THE AMERICAN IOURNAL OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 35:365--375 (1975)
MARITAL RELATIONSHIPS: FRUSTRATION AND FULFILL.MENT* The title I chose for this paper is "Marital Relationships: Frustration and Fulfillment," instead of, as one might expect, "Marital Relationships: Frustration or Fulfillment." This puts us right from the beginning into Karen Horney's dialectic and holistic approach, which conceives of two opposites - in this case the frustration and the fulfillment - merging harmoniously, rather than being in conflict. The breaking down of a life situation, such as marriage, into different components and the harmonious merging of these components, will result in a truly meaningful whole. It also means in practical terms that people who are married or who are anticipating marriage should expect it to be partly a frustrating and partly a fulfilling experience. What would describe the total nature of the marital relationship would be the degree to which each marital partner experiences frustration or fulfillment. It is generally easy to say that the more neurotic the person is, the more frustration he or she will experience, and that the healthier the person is, the more fulfillment he or she will feel. However, this is a rather narrow generalization; it is important for us to be aware that marriage is a process and not a static end. By "process" I mean something that has a beginning, that is dynamic in nature, that requires developments and fluctuations, and that finally matures. When people experience marriage as a process they do not feel so easily discouraged, rebellious, or defiant when they first encounter difficulties. It is a sad state of affairs when people think of their marriage either as a static end or in any other negative way. For example, one patient of mine said he experienced his marriage as "the epitomy of boredom." He tried to cope with the situation not by looking into the marriage itself but by looking outside it, by having consecutive affairs which after a while ended up being as boring and meaningless as his marriage. I shall discuss marriage from a holistic point of view, a point of view that was Horney's predominant approach to people and the psychological aspects of life. When an individual gets involved in a marriage, he or she brings along all past experiences, all conscious and unconscious the character traits, a whole variety of. feelings and thoughts, and the learned behavior from the nuclear family. Each individual must be aware that their spouse~also brings along those same things, whether their experiences have been similar or dissimilar. It is important for the marital couple to be aware that by getting married they are creating a new family constellation that is probably going to be different from the nuclear family and therefore that attitudes of the old family are going to be forgotten, changed, or modified and new attitudes developed. A not infrequent situation is when a husband repeatedly tells his wife, "But my mother used to do this, in that way." The wife feels she has been compared to the mother and found inferior.
*Presented in the Program of Public Education Lectures, 1974-1975, at the Karen Horney Clinic. 365
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She may react to this in a number of different ways. For example, she may try harder and harder to keep up with mother's ways of doing things or she may rebel against them. However, to forget, change, or modify old attitudes, some of which are traditionally deeply rooted, is not very easy. However, through the concept of the process it becomes much easier. Another important issue that we apply to ourselves in all decision making, and certainly in marriage, is the awareness of the so-called yes-no pull. Each time we decide to do something, for instance, to go bowling tonight, we are saying "yes" to that life situation; simultaneously, since we cannot be in more than one place at a time, we are saying " n o " to one or more other life situations. For example, we are saying " n o " to staying home with the wife or to going to a meeting or anything else that we could be doing tonight. It is important to be aware, feelingwise, which pull is the strongest. Is the "yes" pull toward going bowling stronger than the " n o " pull toward staying home with the wife? If the "yes" pull toward going bowling is the strongest, it means that we like to bow[ and that we go with free will. This has no emotional repercussions for the wife. If, on the other hand, the " n o " pull to staying home is the strongest and, as a consequence of that, we end up going bowling, that means that we dislike being with the wife. We may not care about bowling either, but as the lesser of two evils we choose to do it. An awareness that would be very helpful is that it is very difficult for one person alone to fulfill all the needs of another human being in their entirety. Our societal structure makes it impossible for a couple to spend twenty-four hours together over any long period of time. Therefore an individual must expect to have his or her needs met not entirely by the spouse, but also through work, professional associates, social friends, leisure activities, and through the ability to be alone. Since in a marital situation we are dealing with people, I would like to outline the predominant personalities of people who are involved or are about to be involved in marriage. I am using here Horney's concept of movement in determining and describing characteristic personalities. According to Horney, each person has three possible ways of relating to others and to himself. He can move toward people, against people, or away from people. Each movement is directly related to a basic feeling that the growing child experiences. This feeling, called basic anxiety, is a feeling of helplessness and isolation in a potentially hostile world. The person who feels mostly helplessness is the one who will move toward people and who expects people to help him. The person who moves against others experiences the world around him as potentially hostile and therefore expects to fight everyone. The person who moves away from people experiences mostly isolation and expects people not to bother him or to ignore him. According to Horney, these moves are used by both healthy and neurotic people in varying degrees of spontaneity and rigidity. I would like to go a step further and differentiate the healthy from the neurotic by naming personalities according to the predominant feeling. On the neurotic side we have the compliant or dependent person who feels helpless, the aggressive person who feels hostile, and the detached person who feels isolated. On the healthy side is the counterpart of the compliant, the empathic. This person feels mostly empathy and love for others. The healthy counterpart of the aggressive is the
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assertive. This person feeis mostly inner strength. The counterpart of the detached is the free. This person feels mostly inner freedom. The healthy personalities stem from a feeling of basic security that the growing child feels in his environment, a feeling that encompasses strength, love, and freedom. Needless to say, all of us have a little bit of all the above, although we experience predominantly one or more of them. Now we see the importance of being aware of the basic personalities of the people who are involved in marriage. It is customary to believe that opposites attract and sames repulse and that if we marry someone whose personality is opposite to ours, we shall have a successful marriage. This law is absolutely true in physics; in human relations this law may or may not be true. In other words, if an aggressive person marries a compliant person, they may fulfill each other's neurotic needs, although they may appear to have a harmonious life, since no one is tackling the relationship. On the other hand, an aggressive-compliant combination may make available other moves, resulting in a harmonious life in a deeper level. What is important, then, is availability of different moves. Another issue of great importance is the degree of conflicts that exists in each of the above personalities, as far as what movement to use; the conflict may be unconscious or it may be conscious, which makes it easier to handle. For example, if a person is compliant and his compliance is in conflict with his aggression, he may behave overtly in a compliant way, but he is definitely going to show aggressive tendencies. These tendencies will manifest themselves in different ways. Let us assume that an aggressive husband gives directions to his wife, who is compliant and conflicted with aggression, about meeting him at a certain restaurant for lunch. The wife, in her compliance, accepts the directions without any questions and without thorough understanding. When she is ready to leave she cannot get the car started and has to seek help. The car finally starts. She gets on her way, then makes the wrong turn, then forgets or realizes that she never really understood the name of the restaurant. In her helplessness she decides to return home and does not meet her husband. The husband in turn gets furious at her for not showing up. In his fury he forgets about eating lunch and decides to go home to find out what happened. When he gets home he does not b,other to ask what happened, but blasts at his wife. In her compliance, the wife apologizes, and nothing more happens. Nothing is resolved, and the result is utter frustration on both sides. A healthy counterpart of the above situation would be the following. The assertive husband gives his wife the directions and makes sure she understands them. The emphatic wife, through questions and other means, understands the directions. She is aware of the importance of being on time and of the pleasure of having lunch with her husband. She starts the trip early to prevent any possible delays, finds the restaurant, and meets her husband on time. He in turn acknowledges that his wife arrived uneventfully. It is Obvious that this is a fulfilling situation for both partners. Each pair of counterparts I have described has created certain attitudes that behaviorally may be difficult to differentiate. However, examining the inner motivations could help determine whether the behavior is healthy or neurotic. The aggressive behavior is determined by a hostile feeling toward others, whereas the assertive behavior is determined by an inner force to move the person ahead. Clinically they could be undistinguishable. Likewise, the compliant behavior is determined by a need to have
