Deconstruction of Traditional One-Person Psychology Concepts

In the last two chapters, we laid the groundwork to distinguish between traditional one-person and two-person relational psychologies. The astute reader will recognize that the terms that are used within each theoretical model may, in fact, ultimately complicate one’s ability to distinguish between the two psychologies. As Bornstein (2001) states, “Many psychoanalytic terms and concepts became so widely know that they evolved into colloquialisms, recognized even by persons with little or no formal exposure to psychology.” In fact, some of the two-person relational literature often retains the language of the traditional one-person model. Nonetheless, it is critical to clarify the differences in the meaning of the terms used in one-person psychology, which continue to prevail in the psychotherapeutic lexicon, as ultimately these terms evolved to represent two-person relational model constructs. In this regard, there are numerous everyday examples involving clinicians using traditional one-person psychology concepts to understand another person’s behaviors, as if the clinician clairvoyantly knew the nature of the patient’s unconscious. For example, a clinician may describe an adolescent girl who dates older men as having “father/daddy issues,” or a male adolescent who struggles with intense closeness and “neediness” in his relationships as having “mother/mommy issues.” These comments forestall a true understanding of the patient for several reasons. First, the clinician—in using these terms—assumes that the patient has unconscious intrapsychic conflicts (e.g., maladaptive behaviors represent ego defense mechanisms against the pressures from intrapsychic conflict). Second, the clinician fails to take into account the many aspects of the adolescent’s innate temperament , cognition, and internal working models of attachment that influenced his or her relational patterns. Third, in the case of the adolescent girl who dates older men, it is important to consider that in early childhood, she may have had the emotional availability and affective attunement needed provided by warm and caring men in her family (e.g., father, brothers, uncles, cousins, neighbors) and limited affective attunement from the women in her family. As such, her development occurred in an environment where older men may have represented, in a nonconscious way, implicit relational knowings, as safe and caring and likely adaptive. Herein, her wish for closeness to older men to provide the needed affective attunement may have been adaptive in spite of the age difference, as true compatibility is not a simple issue of biology or social construct. Fourth, this also forestalls the fact that for another adolescent, an older man may represent maladaptive childhood experiences of demanding and abusive men that provided some support to her, seen in disorganized forms of attachment. Thus, in the case of the adolescent with a disorganized attachment style, her choice of older men reflects a return to maladaptive implicit relational knowings during adolescence. For the adolescent boy, his clinginess to women may also represent cocreated experiences of safety when close to women and fearful being close to men as a child, stored in implicit nondeclarative memory . Further, both adolescents may have temperament or cognitive weakness that predisposed them to engage in maladaptive behaviors, and, as such, these behaviors may not be attributable to their parents or to their environment per se. Thus, a two-person relational model allows for teasing apart the complexities of nature and nurture through here-and-now experiences between patient and clinician.