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Authors: Ph.D Harville Hendrix

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TO FILL THE void, the child creates a “false self,” a character structure that serves a double purpose: it camouflages those parts of his being that he has repressed and protects him from further injury. A child brought up by a sexually repressive, distant mother, for instance, may become a “tough guy.” He tells himself, “I don’t care if my mother isn’t very affectionate. I don’t need that mushy stuff. I can make it on my own. And another thing—I think sex is dirty!” Eventually he applies this patterned response to all situations. No matter who tries to get
close to him, he erects the same barricade. In later years, when he overcomes his reluctance to getting involved in a love relationship, it is likely that he will criticize his partner for her desire for intimacy and her intact sexuality: “Why do you want so much contact and why are you so obsessed with sex? It’s not normal!”
A different child might react to a similar upbringing in an opposite manner, exaggerating his problems in the hope that someone will come to his rescue: “Poor me. I am hurt. I am deeply wounded. I need someone to take care of me.” Yet another child might become a hoarder, striving to hold on to every bit of love and food and material goods that comes his way out of the certain knowledge that there is never enough. But, whatever the nature of the false self, its purpose is the same: to minimize the pain of losing part of the child’s original, God-given wholeness.
AT SOME POINT in a child’s life, however, this ingenious form of self-protection becomes the cause of further wounding as the child is criticized for having these negative traits. Others condemn him for being distant or needy or self-centered or fat or stingy. His attackers don’t see the wound he is trying to protect, and they don’t appreciate the clever nature of his defense: all they see is the neurotic side of his personality. He is deemed inferior; he is less than whole.
Now the child is caught in a bind. He needs to hold on to his adaptive character traits, because they serve a useful purpose, but he doesn’t want to be rejected. What can he do? The solution is to deny or attack his critics: “I’m not cold and distant,” he might say in self-defense, “what I really am is strong and independent.” Or “I’m not weak and needy, I’m just sensitive.” Or “I’m not greedy and selfish, I’m thrifty and prudent.” In
other words, “That’s not me you’re talking about. You’re just seeing me in a negative light.”
In a sense, he is right. His negative traits are not a part of his original nature. They are forged out of pain and become a part of an assumed identity, an alias that helps him maneuver in a complex and sometimes hostile world. This doesn’t mean, however, that he doesn’t have these negative traits; there are any number of witnesses who will affirm that he does. But in order to maintain a positive self-image and enhance his chances for survival, he has to deny them. These negative traits became what is referred to as the “disowned self,” those parts of the false self that are too painful to acknowledge.
Let’s stop for a moment and sort out this proliferation of self parts. We have now succeeded in fracturing your original wholeness, the loving and unified nature that you were born with, into three separate entities:
1.
Your “lost self,” those parts of your being that you had to repress because of the demands of society.
2.
Your “false self,” the facade that you erected in order to fill the void created by this repression and by a lack of adequate nurturing.
3.
Your “disowned self,” the negative parts of your false self that met with disapproval and were therefore denied.
The only part of this complex collage that you were routinely aware of was the parts of your original being that were still intact and certain aspects of your false self. Together these elements formed your “personality,” the way you would describe yourself to others. Your lost self was almost totally outside your awareness; you had severed nearly all connections with these repressed parts of your being. Your disowned self, the negative parts of your false self, hovered just below your level of awareness and was constantly threatening to emerge. To keep it hidden, you had to deny it actively or project it onto
others: “I am
not
self-centered,” you would say with great energy. Or “What do you mean, I’m lazy?
You’re
lazy.”
ONE DAY WHEN Helen and I were talking about all the splits in the psyche, she recalled an allegory in Plato’s
Symposium
that serves as a mythical model for this state of split existence.
4
Human beings, the story goes, were once composite creatures that were both male and female. Each being had one head with two faces, four hands and four feet, and both male and female genitals. Being unified and whole, our ancestors wielded tremendous force. In fact, so magnificent were these androgynous beings that they dared to attack the gods. The gods, of course, would not tolerate this insolence, but they didn’t know how to punish the humans. “If we kill them,” they said to one another, “there will be no one to worship us and offer up sacrifices.” Zeus pondered the situation and finally came up with a solution. “Men shall continue to exist,” he decreed, “but they will be cut in two. Then they will be diminished in strength so we need not fear them.” Zeus proceeded to split each being in two, asking Apollo’s help to make the wounds invisible. The two halves were then sent in opposite directions to spend the rest of their lives searching frantically for the other half-creature, the reunion with whom would restore their wholeness.