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others dictate the help, whereas the emphatic behavior is determined by a need to help others. The detached behavior is determined by a need not to get involved with others, whereas the free behavior dictates freedom to be involved in life situations in a meaningful way. Erich Fromm referred to detachment as freedom from life situations, whereas he called its counterpart the freedom for active participation in one's life. Before 1 get involved in the marital situation per se, I would like to discuss some of the motivations for getting married that people offer to themselves and to others while they are dating or engaged. This stage of the process I call premarital, i divide the motivations into three major categories: conscious, partly conscious, and unconscious. Conscious motivations are those that people are aware of at the time of the marriage. Unconscious motivations are those of which people are not aware. Motivations that are partly conscious indicate different degrees or depths of awareness. Unconscious motivations may become conscious through analytic work, and people do not experience them at the time of their marriage. The conscious motivations, I would also call superficial motivations, since they are used frequently by people in a plain conventional way, without deeper thought, or as rationalizations. Falling in love is a good reason for getting married, and different people talk about falling in love in different ways. Most of these are immature concepts, and far removed from the mature notion of love, which implies giving of oneself to the other person, rather than receiving from the other. Falling in love is quite often confused with infatuation, idealization of sexual or other qualities, or fulfillment of certain fantasies. In spiteof these, however, there are people who fall in love maturely. It was about time to get married, is another conscious motivation that may mean a number of different things, for example, complying to certain standards of the family or society, fear of remaining single with advancing age, genuine tiredness of single life, need for change, and so on. Meeting the right person is motivation that could be an intellectualization of falling in love. It may also mean that after a period of trying different relationships, the person finally is satisfying certain healthy or neurotic needs. Externalization plays a big role in helping us cope with threatening and conflicting life situations. Externalization means experiencing inner phenomena as happening via or in the outside world, passively or actively, and as a result considering the outside world responsible for these phenomena. Externalization is used by the people who experience their marriage to another person as something that "just happened" or as "mere luck." Although the process of externalization in these situations could be unconscious, the experience of "just happened" or "luck" is on a conscious level. The unconscious and partly conscious motivations I would call, for our purposes, deeper motivations, as they have a stronger emotional significance not only to the marriage but also to the relationship of the person to his environment in general. The first unconscious motivation is emulation ofpeers. A good example of this is a predominantly compliant woman in her early twenties who was the last in her peer group to still be single. She became anxious and got married. Interestingly enough, through her husband she moved into a different environment of friends who after a time started to get divorces. Being the last one to remain married she began to ask for a divorce. However, she did not get the divorce and became aware of her need to emulate her friends. She made a good adjustment to her marriage thereafter.
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Unhappiness at home is another unconscious or partly conscious motivation. This situation is frequently loaded with ambivalent feelings toward the nuclear family and not infrequently results in a marriage where the person unconsciously creates attitudes in the new family that are similar to the ones that lead him away from his home. The result of course is more unhappiness and frustration. This motivation is common to people who have conflicts between aggression and compliance. The healthy counterpart of this is preparation for mature heterosexual adjustment. Legalization o f premarital sex. Sexual taboos are still prevalent in our society in spite of the new sexual freedom. Detached people who need to avoid trouble at any cost would favor this motivation unconsciously. The healthy counterpart of this is using sex as a part of a total relationship. Exploitation o f spouse. This would be characteristic of the aggressive person, in this category belong the themes of many soap operas: the poor girl marries the rich guy, or aggressive parents force their children into a marriage of convenience or common interests. The spouse in these cases has identified with the aggressive attitudes of the parents. Dependency on spouse is characteristic of the compliant person. It is another soapopera theme with romantic overtones. The little princess is hoping to marry the superman who would take care of all her needs. Frustration is the rule in these marriages, unless of course the spouses have healthy elements in them which then would be responsible for the satisfying and fulfilling aspects of the union. This also happens frequently. Healthy identification with the parent of the same sex would lead to a fulfilling marital experience. Vicariousfiving through partner. An example of this is a thirty-year-old woman who experiences herself as helpless but unconsciously is very aggressive. She was married to a laywer who she helped, or rather forced, through law school. Once he got his degree she divorced him and met an unaccomplished engineer and helped (or forced) him to graduate. She then started to have difficulties with this second marriage. Her difficulties were partly resolved through analysis and she remained married. Need to please parents. Compliant or detached people would be more likely to get married with this unconscious motivation. The dynamics, however, are different for the compliant than for the detached person. In the case of the compliant person, it would be fear of being disliked or disapproved of by parents, whereas for the detached person the motto would be "Peace at any cost." Fear o f aloneness. Our society greatly discourages fulfillment with oneself and encourages sociability. Compliant and aggressive people have the greatest difficulty being alone, whereas detached people feel very comfortable being by themselves. The detached person would therefore not use this motivation for getting married. Challenge to conquer. Aggressive people would favor this motivation. They may set as their goal the pursuit of a person who is difficult to get either in terms of popularity or unavailability. The challenging and competitive aspect of this pursuit is very appealing to them. Once the person is conquered the pursuer loses interest. Desire for children or family. Some people think of marriage in terms of relating to the partner and establishing a meaningful relationship. Others, however, contemplate, from the inception of the marriage, the creation of a family. This may be an indication
