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Authors: Ph.D Harville Hendrix

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TWENTY YEARS AGO, after I decided to direct the ideas in this book to the general rather than the professional audience, my editor at Holt suggested that the assistance of a professional writer might be useful. Since this was my first attempt at a popular book, I readily agreed. After interviewing five writers, I was introduced to Jo Robinson. She understood immediately what I was attempting to do. At that time, Jo was the author of
Unplug the Christmas Machine and Full House
. In the years that followed, Jo Robinson became a
New York Times
bestselling author and coauthor of many books, including
Hot Monogamy, The Omega Diet, When Your Body Gets the Blues,
and
Pasture Perfect.
For the first edition of this book, Jo took a lengthy rough manuscript and many transcriptions of lectures and workshops and worked tirelessly to transform a badly organized and somewhat opaque manuscript and much supplementary material into a well organized and finely polished product. When the idea of a second edition of the book was posed, Jo again edited my revisions and integrated them into what became the 2001 edition of
Getting the Love You Want
. For this third incarnation, although she was busy with her own research and writing
and preparing for her marriage, she answered the call to help Helen and me organize our new ideas, working tirelessly to integrate them into this heavily revised edition and to help us craft the new foreword. As she did in the beginning, Jo immersed herself in the material by attending a couple’s workshop and extensively interviewing Helen and me throughout the writing process.
We owe her a debt of gratitude for her long-term devotion to this project and for her friendship over the past twenty years. Without her intelligence and writing skill, we would all have a difficult time indeed getting the love we want. Thanks, Jo.
Harville Hendrix, Ph.D.
Keeping the Love You Find: A Personal Guide
 
 
WITH HELEN LAKELLY HUNT
 
Giving the Love That Heals: A Guide for Parents
 
The Couples Companion: Meditations and Exercises for
Getting the Love You Want
 
The Parenting Companion: Meditations and Exercises for
Giving the Love That Heals
 
The Personal Companion: Meditations and Exercises for
Keeping the Love You Find
 
Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by
Letting Yourself Be Loved
 
