The couple as a relational complex adaptive system. Theoretical and methodological.

The couple as a relational complex adaptive system. Theoretical and methodological Proposal Pere Llovet Planas^∗

In a public service of consultation of Mental Health we took care of a Couple in crisis. After an appreciation of habitual diagnoses and prognoses indicators, we maintained in our mind the concepts of CAS model (Complex Adaptive System) as organizers of a strategic intervention along with some other concepts used in interventions of Couple based in Relational orientation (Johnson, 1996; Johnson, 1997; Spivacow, 2005).

Before exposing the case, let’s see very briefly the key concepts of this systemic model.

The CAS comes from the wide field of the General Systems Theories and has been formulated by Holland (1992) from Biology, which determines its focusing in the adaptive functionality and the evolutionary and dynamic aspects, axes (adaptation, evolution and dynamism) that are common with the Psychoanalysis.

Holland has conceived this model for the analysis of Systems that are made up of Subsystems that must keep simultaneously adapted to the Systems of which they come. In the area of the Couple, we would adapt this vision formulating that two individuals form a new unit but, in some aspects, they will continue belonging and having some properties of their original families. So, the formation of this new unit will be conditioned to the mutual adaptation but this adaptation will not imply them in its totality. These adaptive properties will take preeminence while those others related to their original families remain in latency.

Holland conceptualizes this adaptive dynamics as a balance between centripetal forces (which maintain the coherence of the new system or Couple) and centrifugal forces (which attract the elements of the new System towards the original families and tend to disintegrate the new System or Couple). Holland accentuates that these properties in latency tend to reemerge and in any case continue exerting its power. Let us observe the analogy of this systemic dynamism with the psychoanalytic dynamism of Unconscious and the known cleavage of the object in the processes of falling in love (Klein, 1937).

Faithfully to his biological origin, Holland postulates that these systems must maintain so much an internal adaptation as external (with respect to its environment). So, these systems make Coevolution together but their double dependence also forces Selforganizations, concepts that are well known, in the field of the Couple and Psychoanalysis.

We oriented the clinical and therapeutic aspects completely psychoanalytically selecting the Relational concept of “necessity of emotional connection” of the Boston Group (2008), Lyons-Ruth (2003), Stolorow & Atwood (1992), Riera (2010) and others rooted in Bolwby’s concept of “Attachment”. This concept of “necessity of emotional connection” will allow us to focus clinically and also to insert the concepts of the CAS.

As it is well-known, the dynamics of the Systems is conditioned by his balance. Holland conceives the balance of the Adaptive Systems as “unstable” since they are subject to “flows”, a concept that we compare to the “necessity of emotional connection”. As Ruth Lyons notes, the ruptures of this connection have dissociative effects that affect the relational patterns and the selforganization of the implied ones. For a more fundamental support of this analogy between “flows of unstable balance” and “necessities of emotional connection” we would refer to the conception of the libido and the pulsions in the mental dynamism according to Freud and following with fundamental psychoanalytic authors, the “necessity of emotional connection” justifies the necessity of “mental continents” indicated by Klein and Winnicott (1984) among others^[1].

Keeping in mind these concepts of the CAS (Centripetal and centrifugal adaptation, Coevolution, Selforganization, Reemergencies and centrifugal and centripetal forces), let’s see the case of a young Couple in crisis.

The clinical case

Dr. A. took care of Pablo, 35 years old, by a depressive anxious syndrome. After certain time of discreet evolution, the patient went worse since the Couple conflicts worsen when she got pregnant and she begun to talk about their possible separation. Dr. A derived the case to us for an evaluation of Couple intervention and they exposed us that they suffered serious communication difficulties. They passed days talking each other only the strictly necessary and she underwent intense jealousy and she felt ignored. She complained about the isolation in which he locked himself and the hours he spent in the computer, “certainly maintaining other relations”, she suspected.

Pablo, on his turn, was deeply affected by the separation threat and when he talked about the pregnancy he put his hand very slight and carefully over her belly in an unequivocally protective gesture that impressed us and we interpreted as a first indicator of favorable prognosis.