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of using the partner or living vicariously through children, or it may be a healthy desire to have children. Social necessity or convenience. An example of this is a basically homosexual pianist who got married because he felt very uncomfortable each time there was a party after a concert and he went alone. Again I want to emphasize that these motivations were not conscious at the time of the marriage. Social necessity or convenience will be frequent among compliant or detached people. To defy parents. This motivation is common among aggressive persons. However, if these aggressive people also have unresolved compliant elements they may marry someone similar to the parents and thus perpetuate their frustrations. An example of this is the forty-year-old daughter of an alcoholic father who married three different husbands who were all alcoholics. The Freudian equivalents to some of the above would be unresolved by Oedipal complexes. To save face. An example of this is a couple who were dating for seventeen years and leading a very active life, so that their friends had lost track of the fact that they were not married and looked upon them as a couple. At some point they started to question their relationship. The woman, more so than the man, realized that after so many years of being together she could not face the world if she presented herself being separate from her partner. They both made a good adjustment to marriage and also had a fulfilling premarital relationship. Need to appear healthy. An example of this is a twenty-six-year-old man who had made a fairly good adjustment to single life. Marriage did not enter his mind seriously. When he found out that i was married he started to think about marriage because in his mind I represented the epitomy of health. I discouraged him from doing so, but he did anyway, while I was away on vacation. His first marriage was disastrous and ended in divorce. After considerable analytic work he married another woman and is leading a fulfilling life with her. Society frequently sends similar messages, namely, that people who are married after a certain age are well adjusted and healthy, whereas single people are not. Here again the overt behavior has less significance than the motivation behind it. Thirty-year-oldpanic. This phenomenon used to be more frequent, especially among women who reached their thirtieth birthday and prematurely started to experience traits indicative of old age, such as unattractiveness, slowing down, inefficiency, and so on. Need to share experiences. This covers a great variety of situations and sounds like a healthier movitation, again on an unconscious level, than all the previous ones, and in many instances it is. However, it could also be a neurotic need to use the partner as a sounding board or as an object for externalizations. The person may also feel tired of single life. I would like to indicate here that all the described unhealthy motivations have a healthy component attached to them and vice versa. The degree to which the partner is or will become aware of all his or her motivations for getting married will play an important part in having a predominantly frustrating or fulfilling marital relationship. The earlier the partner becomes aware of these motivations the better it is for setting the beginning of a healthy process. After the motivations for people to get married have been examined the actual
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marriage takes place and a new era for both partners begins. We can say that this is the second phase of what I previously called a process. The second phase tells us to a greater extent than the first whether the marriage is frustrating or fulfilling in nature. After the courtship and the novelty of the situation wear off, things become more or less appropriate to each person's major ways of relating, adjusting, and defending solutions. Here is where the real work begins. Many marriages are doomed to failure because they are based on false and misleading pretenses, when people feel that they have to be a certain way to make themselves more appealing to the partner. Once they "hook" the partner, so to speak, they change. What enters into the process of marriage are, among other things, what I call the psychological aspects of marriage. The following is a discussion of some of these. Communication in its simplest form, means giving and receiving messages. It can be verbal and nonverbal. Faulty communication is one of the major problems that exist in frustrating marriages. We all speak English, and maybe more languages, but in everyday living we give certain messagesthat the other person, unless he or she knows us well, cannot understand. And understanding the messages that are delivered by one spouse to the another is a must in a marital situation. This requires some effort, repetitiveness, sensitivity, and experience, and when it is accomplished it can create very fulfilling situations. Verbal communication is done by asking questions, explaining, tal king about specifics and not generalities, making stimulating statements, answering questions, asking counter questions, elaborating, and so on. Doing these things and learning each other's style can be difficult. However, the majority of problems between couples is created by nonverbal communication, which almost always is open to different interpretations. Nonverbal communication includes facial expressions, body movements, silences or oral sounds, inconsistent behavior, and the like. Communication can also be distinguished into direct (when 1 talk to you) and indirect (when I talk about you). Two important things that should be avoided to improve communication are reading between the lines and escalation. An example of the first is the following. A husband comes home from work in a hot afternoon and says to his wife: "1 feel thirsty." The wife heard in that that he expected her to drop everything that she was doing immediately and fix him a cold drink. An example of escalation is when a wife criticizes her husband for not taking care of his clothes and says, "It is not only you who is sloppy, your father is also, from what your mother has been telling me, and your three brothers are the same, and i think that all men are the same." Finally, I think it is important to be able to tell your wife directly, "1 love you," rather than talk to her about loving her. Mutuality. The fifty-fifty principle, or the more or less equal exchange, which is typical of all business transactions, should not really apply to marriage because in marriage it is not really applicable in its minutest details. Giving is very important in marriage and is strongly connected with mature love. Both partners must give to the other to the degree to which they are capable of giving, in a fulfilling marriage the pleasure of giving is equal to receiving, and, interestingly enough, the person who gives automatically feels that he is getting a lot and does not have to measure things in terms of concrete evidence. The measurement of the degree to which each partner is capable of giving is to be made in comparison to himself in other situations and at other times,
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and not in comparison to others. This will also indicate the degree to which that person could grow toward maturity. If these measurements are done in a businesslike fashion they are going to lead to much competitiveness, hurt, and frustration. They will either create a need to measure up to somebody else or result in utter resignation. Of course, if the partners have similar needs it is likely that they will experience similar mutualities. Let us say that both partners feel a need to remember each other's birthday and acknowledge it with some token. Then they both will do it and derive pleasure out of it. However, it is not absolutely important that they both have that same need. If, for example, the husband has that need and the wife does not, he could buy her a birthday card or present of some sort and not expect one in return. The wife, on the other hand, may like to surprise her husband by buying him theater tickets; she fulfills her mutuality in that way. The husband does not have to reciprocate in a similar fashion. Erich Fromm called that kind of relationship a personal relationship.in contrast to a business relationship. Therefore, in a fulfilling marriage mutuality is going to exist in one way or another. Free expression of feelings. Feelings are the essence of life, and availability and awareness of feelings is an indication of mental health. Feelings are basic in nature, and they may determine our thinking processes and our behavior. On the other hand, we may be able to express or withhold feelings according to our inner and outer needs. It is important for the marital couple to encourage each other to express how they feel, without causing each to feel burdened by the other's feelings. Each person is responsible for his own feelings, which are basic and endogenously generated. However, other people can elicit or provoke a feeling in us. Many externalizations can be used in the way feelings affect another person. Very frequent statements to that effect are, "You make me feel guilty," or "You make me hate you." In fact, nobody can make anybody feel anything, although, as I stated before, a person can provoke certain feelings in another. Feelings are sometimes very powerful and people may be afraid of them. In relation to the three neurotic basic personalities that I described before, feelings can be expressed or withheld as follows. The aggressive person would have no difficulty expressing anger, hostility, disgust, arrogance, and so on, but he would be inhibited in feeling and expressing love, kindness, empathy, and the like. The compliant person is the opposite, and the detached person would have difficulty with all feelings except perhaps isolation and freedom. We cannot put a value judgment on feelings and therefore cannot say that some feelings are wrong and others are right. Much frustration can be caused by moral approaches to the free expression of feelings. If we keep in mind that feelings are individual in nature and reflect only the person who has them and expresses them, we will feel very fulfilled by expressing our feelings and listening to our partner express his or hers. Finally, feelings can and do change; thus they determine a person's level of maturity. Also, two opposite feelings can coexist and thus may create ambivalence, conflict, wholesomeness, and so on. Assignment of functions. In a welt-organized family or marital relationship there is more or less of an understanding of who does what. In order for this to be meaningful and gratifying it should be done with mutual agreement and according to inner capabilities and efficiencies, rather than according to masculine or feminine role conceptions.
