In this presentation, Dr. Tobin presents a model of romantic love that synthesizes concepts from evolutionary psychology, Freudian thought, interpersonal neurobiology, and intersubjectivity. Notions of free will and conscious decision-making regarding the choice of romantic partners are refuted. Instead, Dr. Tobin presents an unconsciously motivated perspective on romantic love that emphasizes our uncanny tendency to select and induce others to hurt us emotionally iin ways that are familiar and to which we are highly adapted.

1. Why We Love Who We Love:
A Psychodynamic Perspective on the Loss of
Free Will
James Tobin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology
The American School of Professional
Psychology/Argosy University
Private Practice, Newport Beach, CA
www.jamestobinphd.com
949-338-4388
February 24, 2014

2. Outline for Tonight’s Talk
• Part I: Analytic Theory and Object Relations
• Part II: Attachment Theory
• Part III: A Psychodynamic View of How We
Fall in Love
• Part IV: The Emerging Field of Interpersonal
Neurobiology
2

3. Part I: Analytic Theory and Object Relations
3

4. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
•Austrian neurologist
•Psychoanalysis was
originally formulated as
a philosophy of life;
developed into a
metapsychology.
4

5. Basic Tenets of Classical Drive Theory
• Drives are often in conflict with reality, and
are thus defended against.
• The original model of the mind (topographic
model) featured repression as dividing the
conscious from the unconscious.
• Repressed material remains
compartmentalized but consistently emerges
into mental life, whether or not it is
cognitively or affectively mediated.
5

6. Basic Tenets of Classical Drive Theory
• “We are doomed to repeat what we do not
remember” – Freud’s discovery of the
repetition compulsion (loss of our own
agency, our free will).
• Attempts to bring drives into conscious
awareness repressed material meets
psychological resistance.
• Once unconscious material is “represented,”
the person is liberated from its effects.
6

7. Basic Principles of Classical Drive
Theory
• The patient’s transference onto the therapist
was Freud’s major discovery, providing
evidence of the motivation for repetition
compulsion.
• What actually gets “transferred” is the
ungratifying nature of the parental object, i.e.,
the frustration generated by the primary
caregiver that could not be managed by the
ego (the mechanism of defensive processes).
7

8. Transference Neurosis: The Talking
Cure of Psychoanalysis
8
Real
Therapist
Transference
Material Transference
Material
Real
Therapist
Transference
Material

9. Theoretical Developments Following
Freud’s Classical Drive Model
• Ego Psychology: Anna Freud’s The Ego and the Mechanisms
of Defense (1936)
• Object Relations: Otto Rank, Fairbairn, Melanie Klein,
Ferenczi, Winnicott, Guntrip (1940s and 1950s)
• The Interpersonal School: Harry Stack Sullivan’s The
Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry (1953)
• Self Psychology: Heinz Kohut (1970s): The Analysis of the
Self
• The Relational School: Stephen A. Mitchell and Jay
Greenberg’s Object Relations in Psychoanalytic
Theory (1983)
• Intersubjectivity: Robert Stolorow, George E. Atwood,
Jessica Benjamin, and Daniel Stern (1980s to present)
9

10. “Object”
• Object = another
human being, a
human relationship
• Seeking relationships
emphasized more
than the tension
reduction of classical
drive theory.
10

11. Melanie Klein
• Observational Study of children:
– Children have the drive to seek relationships
– Children devoted more energy to constructing their
interpersonal worlds than trying to control libidinal impulses or
to discharge tension
– Children have the need to control aggressive/negative/critical
feelings directed at significant figures in their lives
• Introduced the study of relationships
• Focus on the early relationship between mother and child
• Infants internalize their relationships with their caregiver
(introject)
11

12. The Introject, Projection, and
Projective Identification
• The introject consists of the child’s construction of (1)
self, (2) other, and (3) self in relation to other.
• Klein linked the intrapsychic framework of the introject
to actual real-world relationships, thus moving into
territory Freud never got to.
• The major theoretical construct that allowed this to
occur was Klein’s notion of projection: whatever is
“disavowed” gets projected onto the other. Often, the
other is destined or induced to identify with the
projection (projective identification), thus becoming in
real life what exists in the person’s mind.
12

13. Klein’s Normative Process
• Klein originally theorized a normative process
in the child-parent relationship in which the
mother contained the child’s projective
material:
• Early family experiences –> Introject –>
Projection –> Partial Projective Identification
by Mother –> Mother contains the projected
material and reintrojects it back into the child
in a more benign form.
13

14. 14

15. Part II: Attachment Theory
15

16. The Psychology of Attachment
16

17. The Psychology of Attachment
• The study of attachment (between child and
parent) has been a major research topic in
psychology for the last 5 decades.
• What we have learned is that the infant/child
has evolved highly advanced skills for
detecting how to get from mother what
he/she need and wants.
17