He continued explaining that he had always suffered and fought against his own reserved character but as she had begun to feel jealous and to reclaim to being listened about his fears and also demand more attention to him, he had felt more and more pressed and overwhelmed (he accompanied his words with a gesture of weariness). According to him, he was well disposed to give her attention but as she pressed him, his attention acquired character of obligation that extinguished his desire. He felt that its initiative was spoiled and annulled. Thus, increasingly, he needed tranquility and isolation that, as she described, came to reinforce her jealousy and her suspicions of infidelity, although “virtual”, since he spent hours in the computer. Briefly, she claimed that she didn’t felt wished and she was sexually unsatisfied.

We observe that this one is a quite habitual sequence in a Couple crisis (see Dicks, 1967; Perez Testor, 2007). Following our methodological proposal, we will consider there was a progressive frustration of the necessities of attachment in an incremental and centrifugal dynamics that threatens the internal adaptive success of the Couple and its members.

Claudia expressed his preoccupation since she considered herself pathologically jealous and she tried to calm expressing his fears. She explained that she had been in “Psychoanalysis” treatment (not “Psycotherapy”, we want to accentuate) and she knew that she needed to express herself and to be listened. He used to accede initially but after a while of listening their fears and complains, he ended up saturated, and also feeling affected his spontaneity in his relations not only with her but in general. Thus he had become more and more isolated.

Continuing with her narrative, she explained that her father was repeatedly unfaithful and that her mother’s suffering had determined the arousal of her own jealousy pathology in a relation that she had previously maintained. Therefore she had been in analysis during a year and half until her family had immigrated to Spain. As she would explain later, immigration also determined the end of her previous sentimental relation.

Technically we decided to explain to the Couple the implications of these facts: the interrupted analysis (or treatment), her therapeutic necessities and the therapeutic function to which he was doomed^[2]. We briefly investigated the formation of the Couple and both emphasized their great initial communication, specially appreciated by him because of his previous communication difficulties.

For her part, she had felt very calm, without jealousy since during the first years^[3]. Again, based on our perception of the therapeutic alliance and the comprehensive capacity of the Couple, we decided to explain them briefly the cleavage that occurs in the processes of falling in love as well as the phenomena of the later re-emergence of parts of the personality which have been in latency.

Investigating on the Primary Systems or original families, we obtained, in addition to the infidelity of her father, that she immigrated from a South America’s country 4 years ago, when she was 22, that she had an older sister and a younger brother and her family lived in a glad, very communicative and emotionally intense atmosphere.

On his turn, he was 35 years old, he came from another South America’s country and immigrated 7 years ago. He was only child, his mother went in wheelchair and his father had a chronic depression and a very reserved character, with scarce familiar life. He added that his own tendency to the retraction came, without any doubt, from the character of his father although smoothed by the good character of his mother.

We centered our intervention in the “Recognition” of the relational phenomena in which they were immersed and the “Validation” of their feelings^[4].

In the next session they referred an important improvement. They had been able to retake his dialogue and, especially, she explained that she had understood not only its own therapeutic necessities but also that it was inadequate to try to satisfy them with him. Both dwell in details and she expressed her idea that perhaps she had to retake a treatment and she asked if this would have to be individual or together. We established that we would make three sessions with her and later we would make joint sessions. At this moment she produced a “lapsus” since she asked if he also had to do some individual sessions and she was momentarily very surprised when we (me and he) reminded her that he was already having individual treatment with Dr. A. This was a remarkable moment since it indicates a disconnection inside the Couple that we interpreted as overdetermined by the repression of the knowledge that she had about his mental state and also by her internal disconnection, probably related to the effects of her treatment’s interruption.

The individual sessions^[5]

In the individual sessions she told us about the radical improvement of the couple’s communication and she had some remarkable insights. It was clear that she had become aware that her non solved pathologic jealousy unchained the crisis, though she expressed a certain fear to have to retake an analytical process. She also explained that though she thought that she would not support an infidelity, she was convinced that this was something inevitable as long as “everybody committed them”. When she went out with her friends, “everybody’s infidelity” was the recurrent and main subject of conversation. She explained also her conviction that her jealousy had spoiled his first sentimental relation and she explained that she had retaken virtual contact with this old friend. Carefully we could relate these conversations with her friends but specially her contacts with her old sentimental companion with her fears about the virtual relations that her husband could maintain and she was impressed when she realized that these fears could be a projection of her own thoughts.