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Society has created a clear-cut concept of masculine and feminine roles, Generally, being aggressive means being masculine and being submissive means being feminine. These personality traits, as we saw, have nothing to do with gender but have something to do with the early interpersonal experiences of the person. Trying to understand the partner. This is the other goal of the previously mentioned verbal communication, and, when it is done, it creates a atmosphere of fulfillment. By "trying to understand" I mean the way the other person feels, his thinking process, his reasoning, his concepts, his knowledge, and so on, so that we can learn about him and from him. Opposite to that, and unfortunately frequent in marital disharmonies, is arguing, which means trying to prove that one person is right and the other person is wrong. Needless to say, arguing leads to utter frustration. The feeling tone of the exchange is not very important because some people become very involved when they present their point of view to others, whereas some people argue in a quiet and detached way. What is important is the motivation behind the discourse. Is the person trying to learn and understand or is the person trying to prove a point? Listening is another aspect of communication. It is very important because it helps us receive accurate messages and thence elicit appropriate responses. When we listen we hopefully are listening not only to the other person but also to our own productions. Unfortunately, in psychotherapeutic situations the word "talk" is used much more often than the word "listen." Frequently, when I see a husband or wife in consultation he or she will say to me, "i'd like to bring my husband (or wife) so that you can also talk to him (or her)." Then I say, "Yes, I would like to see your spouse to listen to what he (or she) has to say." A very frustrating situation is when neither partner is capable of listening to the other. They both talk at once and are at each other's throat without knowing what the other person is saying. Escalations are frequently used in this situation. Sharing. Here again the fifty-fifty principle cannot apply; instead, to the degree to which each spouse feels free to share, he or she should do so. Sharing involves feelings, thoughts, actions, decisions, everyday pleasant and unpleasant experiences, secrets, and so on. Sharing is frequently misunderstood by couples as meaning that they must do things together all the time. Of course, if the relationship is a predominantly fulfilling one the couple will have all the reasons in the world to want to do as many things as possible together. The opposite is true when the relationship is predominantly aggravating. Adjustments. These are necessary because the creation of a new family, like every new life situation, requires some adjustments, in marriage, adjustments may include changes, emphasizing of certain attitudes, diminishing of other attitudes, and so on. Compromising. Fortunately, the nature of most things in life is flexible enough for a number of different alternatives to be considered whenever there is a difference in a point of view about something that requires that some action be taken. Second bests can be considered. The flexibility or rigidity of the personalities involved are very significant, especially when there are a lot of differences. Two people can be as rigid as they want if they both agree on something. The relationship then can be good. Complementing means using each other's qualities to make a situation more complete. Let us assume that the one spouse has a creative mind and the other has a prac-
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tical mind. The first could use the creativity in terms of ideas and the other could implement those ideas. The opposite is using the qualities that are lacking in one person for demeaning or destructive purposcs. For example, the practically minded person might find the other's creative ideas immature or stupid. The first situation will create great satisfaction and the second will create frustration. Supporting is particularly necessary when one spouse undertakes a difficult task, is engaged in a precarious situation, or has made a mistake. An extension of this on a deeper level would be supporting the person's constructive forces which are struggling with neurotic processes. The opposite of this is criticism. However, criticism can be constructive if it aims at helping the other improve. Destructive criticism aims at proving the other to be incompetent. Doing things independent/y can be a healthy situation when it is accompanied by sharing experiences and is done with mutual consent. It could be questionable if it is done too frequently and especially without sharing. Then it might mean that being together is uncomfortable and that being away from the spouse is more fulfilling. Wholehearted participation is considered by Horney a criterion of good mental health and an ultimate goal of psychoanalytic therapy, in fact, it is a very difficult thing to reach through growth. Most major decisions are invested with ambivalent feelings, and wholehearted participation in a decision means the ability to relinquish one set of feelings and devote oneself to the other. It also implies relative freedom from conflict and ability to execute one's free choice. A final aspect of the marital situation that I want to tackle is the sexual relationship of the marital partners. Since the psychoanalytic discoveries of Freud and the beginning of the 20th century, sex has played an important role in interpersonal relationships and psychotherapeutic situations, i want to make clear that by sex I do not mean only sexual intercourse. I am speaking of it in a much broader context. Sex can frequently be a mirror of the predominant personality of an individual. Disturbed sexual relations are a result of an underlying basic or neurotic disturbance, rather than the cause of a neurosis or a mental disturbance. I try to examine the sexual relationship of a couple as holistically as possible. The new information that modern approaches to sexual problems have given us indicates that a number of sexual difficulties are due to preconceived, rigid notions about masculinity, femininity, sexual behavior, role playing, or simple misinformation about the anatomy and physiology of the sexual organs. For example, it is customary to consider activity in sex or heterosexual pursuit as being a normal male attitude and to consider passivity a normal female one. I think passivity is a misnomer; I believe that all humans are active in nature, activity being an indication of life. The basic movement away from people is more often experienced as passivity than is moving toward people or complying. In examining the sexual life of a couple it is important to explore, in as much detail as possible, how sexuality is manifested from the beginning to the end; the mechanics of sex; the feelings, thoughts, and behavior of the partners; and their actions and reactions. Important issues to be considered are preferences that people have and areas of openness or inhibition. In these i include preferences for darkness or light, hour of the day, nudity versus being partly or fully clothed, separate beds versus one bed, fulfillment of certain conditions that may or may not be obsessive-compulsive in nature,
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certain positions or variations, talking versus silence, using rough words versus affectionate words, frequency of sex, and quality of the sexual interactions. We can see that there is a vast variety of possibilities that exist for changing or improving any feeling of sexual stagnation or lack of fulfillment in sex. Such improvements will affect positively the marital relationship as a whole. It would take an extremely rigid or unhealthy person not to be able to assume some of the above-mentioned varieties, and in that sense I could say that the sexual behavior alone could be an indicator of a predominantly healthy or neurotic personality. To summarize, 1 have described general concepts that apply to marriage, personalities that are involved, premarital motivations that lead to marriage, and aspects of the marital process. If the marriage at any point in the process is taken for granted or is experienced as stagnating it might be indicative of an impending frustration with subsequent disruption. If, on the other hand, the relationship is continuously in focus with new awareness and insights it would be indicative of movement and maturation. I hope that I was able to indicate that the fulfilling marital relationship is an ongoing process. Leonidas Samouilidis, M.D.