Just like Plato’s mythical creatures, we, too, go through life truncated, cut in half. We cover our wounds with healing ointment and gauze in an attempt to heal ourselves, but despite our efforts an emptiness wells up inside us. We try to fill this emptiness with food and drugs and activities, but what we yearn for is our original wholeness, our full range of emotions, the inquisitive mind that was our birthright, and the Buddha-like joy that we experienced as very young children. This becomes a spiritual yearning for completion, and, as in Plato’s myth, we
develop the profound conviction that finding the right person—that perfect mate—will complete us and make us whole. This special person can’t be just anyone. It can’t be the first man or woman who comes along with an appealing smile or a warm disposition. It has to be someone who stirs within us a deep sense of recognition: “This is the one I’ve been looking for! This is the one who will make up for the wounds of the past!” And for reasons we will explore in greater depth in the next chapter, this person is invariably someone who has both the positive and the negative traits of our parents!
YOUR IMAGO
In literature, as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.
��ANDRÉ MAUROIS
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
MANY PEOPLE HAVE a hard time accepting the idea that they have searched for partners who resembled their caretakers. On a conscious level, they were looking for people with only positive traits—people who were, among other things, kind, loving, good-looking, intelligent, and creative. In fact, if they had an unhappy childhood, they may have deliberately searched for people who were radically different from their caretakers. They told themselves, “I’ll never marry a drunkard like my father,” or “There’s no way I’m going to marry a tyrant like my mother.” But, no matter what their conscious intentions, most people are attracted to mates who have their caretakers’ positive
and
negative traits, and, typically, the negative traits are more influential.
I came to this sobering conclusion only after listening to hundreds of couples talk about their partners and then sharing
my insights with Helen. Helen is also trained in counseling and therapy and has been invaluable in helping me process my experiences with couples. At some point during the course of therapy, just about every person would turn angrily to his or her partner and say, “You treat me just the way my mother did!” Or “You make me feel just as helpless and frustrated as my stepfather did!” This idea gained further validity when I assigned all my clients an exercise that asked them to compare the personality traits of their partners with the personality traits of their primary caretakers. In most cases, there was a close correlation between parents and partners, and with few exceptions
the traits that matched up the most closely were the negative traits!
(You will be able to do this exercise yourself when you turn to Part III of this book, which includes all the exercises mentioned in this chapter and those that follow. I suggest that you read all of the text before you attempt the written work.)
Why do negative traits have such an appeal? If people chose mates on a logical basis, they would look for partners who compensated for their parents’ inadequacies, rather than duplicated them. If your parents wounded you by being unreliable, for example, the sensible course of action would be to marry a dependable person, someone who would help you overcome your fear of abandonment. If your parents wounded you by being overprotective, the practical solution would be to look for someone who allowed you plenty of psychic space so that you could overcome your fear of absorption. The part of your brain that directed your search for a mate, however, was not your logical, orderly new brain; it was your time-locked, myopic old brain. And what your old brain was trying to do was recreate the conditions of your upbringing, in order to correct them. Having received enough nurturing to survive but not enough to feel satisfied, it was attempting to return to the scene of your original frustration so that you could resolve your unfinished business.
1
WHAT ABOUT YOUR other unconscious drive, your need to recover your lost self, those thoughts and feelings and behaviors that you had to repress to adapt to your family and to society? What kind of person would help you regain your sense of wholeness? Would it be someone who actively encouraged you to develop these missing parts? Would it be someone who shared your weaknesses and therefore made you feel less inadequate? Or, on the other hand, would it be someone who complemented your weaknesses? To find the answer, think for a minute about some part of your being that you feel is deficient. Maybe you feel that you lack artistic talent, or strong emotions, or, like Sarah in the last chapter, the ability to think clearly and rationally. Years ago, when you were around people who were especially strong in these areas, you probably were even more aware of your shortcomings. But if you managed to form an intimate relationship with one of these “gifted people,” you experienced quite a different reaction. Instead of feeling awestruck or envious, you suddenly felt more complete. Being emotionally attached to this person—this is “my” boyfriend or “my” girlfriend—made his or her attributes feel a part of a larger, more fulfilled you. It was as if you had merged with the other person and become whole.
