Reenacting Trauma
So far I’ve watched 34 episodes of Couples Therapy, wherein Dr. Orna Guralnik does therapy with many real couples, though these are selected far from randomly from a larger set of possible couples.
I’m impressed; the relations seem real, and Orna seems quite competent. To me, that lends weight to the main theory that Orna expresses to her clients, that we typically shape new relations as modest variations on prior relations. So if we had traumatic prior relations, this makes us especially likely to create the conditions for new similar trauma.
Not only does this theory actually make sense of a lot of the relation problems we see on the show, the couples themselves also see this theory as accessible and relevant to them. Which makes this theory especially useful, in addition to maybe being true.
At first I was tempted to dismiss this theory as not applying to me, but on reflection I must recant. I was plausibly greatly influenced by being bullied and rejected by peers, and largely ignored by the authorities who officially rated me highly. I have plausibly reacted similarly later to folks I classified as like those prior folks, and that has likely shaped my relations with them.
I guess I shall up my estimate of Freud, and read some of him; I’ve never read him before.
It seems intuitively correct to you. It seems completely wrong to me and every relationship seems distinct. How do we test it? Judith Rich Harris in The Nurture Assumption discusses how people are often very different in and outside the home, which makes sense to me from an evolutionary perspective. It doesn’t make sense we’d have one template that would apply across relationships. Similarities across relationships can more plausibly be explained by the fact that one remains the same person with the same traits.
That this idea sounds plausible to people doesn’t strike me as powerful evidence, since we know that psychobabble can influence them in all kinds of ways.
I recently read Beyond the Pleasure Principle where Freud discusses the compulsion to repeat traumatic experiences. In that essay he famously introduces the death drive and relates it to the evolutionary theory that death was a late evolutionary adaptation. I am trying to understand the possible reasons why death would be evolutionarily adaptive but must admit I am struggling.