MARITAL RELATIONSHIPS: FRUSTRATION AND FULFILL.MENT* The title I chose for this paper is "Marital Relationships: Frustration and Fulfillment," instead of, as one might expect, "Marital Relationships: Frustration or Fulfillment." This puts us right from the beginning into Karen Horney's dialectic and holistic approach, which conceives of two opposites - in this case the frustration and the fulfillment - merging harmoniously, rather than being in conflict. The breaking down of a life situation, such as marriage, into different components and the harmonious merging of these components, will result in a truly meaningful whole. It also means in practical terms that people who are married or who are anticipating marriage should expect it to be partly a frustrating and partly a fulfilling experience. What would describe the total nature of the marital relationship would be the degree to which each marital partner experiences frustration or fulfillment. It is generally easy to say that the more neurotic the person is, the more frustration he or she will experience, and that the healthier the person is, the more fulfillment he or she will feel. However, this is a rather narrow generalization; it is important for us to be aware that marriage is a process and not a static end. By "process" I mean something that has a beginning, that is dynamic in nature, that requires developments and fluctuations, and that finally matures. When people experience marriage as a process they do not feel so easily discouraged, rebellious, or defiant when they first encounter difficulties. It is a sad state of affairs when people think of their marriage either as a static end or in any other negative way. For example, one patient of mine said he experienced his marriage as "the epitomy of boredom." He tried to cope with the situation not by looking into the marriage itself but by looking outside it, by having consecutive affairs which after a while ended up being as boring and meaningless as his marriage. I shall discuss marriage from a holistic point of view, a point of view that was Horney's predominant approach to people and the psychological aspects of life. When an individual gets involved in a marriage, he or she brings along all past experiences, all conscious and unconscious the character traits, a whole variety of. feelings and thoughts, and the learned behavior from the nuclear family. Each individual must be aware that their spouse~also brings along those same things, whether their experiences have been similar or dissimilar. It is important for the marital couple to be aware that by getting married they are creating a new family constellation that is probably going to be different from the nuclear family and therefore that attitudes of the old family are going to be forgotten, changed, or modified and new attitudes developed. A not infrequent situation is when a husband repeatedly tells his wife, "But my mother used to do this, in that way." The wife feels she has been compared to the mother and found inferior.
*Presented in the Program of Public Education Lectures, 1974-1975, at the Karen Horney Clinic. 365
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She may react to this in a number of different ways. For example, she may try harder and harder to keep up with mother's ways of doing things or she may rebel against them. However, to forget, change, or modify old attitudes, some of which are traditionally deeply rooted, is not very easy. However, through the concept of the process it becomes much easier. Another important issue that we apply to ourselves in all decision making, and certainly in marriage, is the awareness of the so-called yes-no pull. Each time we decide to do something, for instance, to go bowling tonight, we are saying "yes" to that life situation; simultaneously, since we cannot be in more than one place at a time, we are saying " n o " to one or more other life situations. For example, we are saying " n o " to staying home with the wife or to going to a meeting or anything else that we could be doing tonight. It is important to be aware, feelingwise, which pull is the strongest. Is the "yes" pull toward going bowling stronger than the " n o " pull toward staying home with the wife? If the "yes" pull toward going bowling is the strongest, it means that we like to bow[ and that we go with free will. This has no emotional repercussions for the wife. If, on the other hand, the " n o " pull to staying home is the strongest and, as a consequence of that, we end up going bowling, that means that we dislike being with the wife. We may not care about bowling either, but as the lesser of two evils we choose to do it. An awareness that would be very helpful is that it is very difficult for one person alone to fulfill all the needs of another human being in their entirety. Our societal structure makes it impossible for a couple to spend twenty-four hours together over any long period of time. Therefore an individual must expect to have his or her needs met not entirely by the spouse, but also through work, professional associates, social friends, leisure activities, and through the ability to be alone. Since in a marital situation we are dealing with people, I would like to outline the predominant personalities of people who are involved or are about to be involved in marriage. I am using here Horney's concept of movement in determining and describing characteristic personalities. According to Horney, each person has three possible ways of relating to others and to himself. He can move toward people, against people, or away from people. Each movement is directly related to a basic feeling that the growing child experiences. This feeling, called basic anxiety, is a feeling of helplessness and isolation in a potentially hostile world. The person who feels mostly helplessness is the one who will move toward people and who expects people to help him. The person who moves against others experiences the world around him as potentially hostile and therefore expects to fight everyone. The person who moves away from people experiences mostly isolation and expects people not to bother him or to ignore him. According to Horney, these moves are used by both healthy and neurotic people in varying degrees of spontaneity and rigidity. I would like to go a step further and differentiate the healthy from the neurotic by naming personalities according to the predominant feeling. On the neurotic side we have the compliant or dependent person who feels helpless, the aggressive person who feels hostile, and the detached person who feels isolated. On the healthy side is the counterpart of the compliant, the empathic. This person feels mostly empathy and love for others. The healthy counterpart of the aggressive is the
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assertive. This person feeis mostly inner strength. The counterpart of the detached is the free. This person feels mostly inner freedom. The healthy personalities stem from a feeling of basic security that the growing child feels in his environment, a feeling that encompasses strength, love, and freedom. Needless to say, all of us have a little bit of all the above, although we experience predominantly one or more of them. Now we see the importance of being aware of the basic personalities of the people who are involved in marriage. It is customary to believe that opposites attract and sames repulse and that if we marry someone whose personality is opposite to ours, we shall have a successful marriage. This law is absolutely true in physics; in human relations this law may or may not be true. In other words, if an aggressive person marries a compliant person, they may fulfill each other's neurotic needs, although they may appear to have a harmonious life, since no one is tackling the relationship. On the other hand, an aggressive-compliant combination may make available other moves, resulting in a harmonious life in a deeper level. What is important, then, is availability of different moves. Another issue of great importance is the degree of conflicts that exists in each of the above personalities, as far as what movement to use; the conflict may be unconscious or it may be conscious, which makes it easier to handle. For example, if a person is compliant and his compliance is in conflict with his aggression, he may behave overtly in a compliant way, but he is definitely going to show aggressive tendencies. These tendencies will manifest themselves in different ways. Let us assume that an aggressive husband gives directions to his wife, who is compliant and conflicted with aggression, about meeting him at a certain restaurant for lunch. The wife, in her compliance, accepts the directions without any questions and without thorough understanding. When she is ready to leave she cannot get the car started and has to seek help. The car finally starts. She gets on her way, then makes the wrong turn, then forgets or realizes that she never really understood the name of the restaurant. In her helplessness she decides to return home and does not meet her husband. The husband in turn gets furious at her for not showing up. In his fury he forgets about eating lunch and decides to go home to find out what happened. When he gets home he does not b,other to ask what happened, but blasts at his wife. In her compliance, the wife apologizes, and nothing more happens. Nothing is resolved, and the result is utter frustration on both sides. A healthy counterpart of the above situation would be the following. The assertive husband gives his wife the directions and makes sure she understands them. The emphatic wife, through questions and other means, understands the directions. She is aware of the importance of being on time and of the pleasure of having lunch with her husband. She starts the trip early to prevent any possible delays, finds the restaurant, and meets her husband on time. He in turn acknowledges that his wife arrived uneventfully. It is Obvious that this is a fulfilling situation for both partners. Each pair of counterparts I have described has created certain attitudes that behaviorally may be difficult to differentiate. However, examining the inner motivations could help determine whether the behavior is healthy or neurotic. The aggressive behavior is determined by a hostile feeling toward others, whereas the assertive behavior is determined by an inner force to move the person ahead. Clinically they could be undistinguishable. Likewise, the compliant behavior is determined by a need to have