Look around you, and you will find ample evidence that people choose mates with complementary traits. Dan is glib and talkative; his wife, Gretchen, is thoughtful and introverted. Janice is an intuitive thinker; her husband, Patrick, is very logical. Rena is a dancer; her boyfriend, Matthew, has a stiff and rigid body. What people are doing in these yin/yang matches is trying to reclaim their lost selves by proxy.
TO GUIDE YOU in your search for the ideal mate, someone who both resembled your caretakers and compensated for the repressed parts of yourself, you relied on an unconscious image of the opposite sex that you had been forming since birth. Helen and I decided that a good name for this inner picture is “imago,” which is the Latin word for “image.”
2
Essentially, your imago is a composite picture of the people who influenced you most strongly at an early age. This may have been your mother and father, one or more siblings, or maybe a babysitter, nanny, or close relative. But whoever they were, a part of your brain recorded everything about them—the sound of their voices, the amount of time they took to answer your cries, the color of their skin when they got angry, the way they smiled when they were happy, the set of their shoulders, the way they moved their bodies, their characteristic moods, their talents and interests. Along with these impressions, your brain recorded all your significant interactions with them. Your brain didn’t interpret these data; it simply etched them onto a template.
It may seem improbable that you have such a detailed record of your caretakers somewhere inside your head when you have only a dim recollection of those early years. In fact, many people have a hard time remembering anything that happened to them before the age of five or six—even dramatic events that should have made a deep impression. But scientists report that we have incredible amounts of hidden information in our brains. Neurosurgeons discovered this fact while performing brain surgery on patients who were under local anesthesia.
3
They stimulated portions of the patients’ brains with weak electrical currents, and the patients were suddenly able to recall hundreds of forgotten episodes from childhood in astonishing detail. Our minds are vast storehouses of forgotten information. There are those who suggest that everything that we have
ever experienced resides somewhere in the dark, convoluted recesses of our brains.
Not all of these experiences are recorded with equal intensity, however. The most vivid impressions seem to be the ones that we formed of our caretakers early in life. And of all the interactions that we had with these key people, the ones that were most deeply engraved were the ones that were the most wounding, because these were the encounters that seemed to threaten our existence. Gradually, over time, these hundreds of thousands of bits of information about our caretakers merged together to form a single image. The old brain, in its inability to make fine distinctions, simply filed all this information under one heading: the people responsible for our survival. You might think of the imago as a silhouette with few distinguishing physical characteristics but with the combined character traits of all of your primary caretakers.
To a large degree, whether or not you have been romantically attracted to someone depended on the degree to which that person matched your imago. A hidden part of your brain ticked and hummed, coolly analyzing that person’s traits, and then compared them with your rich data bank of information. If there was little correlation, you felt no interest. This person was destined to be one of the thousands of people who come and go in your life with little impact. If there was a high degree of correlation, you found the person highly attractive.
This imago-matching process bears some resemblance to the way soldiers were trained to identify flying aircraft during World War II. The soldiers were given books filled with silhouettes of friendly and enemy aircraft. When an unidentified plane came into view, they hurriedly compared the plane with these illustrations. If it turned out to be a friendly plane, they relaxed and went back to their posts. If it was an enemy aircraft, they leaped into action. Unconsciously you have compared every man or woman that you have met to your imago. When you identified a close match, you felt a sudden surge of interest.
As with all aspects of the unconscious mind, you had no awareness of this elaborate sorting mechanism. The only way you can glimpse your imago is in dreams. If you reflect on your dreams, one thing you will notice is that your old brain capriciously merges people together. A dream that starts out with one person playing a part suddenly has another person filling that role; the unconscious has little regard for corporeal boundaries. You may be able to recall a dream where your partner suddenly metamorphosed into your mother or father, or a dream in which your partner and a parent played such similar roles or treated you in such a similar manner that they were virtually indistinguishable. This is the closest you will ever come to directly verifying the existence of your imago. But when you do the exercises in Part III and have a chance to compare the dominant character traits of your mate with the dominant character traits of your primary caretakers, the parallel that your unconscious mind draws between partners and caretakers will become unmistakably clear.
LET’S TAKE THIS information about the imago and see how it adds to our earlier theories of romantic attraction. As an illustration, let me tell you about a client named Lynn and her search for love. Lynn is forty years old and has three school-age children. She lives in a mid-sized New England town, where she works for the city government. Peter, Lynn’s husband, is a graphics designer.
