logically ob-
solete.
The recent changes that have occurred in the phase of medial modernity explicit the unstop-
pable process that threaten both the disappearance of the neurotic couple, partly because of the on-
going dialectic sublation that we see in the field of interpersonal relationships. Today the couple is
evolving to exist in the condition of the substance-less and virtuality, a logical horizon which entails
the sublation of the concrete I-You. Soon when the boy leaves the parent's house maybe he won't
find a literal person to cleave on but a network of virtual relations whose fluidity and changeability
will express the structure of the aquarian consciousness.
In our liquid times17 that manifest the prevailing logical character of modernity (its having
entered the status of logical negativity) it is well known how easily couples break as a result of the
most insignificant conflicts. Close relationships are very fragile. Increasing rates of divorce, the
phenomenon of LAT (living apart together), and declining rates of marriages are seen as symptoms
of the prevailing commitment phobia18. Indeed in our medial world, the percentage of the populati-
on choosing to live alone is becoming the majority. Committed relationships are replaced by an ex-
tended and superficial network of acquaintances. As Stepp explains:

" [Y]oung people have virtually abandoned dating and replaced it with group get-toget-
hers and sexual behaviours that are detached from love and commitment – and someti-
mes even from liking. Relationships have been replaced by the casual sexual encounters
known as hookups. Love [...] is being put on hold or seen as impossible; sex is beco-
ming the primary currency of social interaction" (cited in Illouz, 2012, p. 105).

16"The ultimate unit is the isolated, atomic, individual, and larger units, e.g. a people, a society, are accumulations of
these individuals..." Giegerich, 2013, p. 84).
17 See Zygmunt Bauman, (2013).
18"From a cultural standpoint, there are two ways of experiencing commitment phobia: as hedonic, in which commit-
ment is deferred by engaging in a pleasurable accumulation of relationships; and as aboulic, in which it is the capacity
to want to commit that is at stake: that is, the capacity to want relationships. Another way to describe this divide is that
one category includes a series of relationships and an inability to fixate on one partner;93 and the other is a category of
those unable to desire a relationship... the difficulty to settle on one object is due to the abundance of choice and to the
permanent sense of possibilities. " Illouz (2012, p. 78).
Josep M. Moreno Alavedra The Neurotic Couple Pàgina 14 de 18
 In effect, we are in a historical situation where promises have become a burden on the self.
"While promise-keeping locks the future in the present and the present in the future, now the future
is open-ended and radically inalienable. It cannot be given to someone else" (Illouz, 2012, p. 100),
to what extent this impossibility of the promise is related to the logical obsolescence of the indivi-
dual? If we follow the sociological trend, it is not impossible to think that, in a more or less distant
future, the process may evolve to the disappearance of this kind of relationship, by having become
obsolete. Modern ambivalence takes a number of forms: not knowing what one feels for someone
else ('Is it true love?', 'Do I really want to spend my life with him/her?'); feeling conflicting emoti-
ons (the desire to explore new relationships while continuing in the current relationship); saying
something but not feeling the emotions that should accompany the words ('I love being with you,
but I cannot bring myself to commit completely'). (Illouz, 2012, p. 97).

We know that psychopathology is often the first immediacy of a new stage of

development19, therefore we can consider that the couple, in the emerging new state of conscious-
ness that amounts to a consciousness conscious of itself, through its neurosis it is being transformed
in the sense of a sublation of the I-it or the subject/object split in a process that Giegerich (2012, p.
286) sees it "as the soul's own doing, its acting upon itself, its following its own necessities" we
have to conclude that the turmoils that the couple are going through in modernity aim at adapting
itself to the new historical locus, perhaps through a new form of otherness and/or of relationship I/
You that amounts to the Heidegger's relational notion of knowledge as the two shores of a river that
is created as the river moves.
The couple that struggles to break free of its neurotic soul compulsions through the alchemi-
cal process that dissolves ego consciousness or transforms it, may become a real couple that is dis-
ciplined enough to avoid falling into a false commitment that violates the respect to the union and
the separation (distance) that each must have for the other. This couple has to embody the prevailing
experience of the irrelevantification of the individual and at the same time, must experience this his-
torical process to its logical consequences. The actual soul process together with its logical determi-
nations seem to push the couple relationship to fully be exposed to a new form of status where the
experience of the union as much as of the separation point to the necessity to live in a radical con-
tingency where the fluidity and the impermanence are its phenomenological hallmarks and consti-
tute the key factors that allow to construe a relational being grounded in the logical love.

19 Giegericgh, 2012, p. 43.

Josep M. Moreno Alavedra The Neurotic Couple Pàgina 15 de 18
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Josep M. Moreno Alavedra The Neurotic Couple Pàgina 16 de 18

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