Airless worlds and couples therapy

ABSTRACT In this paper the author expands his thinking about “airless worlds” in individual therapy to work with couples. Living in an airless world refers to a process of internalizing negating messages from parents to their children such that the adult child continues to view and treat themselves in more or less the same negating ways that their parents had. Individuals suffering from the syndrome tend not to have separated from their internalized parents sufficiently to be able to develop their own senses of self, agency, and reality and therefore tend, transferentially, to create a similar kind of unconscious bondage with their adult partners. When adult partners co-create a communicative system wherein each unconsciously cedes to the other the power to define their experience of themselves, an airless world has been created in their relationship. An unconscious dependency on, and negation of, the other renders constructive intersubjective dialogue virtually impossible (i.e. dialogue that takes into account both parties’ subjectivities). By way of focusing on his work with one couple whose capacity for competent constructive dialogue had broken down completely over many years, the author demonstrates both the operation of airless world dynamics in couples and his approach to introducing “psychic air” into their airless marital systems. Central to his approach is an expansion of the idea of therapeutic empathy to include “empathy with the needs of the system.”