Receiving Love Workbook: A Unique Twelve-Week Course
for Couples and Singles
 
Getting the Love You Want Workbook:
The New Couples’ Study Guide
 
Imago Relationship Therapy: Perspectives on Theory
 
 
BY HELEN LAKELLY HUNT
 
Faith and Feminism: A Holy Alliance
SOME OF YOU MAY WANT to deepen your understanding of your relationship and gain additional skills by working with a couples therapist. Fortunately, couples therapy has lost much of the stigma that it had in earlier years. Years ago only people who were in great pain or who were very courageous signed up for couples counseling. Now more and more couples are deciding to seek help before irrevocable damage is done. They want to enhance the quality of their lives, and they realize that nothing is more important to them than their primary love relationship. They have the healthy attitude that going to a therapist is no different from going to any skilled teacher: you learn faster and better if you get expert supervision.
One of the main benefits of seeing a therapist is that you will speed up the integration of material from your unconscious. A therapist can help you maneuver around your blind spots and assimilate material from your unconscious that might take you months or years to assimilate on your own. As a result, you will spend a lot less time spinning your wheels.
Another good reason to enlist the aid of a therapist is to give you an added measure of safety and support. When you are working on new material and begin to experience some anxiety,
a therapist will help you understand your fears. Given reassurance and insight, you will probably be able to plunge ahead instead of retreating to safer ground. This will prove especially valuable for couples who are experiencing a great many problems.
A final reason for seeking professional counseling is to provide a structured environment for growth. If you are short on discipline or motivation, having a weekly appointment and paying a therapist a good deal of money can give you added incentive.
If you are interested in working with a couples therapist, I have some general recommendations. My advice is that you look for a therapist whose primary area of expertise is relationship therapy, not individual therapy, so that he or she will be well versed in the complexities of love relationships. Furthermore, I recommend that you look for a therapist who will work with you jointly, in what is referred to in professional circles as “conjoint” couples therapy. If you see separate therapists or the same therapist at different times, you might inadvertently focus on issues that would help you live more autonomously, not help you live more harmoniously as a couple. Dwelling on matters that are not directly relevant to your relationship may help you as an individual, but there is some evidence that it might not be the best way to strengthen your marriage. When you are seeing a therapist together, you will more clearly see how your personal issues affect the state of your relationship, and both your personal and relationship issues can be resolved together.
How do you go about selecting a couples therapist? A person professing to be a therapist may be a clergyman, a social worker, a psychologist, a psychiatrist, an educator, or, in some states, simply a person with strong views on love relationships. A therapist’s training may vary from years of postgraduate training to none at all. In some states, all that’s required for a license as a couples therapist is a recommendation by someone
who already has a license. For this reason, it is wise to choose your therapist on the basis of a referral. Get recommendations from friends or from the minister of a church who has successfully referred a large number of couples. If you are unable to get a referral, look in your phone book under the headings “American Association of Pastoral Counselors,” “American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy,” “Association of Clinical Social Workers,” “Marriage Counselors,” or “Mental Health.” If you live in a large city, there may be a special referral service that will match you up with an appropriate therapist.
When you have been given the name of a particular therapist, there are a number of things you should check out. First make sure the therapist is fully accredited by a recognized organization such as the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, the American Association of Pastoral Counselors, the American Psychological Association, or the American Psychiatric Association. When you are satisfied that the therapist meets your initial criteria, sign up for a preliminary interview to see if you would feel comfortable working together. (Some therapists will waive the fees for this initial consultation.) Find out the therapist’s views on relationship therapy. Most important of all, trust your instincts. You are looking for a therapist who is a caring, warm, sensitive person who gives you a feeling of safety and confidence. Even if you like the therapist, it is wise to interview more than one person, so that you have a basis for comparison.
If you are interested in working with a therapist specifically trained in Imago Relationship Therapy, or wish to attend a
Getting the Love You Want
Couples Workshop, please call 1-800-729-1121 or visit our Web site at
www.HarvilleHendrix.com
.
FOREWORD TO THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
1
From the U.S. Census document: “Married-Couple and Unmarried-Partner Households: 2000.” This sixteen-page report is the first time the Census Bureau has commented on the growing trend of cohabitation.
INTRODUCTION TO THE 1988 EDITION
1
A conscious marriage is created by bringing into awareness the unconscious directives and purposes of a romantic or love marriage. A love marriage is defined as a voluntary union of two individuals based upon romantic attraction that is stirred by unconscious needs that have their roots in unresolved childhood issues.
Love marriages have existed throughout history, but they have not been the dominant cultural form of marriage until the latter part of the nineteenth century, and then largely in the Western world. Romantic relationships are recorded in all the world’s mythologies and literature, but they have generally been extramarital and often adulterous. For a discussion of this phenomenon, see Denis de Rougemont,
Love in the Western World
, and Morton Hunt,
The Natural History of Love.
There are historical indications of the trend toward the fusion of romance and marriage, creating the love marriage, in the Western world in the sixteenth century. Following the Renaissance and the Reformation, which gave birth to the concept of individual rights, to democratic