18. The Attachment Dance
• Attachment becomes a dance consisting of the
infant seeking what he/she wants, mother
giving it/not giving it, and an ongoing tug of
war that escalates until ultimately the dyad
reaches some form of stability, a status-quo.
• The mother, for the most part, wins! The
infant adapts to the mother vs. the mother
adapting to the child.
18

19. Personality is Adaptation
• The young child’s personality becomes
organized around all of the nuanced behaviors
and emotions required to participate
successfully in the attachment dance with
mother.
19

20. Personality is Adaptation
• For example, a depressed
mother may not be very
responsive to a child, but she
gets more responsive when the
child acts cute or is funny; the
child learns this quickly and
efficiently; the dance that
ensues between them involves
the child “warming up” the
mother (by making her laugh
or feel better) so that the
mother moves out of a
depressive state and enters a
more optimal position to
respond to the child.
20

21. Personality is Adaptation
• This relational sequence, across thousands of
repeated interactions, becomes well-
patterned and essentially solidifies in a
specific style of personality the child takes on.
21

22. Personality is Adaptation
• As personality evolves into adolescence and
young adulthood, the self coalesces into three
parts:
(1) the compromised (“false”) self;
(2) the non-compromised (“true”) self;
(3) the part of the true self that was not
given the opportunity to develop (“the
lost self”).
22

23. The Self in Adulthood
• The False Self
• The True Self
• The Lost Self
23

24. The False Self
• The evolutionary (survival) genes in our DNA
are so strong that we are programmed to
adapt (the compromised, false self is
activated) over and over again, resulting in the
false self becoming habituated.
• The compromised (false) self centers around
a major traumatic relational theme.
• The false is stronger and predominates over
the true and the lost parts of the self.
24

25. Our Personality as Adults
• At the core of our personality as adults is a
highly adaptive child (if the adaptation worked
early on, we repeat it again and again across
our life span).
25

26. Part III: A Psychodynamic View of How We
Fall in Love
26

27. The Standard View of Romantic
Relationships
• Attraction/ “chemistry”
• We just understand each other/we seem to
know each other
• Common interests
• Similar background/values
27

28. The De-evolution of Relationships
• Dating
• Sex (often intense and passionate at the beginning)
• Commitment
• The relationship evolves
• Things change in comparison to how they were in the
beginning
• Unresolved conflict or avoidance of conflict
• “We grew apart”
• Infidelity
• Crisis drives a wedge between the two persons
28

29. Typical Reactions to the Failed
Relationship
• I could not have predicted how things would
go ...
• What attracted me to him/her turned out to
annoy and frustrate me ...
• My needs were not fulfilled ...
• We lost interest in each other ... couldn’t keep
it fresh ... became bored with each other ....
29

30. A psychological understanding of
the de-evolution of relationships
30

31. Attraction
• Attraction/chemistry is usually based on
“baggage.”
• We are attracted to those people who hold the
potential to hurt us as we have been hurt before
(our original relational trauma).
• The person we see “registers” something in our
brains ... we find them familiar, yet we don’t
understand why.
• We are driven to bond to the persons most likely
to re-traumatize us.
31

32. Why seek to be re-traumatized?
• No one knows.
• Evolution: what is familiar is chosen over that
which would challenge us to develop new
adaptations or jettison the adaptations we have
grown accustomed to using.
• Correcting the original relational trauma: we
may believe that if we re-create the original
trauma of our development through the
creation of a parental-surrogate in
contemporary life, we can finally overcome or
solve the original trauma.
32

33. The Two Types of Relational Trauma
Type I: The Original Relational Trauma of Early Life
• It is inevitable that we get relationally injured
early in development.
• This original trauma stays stored within us.
• In adult life, we are “programmed” to repeat the
original trauma (1: our aura communicates it to
others, and 2: we induce/project others to
become parental surrogates) – in essence, we
are motivated to create a transference neurosis!
33

34. The Two Types of Relational Trauma
Type II: Relational Trauma of Adult Life
• We all get hurt in adult romantic relationships.
• In an effort to not get hurt again, we may:
(1) Do a cross-over: become our past partner;
our current partner becomes ourselves in the
previous relationship
(2) Sabotage the relationship
(3) Withdraw from the emotionality of the
relationship
34

35. Our “Selection” of a Partner
• We are not really selecting our partner, as the
partner (and how we relate to them) is pre-
determined by trauma of Types I and/or II.
• The partner is selected (NOT CHOSEN) by
unconscious factors – we simply cannot help
it!!!
• The relationship is destined to fail and usually
does!
35

