Cover photograph by Anton Biletskyi-Volokh.
On narcissistic defences, borderline dynamics, and the strange power of being the victim.
In the old psychoanalytic theatre, the classic neurotic couple is the hysteric and the obsessive.
One provokes. The other controls. One demands proof of desire. The other produces rules, prohibitions, and excellent reasons why nothing should happen just yet.
They may drive each other mad, but they remain, more or less, separate people.
Some even live happily ever after.
Or at least for a surprisingly long time.
But there is another kind of relationship in which the stakes are considerably higher.
The argument is no longer about desire and prohibition. It is about psychological survival.
Two people looking for what they cannot find in themselves
Imagine one partner organized around a profound fear of abandonment.
Their identity is fragile. Separation can feel like annihilation. They long for a relationship that will finally make them feel complete.
Now imagine another partner whose narcissistic defences make vulnerability, dependency, envy, and shame almost unbearable.
Rather than experiencing these feelings as their own, they may attempt to place them in someone else.
The first person wants someone who will never leave.
The second wants someone who will carry what they cannot tolerate.
An extraordinarily efficient arrangement.
For a while.
The narcissistically defended partner offers idealization: You are extraordinary. Nobody has ever understood me like you do. We are different from everyone else.
The other responds with emotional intensity, devotion, and the intoxicating feeling of finally being seen.
Then something changes.
Idealization gives way to contempt. Affection becomes unpredictable. Contradictory messages replace clarity.
The partner who fears abandonment continues searching for the wonderful person from the beginning.
Perhaps that person is still there.
Perhaps everything can return to how it was.
Perhaps the problem is me.
And so the relationship becomes an exhausting cycle of closeness, humiliation, separation, and reunion.
Both may be trying to avoid the same unbearable experience: accepting that another person is separate, imperfect, and ultimately beyond their control.
In Melanie Klein's language, this brings us close to the depressive position: the difficult capacity to recognize that the person we love is also the person who disappoints us.
That recognition involves mourning.
And mourning is exactly what some psychological defences are designed to postpone.
The partner who suffers always has the final word
Popular imagination gives destructive narcissism a familiar face.
An arrogant sadist. A cruel manipulator. Someone who enjoys humiliating a fragile, emotionally unstable partner.
Such relationships exist.
But there is a more subtle and sometimes more enduring arrangement.
A highly functioning, emotionally vulnerable partner may have a job, creative projects, responsibilities, and a recognizable life outside the relationship.
Meanwhile, the other partner seems to be suffering.
Constantly.
Their suffering becomes the organizing principle of the household.
While you were busy with your precious work, I was practically dying here. And whose fault do you think that is?
The power in this arrangement doesn't necessarily come from shouting, threatening, or openly attacking.
It comes from helplessness.
I sacrificed everything for you.
You know how fragile I am.
After everything I've been through, how can you possibly do this to me?
There is nothing inherently manipulative about suffering, illness, or needing help. People genuinely become ill, overwhelmed, frightened, and dependent on others.
The distinction lies in what happens to that suffering inside the relationship.
Does it become something two people can acknowledge and address together?
Or does it become an unquestionable moral debt that one partner must spend the rest of their life repaying?
In the second case, the suffering person can acquire extraordinary power without ever appearing powerful.
The other partner is no longer allowed simply to have a life.
Their independence becomes evidence of cruelty.
The masochist who creates a persecutor
This is where the psychoanalytic concept of projective identification becomes interesting.
The term describes a process in which a person disowns an intolerable part of their emotional experience and locates it in another person.
In some relational interpretations, the interaction may also exert pressure on that other person to feel or behave in ways that fit the projection.
The result can be disturbing.
A person who continually presents themselves as helpless, wounded, or mistreated may participate in interactions that leave their partner increasingly frustrated, exhausted, and angry.
Eventually, the partner snaps.
They shout.
They say something cruel.
And suddenly the entire story becomes wonderfully simple.
There is the aggressor.
And here is the victim.
The original pattern disappears behind the final outburst.
A particularly sharp psychoanalytic formulation would be this:
The masochist does not always look for an executioner. Sometimes they help create one.
But that is a description of a possible destructive dynamic, not an excuse for aggression.
Each person remains responsible for their own actions. Psychological pressure does not make violence inevitable or justified. And identifying a relationship as dysfunctional does not mean that responsibility for abuse is automatically shared equally.
Still, the emotional mechanism is worth noticing.
In one destructive configuration, a person feels controlled through fear and humiliation.
In another, through guilt, helplessness, and anger they are then ashamed of feeling.
The second can be exceptionally difficult to recognize.
After all, how do you confront someone whose suffering appears to prove your cruelty?
Why sadists and masochists are not necessarily a perfect match
There's a popular fantasy that sadists and masochists must make ideal partners.
One likes inflicting pain. The other likes receiving it.
Problem solved.
Except human psychology is rarely so considerate.
