7 - Research on the psychodynamics of shared understandings

Summary

The two cases of sharing examined in chapter 6, I have argued, came about as solutions to everyday tasks that all of us find it necessary to perform repeatedly. The kind of shared understanding I turn to next results from a different order of shared experience. This experience is not one repeated daily but one experienced early – that is, infantile experience of the sort we pointed to in chapter 4 as being indelible and unusually motivating because learned so very early and in the context of the exceptionally strong feelings, related to their survival and security, aroused in infants. In the case to be presented in this chapter, as in the cases of becoming self-reliant and being a good person that were developed in chapter 4, understanding appears to have become shared because crucial elements of the early experience that formed it are shared. Of the three kinds of shared understanding about marriage I am describing, then, this is the most highly motivating.

It should be clear from the last paragraph that in arriving at a reasonably full account of how this cluster of understandings about marriage has come to be shared and motivating, I found myself drawing on psychodynamic as well as cognitive theory. Some readers may find the resulting juxtaposition of two such distinct theoretical traditions jarring. My combining them, however, is a considered move.