36. Repetition
• Some version of the past is always
being repeated in the present.
• The amount of repetition is determined by the
amount of the previous traumas that remains
unresolved.
• “We are doomed to repeat what we do not
remember”(Freud); in contemporary
psychodynamic psychology, repetitive
processes are called “enactments.”
36

37. Enactments
• A majority of human interactions are nothing more than
enactments.
• A good way to think about enactments is that Person A
acts/behaves in ways that begin to constrict the bandwidth
of relatedness Person B generates back toward Person A
(this is “induction”).
• Example
• Over time, the bandwidth is narrowed to such an extent
that Person A falsely assumes or actually creates a situation
in which he/she is “traumatized” by Person B.
• In essence, Person B is unconsciously recruited to
perpetrate upon/traumatize Person A (THUS AFFIRMING
THE CONTENT OF THE INTROJECT).
37

38. Enactments
38

39. If induction takes a foothold, ....
• Things typically devolve, quickly or gradually.
• But in any “normal” relationship, induction
will (and must) take place.
• The trick is to not let it get out of hand – if it
does, both partners enact and are no longer
“real” persons with each other.
• The key idea is to attempt to maintain (in
yourself and in the other) the widest
bandwidth of relatedness as possible.
39

40. How This All Happens in Our Romantic
Worlds
• What I’ve just told you captures the process of
how we meet someone new, become
attracted to them, start dating them, form a
relationship with them, ... with ultimately
(more often than not) the relationship
blowing up and dissolving.
• There are 6 stages to this process:
40

41. What makes the guy pick girl #2 ?
1 2 3
Stage 1: Attraction
41

42. Our guy thinks the selection of #2 is the
dominating attraction commonly called
“chemistry.”
1 2 3
42

43. Our guy thinks the selection of #2 is the dominating attraction
commonly called “chemistry.”
It is NOT!!!
NEVER!!!
1 2 3
43

44. What he mistakes as “chemistry” are
interpersonal/neurobiologic cues, i.e.,
what is “familiar!”
1 2 3
44

45. Unconsciously, he wants to repeat a
previous “relational structure” from his
past.
1 2 3
45

46. Stage 2: The Honeymoon Period
• Things seem to be going well: they start doing more and
more together, they find they have things in common,
etc.
• There is the sense that it is easy/that they seem to
“know” each other better than what would be expected
given the amount of time they have spent together.
• Sex often occurs in this stage and is “very passionate.”
• The unconscious relational structure that each holds
lays dormant/is hibernating and not yet apparent.
46

47. Stage 3: Induction
• In our example, the man unconsciously
“induces” the woman to act more and more
like his wounding parent (or his mental
construction of his wounding parent).
• The woman is already primed to act this way
(contains qualities consistent with the man’s
wounding parent), but his inductions activate
the similarities in her even more so that they
become more dramatic and manifested.
47

48. Stage 4: Injury and Repair
• Each partner starts injuring the other (in ways that are
familiar, i.e., in the ways that caregivers injured them
during childhood).
• During this phase, the bond between the two actually
gets stronger as each tries to “calm down” and “make
up”; the other feels so important and familiar that the
underlying dysfunction of the relationship is denied by
one or both partners.
48

49. Stage 4: Injury and Repair
• Co-habitation and/or marriage often occur
during this stage, particularly during or right
after “repair” periods in which there is a
profound sense of relief and euphoria (there is
often the internal fantasy of having finally
found one’s “soul mate” or finally having
moved past what went “wrong” in prior
relationships).
49

50. Stage 5: Parasitic Take-Over
• Through ongoing inductions and the accumulation of
repeated injuries, repair becomes less and less
frequent and merely partial.
• The partner becomes the parental-surrogate (AND
THEN SOME!!).
• The partner is overtaken by mysterious forces
(parasitic psychological communications) of which
he/she is no longer in control of; he or she actually
becomes “alien” to himself/herself; the partner
becomes something else/ “not themselves” the
more the relationship goes on. 50

51. Stage 6: Break-up
• Due to repeated
inductions and the
parasitic take-over
process, one partner
eventually decides to end
the relationship (due to
guilt/shame at injuring
their partner over and
over again or due to no
longer feeling like
himself/herself – “alien”
– with their partner).
51

52. Repeating the Pattern
• Most people repeat the same, or a similar pattern,
over and over again in consecutive relationships (this is
the phenomenon of serial monogamy and multiple
divorces).
• Avoiding the pattern is a psychological alternative to
repeating the pattern.
• This alternative has been described in research as the
“avoidant” attachment type and can take many forms:
 (a) men (or women) who just want superficial
relationships/sex
 (b) the self-sabotager (addiction, infidelity)
 (c) business/financial success (workaholics)
 (d) or the indecisive/obsessive personality
52