In some destructive sadistic dynamics, the attraction isn't simply to pain. It is to overcoming another person's resistance and exercising power over someone who does not want to submit.
Meanwhile, some masochistic defences are less concerned with pain itself than with controlling punishment, reducing guilt, or obtaining care and reassurance afterward.
The punishment may matter.
But so does what follows it.
Forgiveness. Comfort. Being held. Being told that the debt has finally been paid.
For a little while.
This is not a description of consensual sexual sadomasochism, where boundaries and mutual agreement change the situation fundamentally.
We are talking about a psychological organization of relationships in which pain, guilt, and dependency become ways of regulating the self through another person.
And those aims are not necessarily compatible.
Love can protect you. It cannot make the relationship safe.
There is another uncomfortable question.
Why do some people emerge from destructive relationships almost completely shattered, while others somehow continue working, creating, growing, and even achieving extraordinary things?
One psychoanalytic answer is love.
Not love as an inspirational slogan, and certainly not the idea that loving someone enough will cure their cruelty.
Love can create a protective inner world.
It gives meaning to suffering. It preserves an image of the beloved that is larger than their worst behaviour. It can help a person hold on to tenderness, creativity, and a sense of purpose even in terrible circumstances.
Sometimes that imaginative protection allows a person to survive what might otherwise overwhelm them.
But survival is not the same as living.
Flowers can bloom in poisoned soil.
That doesn't mean the soil is good for them.
And flowers that bloom under such conditions do not always bear fruit.
The same protective imagination that helps someone survive may also prevent them from recognizing the full reality of the relationship.
To recover, they may eventually have to give up not only the person, but also the imagined version of that person.
The future they were promised.
The love they believed would finally make everything whole.
That can involve an extraordinary amount of grief.
Sometimes the collapse of the fantasy feels more painful, at first, than the mistreatment that preceded it.
But it creates the possibility of something different.
Post-traumatic growth is not a reward for suffering, and it is certainly not guaranteed. Abuse does not make people stronger by some mysterious law of nature.
Growth, when it happens, belongs to the process of recovery, not to the cruelty itself.
And perhaps its most important part is reclaiming the capacity to love oneself without needing to maintain the old illusion.
Support, boundaries, and emotional blackmail
All this brings us to a surprisingly practical distinction.
Three sentences may describe emotional pain. But they create very different relationships.
A request for support:
I'm feeling miserable today. Could you hold me for a while?
Here, a person describes their experience and asks whether another person can help.
There is room for an answer.
A boundary:
When my requests are repeatedly ignored, I feel hurt and confused. I can't continue this interaction in the same way if it keeps happening.
Here, a person describes what they experience, what they cannot accept, and what they may need to do.
The boundary concerns their own participation.
Emotional blackmail:
Go out with your friends if you want. I'll be here suffering alone. Maybe I'll die, but I suppose that doesn't matter to you.
Or:
Look what you've done to your mother. She's ill because of the way you behave.
Now suffering has become a bill.
And the other person is being told to pay it with obedience.
Of course, threats of self-harm must be taken seriously. They require appropriate support, sometimes urgent professional help. But taking a threat seriously does not mean accepting unlimited personal responsibility for another adult's actions.
The difference between genuine vulnerability and coercion isn't always obvious from a single sentence.
It becomes clearer when we examine the pattern.
Can the other person disagree?
Can they say no?
Can they have friends, work, interests, and a life that doesn't revolve entirely around managing someone else's emotional state?
Can support be accepted without becoming a permanent obligation?
Or does every attempt at independence produce another crisis, another accusation, another invoice?
The relationship that never ends
The most tragic part of these relationships is not necessarily their intensity.
It is their extraordinary capacity for repetition.
People leave and return. They hurt each other and promise to change. They rebuild the idealization, then destroy it again.
Sometimes the relationship lasts for years precisely because neither person can bear what ending it would require them to confront.
Loss.
Separation.
An ordinary, imperfect other person.
An ordinary, imperfect self.
And the possibility that no one else can finally repair the emptiness we carry inside.
In psychoanalytic terms, the exit from this cycle requires something less dramatic than another confrontation.
It requires the capacity to mourn.
To recognize what was real, what was imagined, what was lost, and what never existed in the first place.
To stop assigning another person responsibility for one's own existence.
And to stop accepting responsibility for theirs.
Perhaps that is where love begins to change its meaning.
Not when we finally find someone who makes us whole.
But when we no longer have to disappear to keep them close.
Related reading
- Being Uncomfortable Is Not One Skill
- Trauma Doesn't Always Introduce Itself
- The Personality You Built to Survive
- A Threshold Is Not a Home
- The Safest Place Is Where Nothing Changes
Theoretical context and references
Psychoanalytic interpretations are not clinical diagnoses. Borderline organization in psychoanalysis is not synonymous with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. These references provide theoretical context, not proof of the relational model discussed above.