Conscious Relationship

Esther Harding’s name, in the closing chapter of the-way-of-all-women, for the form of relatedness that becomes possible between two people only when the mutual anima/animus projection that initiated their bond has been deliberately withdrawn and replaced by a slowly built recognition of each other’s actual psychic reality.

The starting point is structural: most marriages and most loves begin in projection. “When a man and woman marry there is almost invariably some element of an animus-anima projection in their love. After the first glamor has worn off, each begins to realize that his partner does not see him as he is, but that in some strange way he is distorted in the other’s eyes” (Harding 1970, p. 60). The work of the conscious relationship is to take that disillusion not as the death of love but as its beginning. “They will seek not merely to fulfill each the ideal of the other, not merely to make a ‘success’ of their marriage, not merely to live according to the conventional idea of what constitutes a good husband, a good wife and mother, but instead will take truth as their goal and the extension of consciousness as the means of attaining it” (Harding 1970, p. 281).

The relationship itself becomes “almost like a separate entity with its own rights and obligations which cannot be disregarded except at the risk of destroying their love” (Harding 1970, p. 236) — a third thing between the two, served by both, irreducible to either.

The technique is conversation. The misunderstanding is not smoothed over but worked through, the unconscious roots brought into speech: “If such problems of relationship are to be solved, the unconscious roots of the difficulties must be systematically sought out and brought to consciousness where they can be dealt with” (Harding 1970, p. 282). This is active-imagination applied to the dyad — the same withdrawal of projection, the same rendering of the unconscious into image and speech, transposed from solitary inner work to the work of two.

Harding’s concept anticipates a great deal of what the relational psychoanalytic tradition would later claim as its own.

Relationships

Primary sources

the-way-of-all-women (Harding 1970, Ch. 7 “Psychological Relationship”)