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Introduction
- Michigan State University Press
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Introduction Ihave been practicing as a psychiatrist for forty years. My professors taught me, during my internship and clinical residency, to diagnose pathologies of mood and temperament (mania, melancholy, depression of various types), of personality (psychoses and neuroses), and of behavior (sexual, eating, social, etc.). I learned, like all my colleagues, to treat these with medications. There can be no doubt that psychopharmacology has made extraordinary progress during these last forty years, revolutionizing our view of mental illnesses and especially our ways of handling them and our ideas about their prognoses. During my years of clinical practice, however, something became obvious to me: in addition to the patients who came to me seeking help for an illness that could be clearly categorized and treated with an appropriately specific therapeutic technique, an increasing number came for some problem that was poisoning their lives but which definitely did not derive from a mental illness. I soon realized that these problems were not simply located within the patient but were situated between the patient and some other: father, mother, brother, sister, partner, boss, employee, associate, and so on. The problems that were the most common and the most toxic for physical and psychic health were those afflicting couples, and I found myself at a loss as to how to resolve them. 1 2 Introduction Certainly many couples were flourishing; fifty years after their initial falling in love, numerous couples are still together and remain very happy. Of course couples such as those do not come seeking help. Those who do come to a therapist, either together or separately, are those who have run into difficulties. These often find themselves victims of a paradox: that the very desire that originally drew them to each other and brought them into union has mysteriously transformed into a force that separates them as violently as it once united them. Consequently,Ihavedevotedmytheoreticalandclinicalresearchforthelast twenty years to the effort of analyzing these phenomena. René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire provided precious clues for understanding them. Beginning in 1996, the discovery of mirror neurons has also brought experimental evidence regarding the underlying mimetic mechanisms and provided scientific verification of their reality, so that they are no longer simply hypothetical assumptions but proven facts. The director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, Vilayanur Ramachandran, writes: I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: They will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.1 Drawing on the intuitions of thinkers, philosophers, and psychologists, and applying the already developed theory of mimetic desire along with the new, remarkable discovery of mirror neurons, I have tried to understand better what it is that both unites and separates couples. I have discovered that it is the working of one and the same mimetic mechanism that creates first love and then hatred, that draws couples together and then drives them apart—a mechanism of which they are the playthings. My purpose in this book is to show that there are strategies for escaping the power of this mechanism, strategies that can be effective but that require the partners—or at least one of them—to become aware of the mimetic mechanism that manipulates them, and to be willing to make the effort, and sometimes even the sacrifices, needed for avoiding its harmful effects. ✽ ✽ ✽ Marina, a twenty-five-year-old model, was sent to me by a colleague whom I greatly respect and who urged me to accept her as a patient. She entered Introduction 3 my office in tears, overcome with emotion, without makeup, with her hair disheveled, wearing a jogging suit. She said, “Something absolutely horrible has happened to me. I’ve been living in London for three years with a sixty-year-old man—intelligent, with many women, a millionaire, and an able and successful businessman. For my sake he divorced his wife of thirty years, something he never did for any of his previous mistresses. He was torn between me and a young, twenty-year-old, Swedish model, but he finally chose to live with me. My parents, of whom I am very fond, know nothing about this relationship. It would kill them; they’re very conservative and want me to have a normal life, with a husband and children. They’ve wondered what I’ve been...