Who's afraid of the Wolfe couple: the interlocking traumatic scene

Abstract

Fulfilling intimate relationships require a constant emotional and psychological struggle to disentangle strangleholds created by the interpenetration of unresolved complexes stemming from previous disappointing relational experiences. These complexes may manifest as an encrypted pattern of engagement that each partner brings to the marriage, like a 'malignant dowry'. The dowry box, once opened, releases its nefarious contents to create an extremely complex and entangled drama I call the 'interlocking traumatic scene'. Partners unconsciously entrap each other to play a part in such a scene with double (sometimes multiple) roles for each antagonist. The imaginal space between the two characters can be seen as a projection screen, upon which are superimposed two separate shadow plays, one on each side of the screen. A third play, which is a co-created product of these two individual traumatic scenes, can also be observed. Three plays are performed simultaneously. The defensive systems that the two individuals bring to the equation dovetail together, but the actual interlocking mechanism itself deadlocks in such a way that it seems to have its own malignant presence, a 'malevolent third' (after Ogden 1994). I outline therapeutic interventions using the metaphor of the therapist as 'anti-director' and I introduce my concept of the conjoint selected fact (after Bion 1963 after Poincaré 1952).

When left hands touch: shadow vows and Jung’s quaternity

“…Building on the work of Klein (1946, 1955), psychoanalysts have used the concepts of splitting, projection, introjection, and projective identification to name the invisible forces at play. A variety of terms have been used to describe the felt sense of the forces: projective gridlock (Morgan 1995), Pickering’s (2006) interlocking traumatic scene and malevolent third , Meltzer’s (1992) claustrum and folie‐à‐deux , an unconscious covenant (Grotstein 2000), unconscious communication (Balint 1993), and the related ideas of holding (Winnicott 1960) and different types of container‐contained (Bion 1963; Jung 1925), to name just a few.…”