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others dictate the help, whereas the emphatic behavior is determined by a need to help others. The detached behavior is determined by a need not to get involved with others, whereas the free behavior dictates freedom to be involved in life situations in a meaningful way. Erich Fromm referred to detachment as freedom from life situations, whereas he called its counterpart the freedom for active participation in one's life. Before 1 get involved in the marital situation per se, I would like to discuss some of the motivations for getting married that people offer to themselves and to others while they are dating or engaged. This stage of the process I call premarital, i divide the motivations into three major categories: conscious, partly conscious, and unconscious. Conscious motivations are those that people are aware of at the time of the marriage. Unconscious motivations are those of which people are not aware. Motivations that are partly conscious indicate different degrees or depths of awareness. Unconscious motivations may become conscious through analytic work, and people do not experience them at the time of their marriage. The conscious motivations, I would also call superficial motivations, since they are used frequently by people in a plain conventional way, without deeper thought, or as rationalizations. Falling in love is a good reason for getting married, and different people talk about falling in love in different ways. Most of these are immature concepts, and far removed from the mature notion of love, which implies giving of oneself to the other person, rather than receiving from the other. Falling in love is quite often confused with infatuation, idealization of sexual or other qualities, or fulfillment of certain fantasies. In spiteof these, however, there are people who fall in love maturely. It was about time to get married, is another conscious motivation that may mean a number of different things, for example, complying to certain standards of the family or society, fear of remaining single with advancing age, genuine tiredness of single life, need for change, and so on. Meeting the right person is motivation that could be an intellectualization of falling in love. It may also mean that after a period of trying different relationships, the person finally is satisfying certain healthy or neurotic needs. Externalization plays a big role in helping us cope with threatening and conflicting life situations. Externalization means experiencing inner phenomena as happening via or in the outside world, passively or actively, and as a result considering the outside world responsible for these phenomena. Externalization is used by the people who experience their marriage to another person as something that "just happened" or as "mere luck." Although the process of externalization in these situations could be unconscious, the experience of "just happened" or "luck" is on a conscious level. The unconscious and partly conscious motivations I would call, for our purposes, deeper motivations, as they have a stronger emotional significance not only to the marriage but also to the relationship of the person to his environment in general. The first unconscious motivation is emulation ofpeers. A good example of this is a predominantly compliant woman in her early twenties who was the last in her peer group to still be single. She became anxious and got married. Interestingly enough, through her husband she moved into a different environment of friends who after a time started to get divorces. Being the last one to remain married she began to ask for a divorce. However, she did not get the divorce and became aware of her need to emulate her friends. She made a good adjustment to her marriage thereafter.
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Unhappiness at home is another unconscious or partly conscious motivation. This situation is frequently loaded with ambivalent feelings toward the nuclear family and not infrequently results in a marriage where the person unconsciously creates attitudes in the new family that are similar to the ones that lead him away from his home. The result of course is more unhappiness and frustration. This motivation is common to people who have conflicts between aggression and compliance. The healthy counterpart of this is preparation for mature heterosexual adjustment. Legalization o f premarital sex. Sexual taboos are still prevalent in our society in spite of the new sexual freedom. Detached people who need to avoid trouble at any cost would favor this motivation unconsciously. The healthy counterpart of this is using sex as a part of a total relationship. Exploitation o f spouse. This would be characteristic of the aggressive person, in this category belong the themes of many soap operas: the poor girl marries the rich guy, or aggressive parents force their children into a marriage of convenience or common interests. The spouse in these cases has identified with the aggressive attitudes of the parents. Dependency on spouse is characteristic of the compliant person. It is another soapopera theme with romantic overtones. The little princess is hoping to marry the superman who would take care of all her needs. Frustration is the rule in these marriages, unless of course the spouses have healthy elements in them which then would be responsible for the satisfying and fulfilling aspects of the union. This also happens frequently. Healthy identification with the parent of the same sex would lead to a fulfilling marital experience. Vicariousfiving through partner. An example of this is a thirty-year-old woman who experiences herself as helpless but unconsciously is very aggressive. She was married to a laywer who she helped, or rather forced, through law school. Once he got his degree she divorced him and met an unaccomplished engineer and helped (or forced) him to graduate. She then started to have difficulties with this second marriage. Her difficulties were partly resolved through analysis and she remained married. Need to please parents. Compliant or detached people would be more likely to get married with this unconscious motivation. The dynamics, however, are different for the compliant than for the detached person. In the case of the compliant person, it would be fear of being disliked or disapproved of by parents, whereas for the detached person the motto would be "Peace at any cost." Fear o f aloneness. Our society greatly discourages fulfillment with oneself and encourages sociability. Compliant and aggressive people have the greatest difficulty being alone, whereas detached people feel very comfortable being by themselves. The detached person would therefore not use this motivation for getting married. Challenge to conquer. Aggressive people would favor this motivation. They may set as their goal the pursuit of a person who is difficult to get either in terms of popularity or unavailability. The challenging and competitive aspect of this pursuit is very appealing to them. Once the person is conquered the pursuer loses interest. Desire for children or family. Some people think of marriage in terms of relating to the partner and establishing a meaningful relationship. Others, however, contemplate, from the inception of the marriage, the creation of a family. This may be an indication
