John began by telling me that he didn’t want to marry his fiancee. “I love my girlfriend, we’ve been together for three years. Some days getting married seems like the best. Other days I cannot bear to think about it.” I asked him what the feelings were around these two contradictory positions.
He struggled – stuck to the narrative and said he didn’t understand it – he loved his girlfriend.
Over the weeks months he revealed scenarios that demonstrated his ambivalent attachment to his girlfriend. He wanted to be loved but at other times couldn’t tolerate it. His recollection of the first five years of his early life were patchy. He dismissed them as irrelevant.
After going to a school friend’s wedding in his hometown – he came to the session distraught. Not about the wedding. He had had a rare conversation with his mother about his elder brother. She had had an elder son who died at a year old. And John was born a year after his death. He was a Replacement Child
John lay helpless in his mother, in the womb liquid, then came out into an atmosphere of death & life. The young psyche only able to contemplate a black and white binary was confronted by death and life. His mother the rescuer who gave him life, and the symbol of creating a previous death: which he might also experience. A Replacement that might fail.
Men can idealise women their mothers for giving them life. And hate them for it. Depending on how this is emotionally negotiated. But wih the spectre of a previous death – this creates an unbearable tension. Again being associative the baby’s psyche interprets the mother as life and death. Rescuer and Killer.
Naturally John took his birth scenario and associatively recreated it in his adult romantic relationships.
Love and Fear towards women. Go to … Get away
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