institutions, and to the changing status of women, marriage gradually became a source of personal satisfaction and began to shed its function as a stabilizing unit for society. For a detailed historical analysis of this process, see Robert Bellah et al.,
Habits of the Heart,
chapters three and four. He presents a brilliant analysis of the tension between the demands of social roles and social institutions and the emergence of private life, especially in the arena of love and marriage. He sees this tension, which was rampant in the nineteenth century, as “endemic” in our culture today.
Prior to the modern period, from the sixteenth century until the present, the dominant form of marriage in the Western world was the arranged marriage, variously based upon economics, politics, or social position, and serving the purpose of maintaining a particular social reality. This form of marriage is still numerically dominant in the non-Western world today. A second form of marriage that has existed throughout history, and still exists in many cultures, is the slave marriage, in which the spouse, usually the woman, is purchased by the man with whatever “coin in trade” is used in that culture—money, pigs, water buffalo, etc. The purchased spouse usually bears and rears the children, does much of the domestic work, owns no property, has no rights, and can be sold if desired or necessary. (I have recently visited the Dani tribe in Irian Jaya, where a wife could be bought for five pigs, and also the Batak people of Sumatra, where the price of a wife was five water buffalo. At the current exchange rate, that was about five thousand dollars.)
Love relationships can and do exist in all cultures, but marriage based on love and mutual selection requires freedom of choice and gender equality. However, freedom is a relative state, and most marriages in the Western world are still arranged and spouses are still selected because of their value. The arena, however, has shifted from the social and objective world to the private and subjective world. Partner selection in a democratic society is arranged by the unconscious, and the value of the partners is determined by unconscious judgment of their ability to provide psychic satisfaction of specific emotional needs. The romantic or love marriage is influenced, perhaps even determined, by the parents, albeit out of the awareness of the actual parents or the marital partners. But in this case the selection is not to do the bidding of the parents but to make up for their deficiencies as caretakers. The romantic marriage is, therefore, an unconscious marriage, with purposes that suit the unconscious. It is the thesis of this book that this subterranean drama must be brought into consciousness,
thus creating the conscious marriage, if the psychic purposes are to be realized. Since we view these purposes as positive and constructive, bringing them into consciousness and intentionally cooperating with them results in a type of healing and wholeness that satisfies deep and universal longing. For the first time in history, marriage can be an arena for personal growth that matches or exceeds the offerings of other forms of personal salvation, such as psychotherapy, religious disciplines, and social revolutions. See Jung, “Marriage as a Psychological Relationship,” in
The Portable Jung
, pp. 163ff.
CHAPTER 1: THE MYSTERY OF ATTRACTION
1
This theory, that people tend to select mates who are more or less their equals, also attempts to explain the stability of some couples. In a study of 537 dating men and women reported in the July 22, 1986, edition of
The New York Times
by writer Daniel Goleman, the researchers found that people who perceived their partners to be superior to them felt guilty and insecure. People who perceived their partners to be inferior to them reported feelings of anger. When partners perceived themselves to be equals, their relationships were relatively conflict-free and stable.
2
C. G. Jung,
Two Essays in Analytical Psychology,
pp. 115–56. See also
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious,
vol. 9, pp. 122–23.
3
Paul D. McLean, “Man and His Animal Brains.” This is one of several ways of looking at the brain distinguished by an evolutionary perspective. I use the terms “old brain” and “new brain” because of their simplicity and illustrative power, as compared with the more familiar terms, the “unconscious” and the “conscious.”
4
The question of freedom and determinism divides various disciplines into opposing camps. In philosophy and religion, the question has been debated for centuries with no resolution. Psychological schools are distinguished by their adherence to a mechanistic versus an organismic view of human beings. This question is crucial for marriages, because if we are destined to certain marital fates, then what is the value of therapies that offer hope and change? To my way of thinking, both sides of most polarities are valid. The old-brain/new-brain metaphor offers a resolution to the dialogue—we are both determined and free. The old brain, with its built-in survival programs, determines our basic reactions, and the new brain can become aware of reactions that are not effective and devise new options. The survival directives of
the old brain cannot be overridden, but the new brain can re-educate the old brain with regard to what is dangerous and what is not. We are free within limits, but our limits are not absolute.
5
These primary evolutionary defenses are believed to have evolved in the reverse order of the way I have listed them. Fear, considered the primary affect, is followed much later in evolutionary history by the nurturing response. It is believed that self-preservation as the basic instinct preceded the nurturing response by millions of years.
CHAPTER 2: CHILDHOOD WOUNDS
1
Martin Buber,
I and Thou
, p. 76. The notion that human life includes an awareness of oneness with the universe is endemic in most religions in most cultures and is often referred to by the term “mystical.” This experience was reduced by Freud to an “oceanic feeling” reminiscent of prenatal union with the mother, thus polarizing with Buber. Silverman et al., in
The Search for Oneness,
subject Freud’s thesis to empirical research and conclude that “unconscious fantasies of oneness can enhance adaptation if a sense of self can be preserved” (pp. iff).