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of using the partner or living vicariously through children, or it may be a healthy desire to have children. Social necessity or convenience. An example of this is a basically homosexual pianist who got married because he felt very uncomfortable each time there was a party after a concert and he went alone. Again I want to emphasize that these motivations were not conscious at the time of the marriage. Social necessity or convenience will be frequent among compliant or detached people. To defy parents. This motivation is common among aggressive persons. However, if these aggressive people also have unresolved compliant elements they may marry someone similar to the parents and thus perpetuate their frustrations. An example of this is the forty-year-old daughter of an alcoholic father who married three different husbands who were all alcoholics. The Freudian equivalents to some of the above would be unresolved by Oedipal complexes. To save face. An example of this is a couple who were dating for seventeen years and leading a very active life, so that their friends had lost track of the fact that they were not married and looked upon them as a couple. At some point they started to question their relationship. The woman, more so than the man, realized that after so many years of being together she could not face the world if she presented herself being separate from her partner. They both made a good adjustment to marriage and also had a fulfilling premarital relationship. Need to appear healthy. An example of this is a twenty-six-year-old man who had made a fairly good adjustment to single life. Marriage did not enter his mind seriously. When he found out that i was married he started to think about marriage because in his mind I represented the epitomy of health. I discouraged him from doing so, but he did anyway, while I was away on vacation. His first marriage was disastrous and ended in divorce. After considerable analytic work he married another woman and is leading a fulfilling life with her. Society frequently sends similar messages, namely, that people who are married after a certain age are well adjusted and healthy, whereas single people are not. Here again the overt behavior has less significance than the motivation behind it. Thirty-year-oldpanic. This phenomenon used to be more frequent, especially among women who reached their thirtieth birthday and prematurely started to experience traits indicative of old age, such as unattractiveness, slowing down, inefficiency, and so on. Need to share experiences. This covers a great variety of situations and sounds like a healthier movitation, again on an unconscious level, than all the previous ones, and in many instances it is. However, it could also be a neurotic need to use the partner as a sounding board or as an object for externalizations. The person may also feel tired of single life. I would like to indicate here that all the described unhealthy motivations have a healthy component attached to them and vice versa. The degree to which the partner is or will become aware of all his or her motivations for getting married will play an important part in having a predominantly frustrating or fulfilling marital relationship. The earlier the partner becomes aware of these motivations the better it is for setting the beginning of a healthy process. After the motivations for people to get married have been examined the actual
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marriage takes place and a new era for both partners begins. We can say that this is the second phase of what I previously called a process. The second phase tells us to a greater extent than the first whether the marriage is frustrating or fulfilling in nature. After the courtship and the novelty of the situation wear off, things become more or less appropriate to each person's major ways of relating, adjusting, and defending solutions. Here is where the real work begins. Many marriages are doomed to failure because they are based on false and misleading pretenses, when people feel that they have to be a certain way to make themselves more appealing to the partner. Once they "hook" the partner, so to speak, they change. What enters into the process of marriage are, among other things, what I call the psychological aspects of marriage. The following is a discussion of some of these. Communication in its simplest form, means giving and receiving messages. It can be verbal and nonverbal. Faulty communication is one of the major problems that exist in frustrating marriages. We all speak English, and maybe more languages, but in everyday living we give certain messagesthat the other person, unless he or she knows us well, cannot understand. And understanding the messages that are delivered by one spouse to the another is a must in a marital situation. This requires some effort, repetitiveness, sensitivity, and experience, and when it is accomplished it can create very fulfilling situations. Verbal communication is done by asking questions, explaining, tal king about specifics and not generalities, making stimulating statements, answering questions, asking counter questions, elaborating, and so on. Doing these things and learning each other's style can be difficult. However, the majority of problems between couples is created by nonverbal communication, which almost always is open to different interpretations. Nonverbal communication includes facial expressions, body movements, silences or oral sounds, inconsistent behavior, and the like. Communication can also be distinguished into direct (when 1 talk to you) and indirect (when I talk about you). Two important things that should be avoided to improve communication are reading between the lines and escalation. An example of the first is the following. A husband comes home from work in a hot afternoon and says to his wife: "1 feel thirsty." The wife heard in that that he expected her to drop everything that she was doing immediately and fix him a cold drink. An example of escalation is when a wife criticizes her husband for not taking care of his clothes and says, "It is not only you who is sloppy, your father is also, from what your mother has been telling me, and your three brothers are the same, and i think that all men are the same." Finally, I think it is important to be able to tell your wife directly, "1 love you," rather than talk to her about loving her. Mutuality. The fifty-fifty principle, or the more or less equal exchange, which is typical of all business transactions, should not really apply to marriage because in marriage it is not really applicable in its minutest details. Giving is very important in marriage and is strongly connected with mature love. Both partners must give to the other to the degree to which they are capable of giving, in a fulfilling marriage the pleasure of giving is equal to receiving, and, interestingly enough, the person who gives automatically feels that he is getting a lot and does not have to measure things in terms of concrete evidence. The measurement of the degree to which each partner is capable of giving is to be made in comparison to himself in other situations and at other times,
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and not in comparison to others. This will also indicate the degree to which that person could grow toward maturity. If these measurements are done in a businesslike fashion they are going to lead to much competitiveness, hurt, and frustration. They will either create a need to measure up to somebody else or result in utter resignation. Of course, if the partners have similar needs it is likely that they will experience similar mutualities. Let us say that both partners feel a need to remember each other's birthday and acknowledge it with some token. Then they both will do it and derive pleasure out of it. However, it is not absolutely important that they both have that same need. If, for example, the husband has that need and the wife does not, he could buy her a birthday card or present of some sort and not expect one in return. The wife, on the other hand, may like to surprise her husband by buying him theater tickets; she fulfills her mutuality in that way. The husband does not have to reciprocate in a similar fashion. Erich Fromm called that kind of relationship a personal relationship.in contrast to a business relationship. Therefore, in a fulfilling marriage mutuality is going to exist in one way or another. Free expression of feelings. Feelings are the essence of life, and availability and awareness of feelings is an indication of mental health. Feelings are basic in nature, and they may determine our thinking processes and our behavior. On the other hand, we may be able to express or withhold feelings according to our inner and outer needs. It is important for the marital couple to encourage each other to express how they feel, without causing each to feel burdened by the other's feelings. Each person is responsible for his own feelings, which are basic and endogenously generated. However, other people can elicit or provoke a feeling in us. Many externalizations can be used in the way feelings affect another person. Very frequent statements to that effect are, "You make me feel guilty," or "You make me hate you." In fact, nobody can make anybody feel anything, although, as I stated before, a person can provoke certain feelings in another. Feelings are sometimes very powerful and people may be afraid of them. In relation to the three neurotic basic personalities that I described before, feelings can be expressed or withheld as follows. The aggressive person would have no difficulty expressing anger, hostility, disgust, arrogance, and so on, but he would be inhibited in feeling and expressing love, kindness, empathy, and the like. The compliant person is the opposite, and the detached person would have difficulty with all feelings except perhaps isolation and freedom. We cannot put a value judgment on feelings and therefore cannot say that some feelings are wrong and others are right. Much frustration can be caused by moral approaches to the free expression of feelings. If we keep in mind that feelings are individual in nature and reflect only the person who has them and expresses them, we will feel very fulfilled by expressing our feelings and listening to our partner express his or hers. Finally, feelings can and do change; thus they determine a person's level of maturity. Also, two opposite feelings can coexist and thus may create ambivalence, conflict, wholesomeness, and so on. Assignment of functions. In a welt-organized family or marital relationship there is more or less of an understanding of who does what. In order for this to be meaningful and gratifying it should be done with mutual agreement and according to inner capabilities and efficiencies, rather than according to masculine or feminine role conceptions.
