Airless worlds and couples therapy

ABSTRACT

In this paper the author expands his thinking about “airless worlds” in individual therapy to work with couples. Living in an airless world refers to a process of internalizing negating messages from parents to their children such that the adult child continues to view and treat themselves in more or less the same negating ways that their parents had. Individuals suffering from the syndrome tend not to have separated from their internalized parents sufficiently to be able to develop their own senses of self, agency, and reality and therefore tend, transferentially, to create a similar kind of unconscious bondage with their adult partners. When adult partners co-create a communicative system wherein each unconsciously cedes to the other the power to define their experience of themselves, an airless world has been created in their relationship. An unconscious dependency on, and negation of, the other renders constructive intersubjective dialogue virtually impossible (i.e. dialogue that takes into account both parties’ subjectivities). By way of focusing on his work with one couple whose capacity for competent constructive dialogue had broken down completely over many years, the author demonstrates both the operation of airless world dynamics in couples and his approach to introducing “psychic air” into their airless marital systems. Central to his approach is an expansion of the idea of therapeutic empathy to include “empathy with the needs of the system.”

KEYWORDS:

• Dialogue breakdown
• empathy
• identification
• intersubjective system
• negation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Henceforth, all significant interventions will be italicized; when these include direct quotes, the quotes will be in quotation marks.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Steven Stern

Steven Stern, Psy.D., is Clinical Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Tufts University School of Medicine and Maine Medical Center; faculty member and training/supervising analyst at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis; faculty member at The Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity; and member of the Editorial Board of Psychoanalysis, Self and Context.