I take the position that the search for oneness is multidimensional. It expresses our awareness of our separation from essential aspects of ourselves, a split in the psyche caused by the repressive aspect of socialization, which disturbs our awareness of our union with the universe, which Buber so poetically says “we forgot at birth.” The desire for union with the mother, an empirical reality, expresses this deeper desire for union with split-off parts of the self, a search for personal wholeness, which, when achieved, restores our awareness of our essential union with the universe out of which both the self and the maternal matrix arise. From this I hypothesize that in marriage the impulse to unite with the partner is unconsciously an attempt to reunite with the split-off parts of the self, which are projected onto the partner. Since there is a fusion of the partner and the parent in the unconscious, a positive emotional bond with the partner (achieved by loving in the partner that which is split off from the self and projected) restores a sense of personal wholeness and an awareness of our essential union with the universe. This gives marriage an essentially spiritual potential.
2
The brief summary of the developmental stages of childhood is based upon the work of Margaret Mahler,
On Human Symbiosis and the Vicissitudes of Individuation.
I take full responsibility for the liberties I have taken with identifying developmental issues that reappear in
marriage, since this was not her intention. Developmental theories are distinguished by the interests of the theoretician. Current theories include childhood viewed from the perspective of sexual, social, cognitive, moral, and faith development. All these dimensions are involved in the developmental processes of every child, and their fate is reflected in every marriage. The elaboration of this thesis would be book-length itself, and that is not my present intention. I wish only to identify the issues of childhood that appear in marriage as a basis of understanding and grounding the thesis that marriage, at the unconscious level, is an attempt to resolve those issues, and, indeed, must resolve them if the marriage is to be a growth experience.
3
The English language has only one word for the phenomenon of love, and that word is used in so many contexts to describe so many emotions that it has no distinct meaning. We use it to say “I love New York,” “I love the movies,” “I love sex,” “I love you,” and everything else about which we may have positive feelings. Consequently, its meaning is determined largely by its context.
Until recently, psychology made little reference to love, and it is noticeably absent in most studies of marriage. Perhaps that is because the association of love and marriage is, as discussed earlier, a recent historical phenomenon. Theories of marriage and marital therapy have focused on contract making, conflict resolution, systems analysis, and restructuring rather than love. Freud and Jung used the Latin word “libido,” but in different ways. Freud spoke of a libidinal love and a narcissistic love; the first is a generalized sexual energy directed to others, notably the infant to the mother as a first love object, and later redirected to others. The second, narcissistic love, was a consequence of psychic injury that resulted in focusing libido on the self. He called this “primary narcissism.” The resolution of this self-invested love led to the redirection of libido to another, or secondary narcissism. (See Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction.”) Jung used “libido” to refer to a generalized life energy. (For a discussion of love by psychoanalytically oriented psychologists and psychiatrists, see Rollo May,
Love and Wills;
Erich Fromm,
The Art of Loving;
Reubin Fine,
The Meaning of Love in Human Experience;
Willard Gaylin,
Rediscovering Love;
and Nathaniel Brandon,
The Psychology of Romantic Love.
)
To avoid the vagueness of the word “love,” I have elected to use three Greek words: “eros,” “agape,” and “philia.” These words have precise meanings and refer to various phases of one phenomenon. They also make possible a description of a developmental view of love
as a possibility in marriage. “Eros” is the root of the word “erotic,” which in our culture has a sexual, even pornographic connotation, but in Greek means “passionate love of the world.” (See Bauer,
A Greek-English Lesson,
p. 311.)
The broader meaning of “eros” is “life force,” which is directed outward in passionate appreciation of the world. This includes, but is not limited to, sexuality. It also denotes the sense in which the self and its demands and needs are emphasized. In my view, when eros is frustrated or blunted by deficient nurturing or excessive socialization, it turns back upon itself in self-absorption and becomes preoccupied with organismic survival. This condition remains until the experience of romantic love, when eros is redirected to another, the romantic partner, in an attempt to restore the original condition of wholeness. The failure to achieve the original situation results in the power struggle, which is ultimately a defense against death. In this I take issue with Freud, who posits a “death instinct,” or “thanatos,” as a polarity to eros. (Freud, “The Instincts and Their Vicissitudes.”) I see eros as a singular life energy expressing itself in the face of the fear of death, not the “pull” of death. See Chapter to, note 1, for a further discussion of eros.
4
Plato,
The Symposium
, pp. 143ff.
CHAPTER 3: YOUR IMAGO
1
The reconstruction of the past by selecting a partner who resembles one’s parents was originally given the name “repetition compulsion” by Freud. This idea was expanded by Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt Therapy, and given the name “unfinished business.” For Perls, this consists of feelings and memories that are unconscious and avoided but are expressed in behavior. Some view this repetition as an attempt to restore the familiar, thus as a static and nonpurposive process. I side with Freud’s view of the purposive character of repetition as an attempt at resolution.
2
In
Webster’s Dictionary,
“imago” means the “representation of a person or a thing,” “a copy,” “likeness,” “a mental picture.” The term was used in psychology by Freud. In fact, it was the title of a now defunct journal edited by him. Jung also uses the term in his
Collected Works,
vol. 9, pp. 60ff., to mean the “inner representation of the opposite sex.” In this book I depend in principle upon Jung rather than the “object-relations” school, who would define it as the “significant other.” In either case, the image is formed out of the internalization of all
childhood caretakers, and its projection generates the feelings of romantic love.
In Jungian psychology, the anima image is projected by the man and the animus image is projected by the woman. In this book, the imago is a fusion of the traits of all significant caretakers and may have dominant same-sex or opposite-sex qualities and can be projected by either sex. In other words, from clinical experience it is obvious that a man may choose a woman who is like his father and a woman may choose a man who is like her mother. In all cases the imago selection is a combination of same- and opposite-sex traits.
3
See Wilder Penfield,
The Mystery of Mind,
p. 20.

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