In the initial counseling sessions I had with Lynn and Peter, I learned that Lynn’s father had had a profound influence on her. Apparently he was a good provider and spared no expense in her behalf. But he could also be very insensitive. When he was, Lynn felt angry and threatened. She told me about the relentless way he would tickle her, even though he knew she hated it.
When she finally broke down and cried, he would laugh at her and call her a crybaby. An incident that she will never forget is the time he threw her into a river to “teach her how to swim.” When Lynn told me this story, her throat was tight and her hands gripped the seat of her chair. “How could he have done that?” she asked. “I was only four years old! I remember looking at my daughter when she was four years old and being amazed that he could have done that to me. It’s such a trusting, vulnerable age.”
Although she wasn’t aware of it, Lynn had much earlier images of her father stored deep in her unconscious, ones that affected her even more deeply. As a hypothetical example, let’s suppose that, when she was an infant, her father would neglect to warm the bottle when it was his turn to feed her, and she learned to associate lying in his arms with the shock of cold milk. Or maybe, when she was a few months old, he would toss her high into the air, misreading her frantic cries as an indication of excitement. She has no memory of incidents like these, but every one of her significant experiences with her father is recorded somewhere in her mind.
Lynn’s mother was an equally potent source of images. On the plus side, she was generous with her time and attention and consistent with her discipline. Unlike Lynn’s father, she was sensitive to her daughter’s feelings. When she tucked Lynn into bed at night, she would ask her about her day and was sympathetic if Lynn reported any emotional difficulties. But Lynn’s mother was also overly critical. Nothing Lynn said or did seemed to be quite good enough. Her mother was always correcting her grammar, combing her hair, double-checking her homework. Lynn felt on stage around her, and she had the feeling that she was always flubbing her lines.
Another important thing about her mother was that she was not comfortable with her own sexuality. Lynn remembers that her mother always wore long-sleeved blouses buttoned up to the top button and covered the blouses with loose, concealing
sweaters. She never allowed anyone in the bathroom with her, even though the house had only one bathroom. When Lynn was a teenager, her mother never talked to her about menstruation, boyfriends, or sex. It’s not surprising that one of Lynn’s problems is that she is sexually inhibited.
Other people had a strong influence on Lynn, too, and one of them was her older sister, Judith. Judith, only fourteen months older, was her idol. Tall and talented, she seemed to succeed at everything she did. Lynn admired her older sister and wanted to spend as much time as possible around her, but when she did she always felt inferior.
Gradually the personality traits of these key people—Lynn’s mother, her father, and her older sister—merged together in Lynn’s unconscious mind to form a single image, her imago. Her imago was a picture of someone who was, among other things, affectionate, devoted, critical, insensitive, superior, and generous. The character traits that stood out in bold relief were the negative ones—the tendency to be critical, insensitive, and superior—because these were the ones that had wounded her; this is where she had unfinished business.
Lynn first met Peter at a friend’s house. Her main memory of this meeting is that, when she was introduced to him, she looked in his face and felt as if she already knew him. It was a curious sensation. The next week she kept finding excuses to go over to her friend’s house, and she was glad when Peter was there. Gradually she became aware of an even stronger attraction, and realized that she wasn’t really happy unless she was around him. In these first encounters, Lynn wasn’t consciously comparing Peter with anyone she knew—certainly not with her parents or her sister—she just found him a wonderfully appealing person who seemed easy to talk to.
In the course of their therapy, I grew to appreciate what a good imago match Peter was for Lynn. He was outgoing and confident, traits that he shared with Lynn’s father and sister. But he also had a critical nature, like Lynn’s mother. He kept
telling Lynn that she should lose weight, loosen up, and be more playful at home—especially in bed—and be more assertive at work. The parent trait that was most marked in him, however, was his lack of compassion for her feelings, just like Lynn’s father. Lynn had frequent bouts of depression, and Peter’s advice to her was “Talk less and do more. I’m tired of hearing about your problems!” This was consistent with his own approach to unhappy feelings, which was to cover them up with frantic activity.