She had another significant insight when she related that when she was 17 years old she had to abort. Until certain point she trivialize the emotional impact of this event arguing the unconsciousness owned to her age and also because she had her mother’s support since she also had passed through that to a similar age. She argued that, by the mentality of the time at which this had happened, her mother had suffered incomprehension and she did not want that “the same thing” was repeated with her daughters. “Nevertheless, repetition has been produced”, we said to her. After a moment of surprise, she realized that we didn’t refer to the fact of being misunderstood but to the fact of having to abort and she answered deeply affected: “it is true; I had not realized that before. There is a repetition”.

In summary, in this patient already initiated in the knowledge of the unconscious phenomena, these insights obtained in the two sessions produced a greater conscience of its current internal conflicts and an important diminution of the projections on her couple.

Dr. A. also referred Pablo’s important improvement as long as she had reduced her pressure on him and the improvement of the Couple crisis had allowed to retake its own previous internal problematic.

Our last session with her took place only one week before the anticipated term of the pregnancy thus we postponed in two months the programmed new couple’s session and we reminded the explanation that we had made in the last session of Couple about the impact of the birth on the balance of Couple and its relations with the origin families (see Darchis, 2005).

The epilogue of this case is still to arrive since she came personally to our service to annul the visit since they had difficulties to find somebody that took care of the new born during our attendance and Pablo also annulled his sessions with Dr. A during this period.

The contribution of the CAS’s concepts

Without any doubt, despite of their individual pathologies, this Couple had important healthy resources that made possible a so fast evolution out of the crisis with a very brief intervention. However, we think that focusing in the necessities of emotional attachment and their influence in the balance of the Couple determined this success since, in combination with their insight’s capacity, lead them in a fruitful introspective direction that they incorporated and continued developing by themselves in an autonomous way.

We have seen that after the cleavage of the initial “falling in love”, there was a reemergency of the previous intrapsychic conflicts that “centrifuged” the couple system and sent their members to the original systems towards their families and networks of attachment as well as towards their latent and unconscious conflicts dissociated during the “falling in love” and “enlarged honey moon” processes.

Appling the CAS concepts, we would formulate that the remergency of latent properties made that the coevolution of the Couple took diverging directions and each member selforganized according to its own agreements: in the case of Pablo with a defensive narcissistic crease and a refuge in the virtual rewarding experiences and in the case of Claudia with an intense search of “emotional connection” (Riera, 2010) with her social network and her family although these refuges increased her jealousy his isolation necessities and the emotional and sexual dissatisfaction of both.

From this point of view we can formulate that the therapeutic intervention had an effect of redistribution of the attachment flows and to restore the experience of necessary emotional satisfaction that according to the Hypothesis that we have formulated, is the condition for the maintenance of the balance of the Couple or System.

Epilogue

In addition to the indicated factors, we can think that fast restoration of couple balance is partly due to a “forwards run” or defensive reestablishment of Claudia and to the effects in her of the imminent maternity. Without a doubt, the parentality is going to be a new challenge, particularly for her jealousy and we can also ask ourselves about the new balance that maternity will produce in their necessities of emotional connection, how the demand of intense emotional connection towards Pablo will be reconstructed, their generational relations etc.

Pablo, he will have to confront new risks of exclusion and emotional intensity that without any doubt will be awakened up by paternity. The Couple (or rather we will say: Pablo), had planified that his mother would come to know her first grandson and help the Couple in their first parentality. As we said, his mother had health problems and his father would not come due to his psychic state.

This gives us an idea of the challenges of this Couple that has restored their balance quickly and it makes us think that will require some future psychotherapeutic help.

---

Bibliography

Boston Change Process Study Group (2008), Forms of Relational Meaning: Issues in the Relations between the implicit and the reflective-verbal domains, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 18:2, 125-148.

Bleichmar H. (1999), Del apego al deseo de intimidad: las angustias del desencuentro, Aperturas Psicoanalíticas, nº 2.

Darchis E. (2005), Crises familiales en perinatalité. En Les crises familiales, violence et reconstruction, Decherf & Darchis, In Press, Paris.

Dicks H. (1967), Marital Tensions. Clinical studies towards a psychoanalytic theory of interaction, Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Dio Bleichmar E. (2000), Lo intrapsíquico y lo intersubjetivo: metodologia de la psicoterapia de la relación padres-hijos/as desde el enfoque Modular-Tansformacional, Aperturas Psicoanalíticas, nº 6.

