Whose Disgust Is It Anyway?: Projection and Projective Identification in the Couple Relationship

Abstract

In this commentary on Josephs’s paper on Oedipal disgust, I emphasize that disgust is best viewed as a symptom of an interpersonal dynamic that may reflect a range of underlying unconscious issues beyond threats to attachment. Disgust, like all affective experience, doesn’t only arise in response to interpersonal experience; it is also created interpersonally through projection and projective identification. In my view, disgust signals a breakdown, a failure in the couple’s capacity to engage in the communicative processes essential to all intimate relationships for negotiating the fragile balances between separation and merger, love and hate, creativity and destruction.

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Notes on contributors

Shelley Nathans

Shelley Nathans, Ph.D., is on the faculty of the California Pacific Medical Center and the Psychoanalytic Couple Psychotherapy Group training program. Her most recent publication is “Infidelity as Manic Defense,” published in Couple and Family Psychoanalysis in 2012. She is the director and producer of the film Robert Wallerstein: 65 Years at the Center of Psychoanalysis, and she is co-editor (with Milton Schaefer, Ph.D.) of the forthcoming book Couples on the Couch: Psychoanalytic Couple Psychotherapy. She is in private practice in both San Francisco and Oakland, California.