Another reason Lynn was attracted to Peter was that he was so at home in his body. When I looked at the two of them, I was often reminded of the words of one of my professors: “If you want to know what kind of person a client is married to, imagine his or her opposite.” Lynn would sit with her arms and legs crossed, while Peter would sprawl in his chair with complete abandon. Sometimes he would kick off his shoes and sit cross-legged. Other times he would swing one leg up and hook it across the arm of the chair. Lynn wore tailored clothes buttoned to the top button, or a business suit with a silk scarf knotted securely around her neck. Peter wore loose-fitting corduroy pants, shirts open at the neck, and loafers without socks.
Now we have some clues to why Lynn was attracted to Peter. Why was Peter attracted to Lynn? The fact that she had an emotional nature was one of the reasons. Although his parents had accepted Peter’s body, they had rejected his feelings. When he was with Lynn, he felt more connected to his repressed emotions; she helped him regain contact with his lost self. In addition, she had numerous character traits that reminded him of his parents. Her sense of humor reminded him of his mother, and her dependent, self-effacing manner reminded him of his father. Because Lynn matched Peter’s imago and Peter matched Lynn’s, and because they had numerous complementary traits, they had “fallen in love.”
The question that I’m frequently asked when I talk about
the unconscious factors in mate selection is this: how can people tell so much about each other so quickly? While certain characteristics may be right on the surface—Peter’s sexuality, for example, or Lynn’s sense of humor—others are not so apparent.
The reason that we are such instant judges of character is that we rely on what Freud called “unconscious perception.” We intuitively pick up much more about people than we are aware of. When we meet strangers, we instantly register the way they move, the way they seek or avoid eye contact, the clothes they wear, their characteristic expressions, the way they fix their hair, the ease with which they laugh or smile, their ability to listen, the speed at which they talk, the amount of time it takes them to respond to a question—we record all of these characteristics and a hundred more in a matter of minutes.
Just by looking at people, we can absorb vast amounts of information. When I walk to work each morning, I automatically appraise the people on the crowded Manhattan sidewalks. My judgment is instantaneous: this person is someone I wish I knew; that person is someone I have no interest in. I find myself attracted or repulsed with only a superficial glance. When I walk into a party, one glance around the room will often single out the people that I want to meet. Other people report similar experiences. A truck driver told me that he could tell whether or not he wanted to pick up a particular hitchhiker even though he was cruising at sixty-five miles an hour. “And I’m rarely wrong,” he said.
Our powers of observation are especially acute when we are looking for a mate, because we are searching for someone to satisfy our fundamental unconscious drives. We subject everyone to the same intense scrutiny: is this someone who will nurture me and help me recover my lost self? When we meet someone who appears to meet these needs, the old brain registers instant interest. In all subsequent encounters, the
unconscious mind is fully alert, searching for clues that this might indeed be the perfect mate. If later experiences confirm the imago match, our interest climbs even further. On the other hand, if later experiences show the match to be superficial, our interest plummets, and we look for a way to end or reduce the importance of the relationship.
Unbeknown to them, this was the psychological process that Lynn and Peter were engaged in when they met that day at a friend’s house. Because Peter seemed to match Lynn’s imago, she went out of her way to see him again. Because Lynn, in turn, was a reasonably good imago match for Peter, her interest was returned; this was not just another case of unrequited love. After a few weeks, Peter and Lynn had accumulated enough data about each other to realize that they were in love.
Not everyone finds a mate who conforms so closely to the imago. Sometimes only one or two key character traits match up, and the initial attraction is likely to be mild. Such a relationship is often less passionate and less troubled than those characterized by a closer match. The reason it is less passionate is that the old brain is still looking for the ideal “gratifying object,” and the reason it tends to be less troubled is that there isn’t the repetition of so many childhood struggles. When couples with weak imago matches terminate their relationships, it’s often because they feel little interest in each other, not because they are in great pain. “There wasn’t all that much going on,” they say. Or “I just felt restless. I knew that there was something better out there.”
 
AT THIS POINT in our discussion of love relationships, we have a more complete understanding of the mystery of romantic attraction. To the biological theory and the exchange theory and the persona theory discussed in chapter 1, we have added the idea of the unconscious search for a person who matches our imago. Our motivation for seeking an imago match is our
urgent desire to heal childhood wounds. We also have new insight into marital conflict: if the primary reason we select our mates is that they resemble our caretakers, it is inevitable that they are going to reinjure some very sensitive wounds. But before we sink into this quagmire of pain and confusion called “the power struggle,” I would like to focus on the ecstasy of romantic love, those first few months or years of a relationship when we are filled with the delicious expectation of wish fulfillment.

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