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Society has created a clear-cut concept of masculine and feminine roles, Generally, being aggressive means being masculine and being submissive means being feminine. These personality traits, as we saw, have nothing to do with gender but have something to do with the early interpersonal experiences of the person. Trying to understand the partner. This is the other goal of the previously mentioned verbal communication, and, when it is done, it creates a atmosphere of fulfillment. By "trying to understand" I mean the way the other person feels, his thinking process, his reasoning, his concepts, his knowledge, and so on, so that we can learn about him and from him. Opposite to that, and unfortunately frequent in marital disharmonies, is arguing, which means trying to prove that one person is right and the other person is wrong. Needless to say, arguing leads to utter frustration. The feeling tone of the exchange is not very important because some people become very involved when they present their point of view to others, whereas some people argue in a quiet and detached way. What is important is the motivation behind the discourse. Is the person trying to learn and understand or is the person trying to prove a point? Listening is another aspect of communication. It is very important because it helps us receive accurate messages and thence elicit appropriate responses. When we listen we hopefully are listening not only to the other person but also to our own productions. Unfortunately, in psychotherapeutic situations the word "talk" is used much more often than the word "listen." Frequently, when I see a husband or wife in consultation he or she will say to me, "i'd like to bring my husband (or wife) so that you can also talk to him (or her)." Then I say, "Yes, I would like to see your spouse to listen to what he (or she) has to say." A very frustrating situation is when neither partner is capable of listening to the other. They both talk at once and are at each other's throat without knowing what the other person is saying. Escalations are frequently used in this situation. Sharing. Here again the fifty-fifty principle cannot apply; instead, to the degree to which each spouse feels free to share, he or she should do so. Sharing involves feelings, thoughts, actions, decisions, everyday pleasant and unpleasant experiences, secrets, and so on. Sharing is frequently misunderstood by couples as meaning that they must do things together all the time. Of course, if the relationship is a predominantly fulfilling one the couple will have all the reasons in the world to want to do as many things as possible together. The opposite is true when the relationship is predominantly aggravating. Adjustments. These are necessary because the creation of a new family, like every new life situation, requires some adjustments, in marriage, adjustments may include changes, emphasizing of certain attitudes, diminishing of other attitudes, and so on. Compromising. Fortunately, the nature of most things in life is flexible enough for a number of different alternatives to be considered whenever there is a difference in a point of view about something that requires that some action be taken. Second bests can be considered. The flexibility or rigidity of the personalities involved are very significant, especially when there are a lot of differences. Two people can be as rigid as they want if they both agree on something. The relationship then can be good. Complementing means using each other's qualities to make a situation more complete. Let us assume that the one spouse has a creative mind and the other has a prac-
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tical mind. The first could use the creativity in terms of ideas and the other could implement those ideas. The opposite is using the qualities that are lacking in one person for demeaning or destructive purposcs. For example, the practically minded person might find the other's creative ideas immature or stupid. The first situation will create great satisfaction and the second will create frustration. Supporting is particularly necessary when one spouse undertakes a difficult task, is engaged in a precarious situation, or has made a mistake. An extension of this on a deeper level would be supporting the person's constructive forces which are struggling with neurotic processes. The opposite of this is criticism. However, criticism can be constructive if it aims at helping the other improve. Destructive criticism aims at proving the other to be incompetent. Doing things independent/y can be a healthy situation when it is accompanied by sharing experiences and is done with mutual consent. It could be questionable if it is done too frequently and especially without sharing. Then it might mean that being together is uncomfortable and that being away from the spouse is more fulfilling. Wholehearted participation is considered by Horney a criterion of good mental health and an ultimate goal of psychoanalytic therapy, in fact, it is a very difficult thing to reach through growth. Most major decisions are invested with ambivalent feelings, and wholehearted participation in a decision means the ability to relinquish one set of feelings and devote oneself to the other. It also implies relative freedom from conflict and ability to execute one's free choice. A final aspect of the marital situation that I want to tackle is the sexual relationship of the marital partners. Since the psychoanalytic discoveries of Freud and the beginning of the 20th century, sex has played an important role in interpersonal relationships and psychotherapeutic situations, i want to make clear that by sex I do not mean only sexual intercourse. I am speaking of it in a much broader context. Sex can frequently be a mirror of the predominant personality of an individual. Disturbed sexual relations are a result of an underlying basic or neurotic disturbance, rather than the cause of a neurosis or a mental disturbance. I try to examine the sexual relationship of a couple as holistically as possible. The new information that modern approaches to sexual problems have given us indicates that a number of sexual difficulties are due to preconceived, rigid notions about masculinity, femininity, sexual behavior, role playing, or simple misinformation about the anatomy and physiology of the sexual organs. For example, it is customary to consider activity in sex or heterosexual pursuit as being a normal male attitude and to consider passivity a normal female one. I think passivity is a misnomer; I believe that all humans are active in nature, activity being an indication of life. The basic movement away from people is more often experienced as passivity than is moving toward people or complying. In examining the sexual life of a couple it is important to explore, in as much detail as possible, how sexuality is manifested from the beginning to the end; the mechanics of sex; the feelings, thoughts, and behavior of the partners; and their actions and reactions. Important issues to be considered are preferences that people have and areas of openness or inhibition. In these i include preferences for darkness or light, hour of the day, nudity versus being partly or fully clothed, separate beds versus one bed, fulfillment of certain conditions that may or may not be obsessive-compulsive in nature,
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certain positions or variations, talking versus silence, using rough words versus affectionate words, frequency of sex, and quality of the sexual interactions. We can see that there is a vast variety of possibilities that exist for changing or improving any feeling of sexual stagnation or lack of fulfillment in sex. Such improvements will affect positively the marital relationship as a whole. It would take an extremely rigid or unhealthy person not to be able to assume some of the above-mentioned varieties, and in that sense I could say that the sexual behavior alone could be an indicator of a predominantly healthy or neurotic personality. To summarize, 1 have described general concepts that apply to marriage, personalities that are involved, premarital motivations that lead to marriage, and aspects of the marital process. If the marriage at any point in the process is taken for granted or is experienced as stagnating it might be indicative of an impending frustration with subsequent disruption. If, on the other hand, the relationship is continuously in focus with new awareness and insights it would be indicative of movement and maturation. I hope that I was able to indicate that the fulfilling marital relationship is an ongoing process. Leonidas Samouilidis, M.D.