Holland J. H. (1992), Adaptation in natural and artificial systems: an introductory analysis with applications to biology, control, and artificial intelligence, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Johnson S. (1996), The practice of emotionally focused couple therapy. Creating Connection. Brunner & Mazel, Philadelphia.

Johnson S. (1997), Predictors of success in emotionally focused marital therapy, Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, Volume 23 Issue 2, Pages 135 – 152.

Klein M. (1937), Amor, Odio, Culpa y Reparación, En M. Klein, Obras Completas 1, Barcelona, Paidós, 1989.

Lemaire J. (1979), La pareja humana: su vida, su muerte, su estructura, México 1986, Fondo de   Cultura Económica.

Lyons-Ruth K. (2003), Dissociation and parent-infant dialogue: A longitudinal perspective from attachment research, fue publicado originariamente en Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association, vol. 51, o. 3, p. 883-911, 2003, Publicado en Aperturas

Psicoanalíticas, nº 17.

Perez Testor C. (2007), Pareja, elección y patologia, En Personalidad, madurez humana y contexto familiar, Rios Gonzalez (ed.), Madrid.

Riera R. (2010), La connexió emocional, Ed Octaedro, Barcelona.

Sander L. (2002) Thinking differently. Principles of Process in Living Systems and the specificity of Being Known, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 12 (1): 11-42.

Spivacow M. (2005), La intervención vincular en el tratamiento psicoanalítico de pareja, Aperturas Psicoanalíticas, nº 19.

Stolorow R.D., Atwood G.E. (1992), Los contextos de ser, Ed Herder, Barcelona.

Winnicott D. (1984), La Familia y el desarrollo del Individuo, Paidós, Barcelona.

Zavattini G.C. (2008), Psychothérapie psychanalytique de couple et attachement, en Les modèles de thérapies psychanalytiques de  couples et de famille, Congreso de Barcelona, Asociación

Internacional de Psicoanálisis de la Pareja y la Familia.

---

^∗ Member of the ACPP/ AEPP/ EFPP. AEPP’s Delegate for the Couple and Family  EFPP’s Section.

Institution: Unitat de Salut Mental de Collblanch (Institut Català de la Salut – Diputació de Barcelona)

Adress : Josep Tarradellas, 132. 2n 2ª. 08029 BARCELONA

Mail: perellovet@telefonica.net

In general, in psychotherapy, we have to consider the motivations and the potential impact of the therapist’s interventions previously. In this case and  particular moment, the motivation for individual sessions with the wife was to get some elaboration about the interruption of her treatment when his family emigrated and a possible restart of this therapeutic process. Certainly, these sessions modify the therapeutic couple setting and implies a privileged relationship (alliance) with the therapist with some exclusion of the husband. However, due to the acute crisis they were going through and the imminence of the birth, we consider best choice to run these risks than those that would result from direct them to another therapist to treat her specific problem and delay the process.

Moreover, this disruption in the treatment of her jealousy was directly linked with intense pathogenic projections on the husband, who was receiving the transferences of ” unfaitfull father ” and “lost therapist”.

In addition to considering that his hypothetical exclusion was relative and that these individual sessions had a “restorative” funtion of something previous, above all, we prioritize what we considered the “therapeutic option” over the subjection to the ortodox setting, an issue ratified by the effects and the evolution that followed. Moreover, this action is characteristic of brief or focused techniques. The condition for doing so is that, as we said, the therapist considers previously transference and countertransference implications and the possibles outcomes.

[1] See a review of these concepts in basic psychoanalytic literature in Bleichmar, 1999.

[2] This technical choice was based on our perception of the therapeutic alliance that the couple established from the start and that allowed us to develop a facilitative and supportive role (see a development in Zavattini, 2008)

[3] We see a true explanation of defensive collusion that occurs in the formation of couples (Lemaire, 1979).

[4] See a development of the concepts of “Recognition” and “Validation” in Sander (2002), Stolorow and Atwood (1992) and Riera (2010).

[5] The revision of the Spanish-castillan version of this article highlighted an interesting theoretical-technical point: within couple treatment, how we should consider individual sessions with a single member?

From an orthodox view, it can be interpreted to be a therapist “acting out” produced by an unconscious alliance with one of the partners that would have an exclusionary effect of the other member amen of collusion in the therapeutic process.