We traverse our life with new people and new circumstances. Every time we leave our home, we are surrounded by individuals. While it would be ideal if we could begin every new relationship with an objective understanding about the person we have befriended, psychoanalysis states that we can never see others through an objective lens. In fact, this theory states that we can only relate to one another obliquely.

The reason for this, according to Freud, is that we transfer experiences we have had with individuals from the past onto every new relationship, regardless of its nature. The psychological impact and interpretation of primary caregivers and childhood relationships are carried in our unconscious, and can remain a mystery until we undertake exploration with a therapist or analyst. In addition to this transference, we also tend to repeat the kernel of a previous relationship with every new person we meet and know.

Freud spoke about the repetition compulsion, which describes the choices we make and how we tend to repeat this ad infinitum. This is because we not only transfer old relationships onto new ones, but we also seek out, unconsciously and out of our awareness, similar relationships we have had in the past even if these have been harmful to our self -esteem and resilience.

An example, from my own life, is a female friend who always entangles herself with a partner who is emotionally unavailable and even downright abusive. A man that she had been seeing romantically promised her a long-term relationship and even marriage. I knew that this would never come to fruition based upon experiences with him, and other romantic interests from the past. Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it. This quote from Philosopher George Santayana mirrors the sentiment of Freud, and the endless cycle of self-destructive relationships for those individuals who don’t understand their unconscious mine.

Freud explains this as the need to keep entering into the same type of abusive relationships we may have experienced throughout our lives. The rationale for this is that we seek to master dysfunctional experiences, reentering them in the hope, which is irrational, that this time the relationship will not fail and will work, simply by willing it to with our conscious mind.

However, we are unconsciously drawn into relationships just like the ones we have had in the past. Psychoanalysis states that we are drawn into re-experiencing dysfunctional relationships because it is what we are comfortable and familiar with. It seems ironic that the very relationship styles that have hurt us in the past possess a positive valence into drawing people back into identical dynamics.

There is a type of nerve cell known as the mirror cell. When we sit in a group, and one person yawns, we frequently see many people in the room yawn as well. The mirror neurons that we possess trigger a yawn just like the person we were noticing. When someone we love is suffering we can literally feel their pain due to the properties of this specific nerve cell.

Humans like to believe that they are rational and logical in the decisions that they make. Free will is something that we want to believe in. If we understood that all of our major decisions were influenced by environmental stimuli, we might feel like we have lost our autonomy. The reality is that many neuroscientists don’t believe free will is a legitimate property and, just like more primitive animals, our behavior is guided by mental processes outside of our observational control.

Yet, we require personal relationships with friends and family in order to truly survive. The late social neuroscientist John Cacioppo had invested a great part of his career to understanding how loneliness can produce anxiety, depression and even suicide. We are social creatures by nature, and without human relationships, our mental health can be put into jeopardy.

Throughout the pandemic, people have become more alienated and isolated, and, as a consequence, have developed mental health issues that they may have never encountered before. Even being in constant interactions with our family, which can produce paradoxical feelings of loneliness when we believe we are traversing a different psychological path, can produce similar symptoms to loneliness. We don’t often love many people, and that goes for families as well. Loneliness can develop from oneself and can occur even when there are many people with whom we might live. It is the old adage that one can be lonely in a crowd.

The types of relationships we develop are strongly impacted by the relationships we have had with our parents. For the first five years of life, our parents are the main support system for their newborn children. If one’s mother has a personality disorder, we will often unconsciously seek out relationships with partners that we have had with our primary caretaker. This is sort of like a computer software program that primes the individual with an unhealthy and destructive path for all future relationships.

One type of personality disorder is borderline personality disorder. If our mothers or fathers had this disorder, we are at risk for developing this as well. Borderline personality disorder describes a personality constellation of putting oneself into dangerous activities, having fluctuating moods, engaging in cutting and self-harm, and being unable to differentiate people into a gray area and viewing everyone as all good or all bad. This inability to differentiate people, and the unprecipitated speed with which these relationships fail, are hallmarks of the diagnostic criteria for borderline personality disorder. An old description of this disorder is that these patients love beyond measure those who they will soon hate beyond reason.

When entering into a relationship with a person who has borderline personality disorder, we can be mesmerized by how this person tuned into our need and desires. People with this diagnosis also create a false persona for each person they are with, creating a false sense of comfort and security for those who don’t have the ability to be objective and understand that it is the individual’s pathology, and not their healthy self, that is being utilized.

Many years ago, the undersigned was in a relationship with a borderline personality disorder. She created a false persona for me and would call me Sammy. Before getting together with her, I had been watching several organized crime movies and joked about the lifestyle they had. Calling me Sammy related to her addressing me as if I were Sammy Gravano, the underboss for the Gambino Crime Family. At first this might seem like a little joke, but the persistent persona that she adopted when we wrote via email or saw each other in person was never subsumed and was constantly present. Being in psychoanalytic therapy, the analyst told the undersigned to leave this relationship quickly. He said that he can’t be 100% certain but he believed that this woman was a “black widow” and that she is capable of harming me severely, or killing me, if I stayed in this relationship. Because she was so mesmerizing, it took me a while to finally build up the courage to tell her the relationship was over.

Even though relationships can be frustrating and unfulfilling we all still crave them. It is in our DNA. In the Woody Allen movie “Annie Hall,” he states that he knows someone who believes he is a chicken.

Allen asks the rhetorical question about why he wasn’t turned in or hospitalized.

He responds that “I would turn him in but I need the eggs.”

Allen goes on to say that we are in relationships, regardless of how unhealthy and unpredictable these relationships might be.

Like the person who believes he is a chicken, and who is tolerated because we need the eggs, relationships can be harmful and demeaning unless we understand our own unconscious dynamics and how they have been influences by early relationships. Any individual who has a borderline mother will likely be in relationships with the same disorder. Unless we explore our relationships and their unconscious determinants with a trained therapist, it is likely, unfortunately, that we will unconsciously repeat over and over again the type of the relationship we experienced with a parent. This is the relationship when we understand where our own needs and wants are ignores and, instead, everything must be oriented to please the partner who has this personality disorder.