53. Implications for Romantic Love
• As adults, we are destined to continue our
adaptive patterns with our next significant
attachment figure (our lover/partner).
• That is, we seek to find a lover who resembles
our caregiver (psychologically, emotionally) so
that we can continue with our usual adaptive
style to maintain the attachment.
• This implies something very paradoxical: we are
destined to seek a romantic partner (and a
“relational structure”) that wounds us in
familiar ways!
53

54. The Dissolution of the Relationship
• When the parental-surrogate is embodied in
our partner, conflict/distress occurs and is
often (1) tolerated/lived with for many years,.
and/or (2) causes break-up/divorce.
• Our (unconscious) hope to resolve the wounds
from our past in our contemporary partner
usually fails! (AND, we remain unknown to
ourselves and to the other).
54

55. Part IV: The Emerging Field of Interpersonal
Neurobiology
55

56. The Car in the Parking Lot Story
56

57. The Emergence of a New Field:
Interpersonal Neurobiology
The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the
Cultivation of Well-Being
DANIEL J. SIEGEL
The Neuroscience of Human Relationships: Attachment And
the Developing Social Brain
LOUIS COZOLINO
The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of
Chronic Traumatization
ONNO VAN DER HART, ELLERT R. S. NIJENHUIS, KATHY
STEELE
57

58. Interpersonal Neurobiology
Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self & Affect
Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self
ALLAN N. SCHORE
Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self
ALLAN N. SCHORE
Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self
ALLAN N. SCHORE
Healing Trauma: Attachment, Mind, Body and Brain
DANIEL J. SIEGEL, MARION SOLOMON
58

59. Interpersonal Neurobiology
Love and War in Intimate Relationships: Connection, Disconnection, and
Mutual Regulation in Couple Therapy
MARION SOLOMON, STAN TATKIN
The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy: Healing the Social Brain
LOUIS COZOLINO
From Axons to Identity: Neurological Explorations of the Nature of the Self
TODD E. FEINBERG
Infant/Child Mental Health, Early Intervention, and Relationship-Based
Therapies: A Neurorelational Framework for Interdisciplnary Practice
CONNIE LILLAS, JANIECE TURNBULL
59

60. Interpersonal Neurobiology
Healing the Traumatized Self: Consciousness, Neuroscience,
Treatment
PAUL FREWEN, RUTH LANIUS, BESSEL VAN DER KOLK, ET AL.
Neurobiologically Informed Trauma Therapy with Children and
Adolescents: Understanding Mechanisms of Change
LINDA CHAPMAN
Loving with the Brain in Mind: Neurobiology and Couple
Therapy
MONA DEKOVEN FISHBANE, DANIEL J. SIEGEL
60

61. Interpersonal Neurobiology
Body Sense: The Science and Practice of Embodied Self-
Awareness
ALAN FOGEL
The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of
Human Emotions
JAAK PANKSEPP, LUCY BIVEN
Brain-Based Parenting: The Neuroscience of Caregiving
for Healthy Attachment
DANIEL A. HUGHES, JONATHAN BAYLIN, DANIEL J. SIEGEL
61

62. Ours is a Social Brain
62

63. “Aura”
• Our brains and bodies put forth a series of
complex, nonverbal and unconscious
communications that are “read” by others.
63

64. “Aura”
• We see something similar in the animal kingdom,
where the weakest animal in a pack is sensed,
identified and hunted (survival of the fittest).
• In humans, it’s a bit different: the aura promotes
our survival by cuing others to traumatize us so
that we can maintain our adaptations
(conversely, if others were cued to promote our
true or lost selves, we would be threatened and
great anxiety would ensue).
64

65. This is the Central Component of the
Therapeutic Relationship or any Intimate Bond
• The patient is programmed to adapt (use a
facade or adapt to an actual or assumed
trauma) vs. have his/her true self or lost self
acknowledged.
• The therapist promotes the true and the lost
over the facade, just as a lover senses his/her
partner’s anxiety about living without
trauma (and preference for maintaining a
compromised/false self).
65

66. Implications
• Our compromised (false) self must be
gradually reduced in intensity and power
(what has become so familiar is suddenly
strange).
• This occurs in part by discovering how we
falsely assume the potential to be injured and
also how we induce others (and are induced)
so that we end up becoming re-traumatized.
66

67. Implications
• It also occurs by realizing the nature of our
relational traumas and how we managed
them at a primitive level.
• The aura of our relationally traumatic past will
never fully disappear so we must understand
in detail how people are likely to “view” us.
• By doing this, there are ways to interfere with
the aura.
67

68. James Tobin, Ph.D.
Licensed Psychologist, PSY 22074
220 Newport Center Drive, Suite 1
Newport Beach, CA 92660
949-338-4388
Email: jt@jamestobinphd.com
Website: www.jamestobinphd.com