If you and your partner keep having the same fight, feel fundamentally misunderstood, or wonder why you can’t seem to break destructive patterns, you’re not alone—and you’re not failing. What looks like a communication problem often runs much deeper. Here’s how psychodynamic couples therapy can help.

This past fall, I had the opportunity to attend the Bay Area Psychoanalytic Couple Psychotherapy Group’s (PCPG) annual lecture. Presented by visiting analyst Elizabeth Palacios García, MD, of Zaragoza, Spain with local discussant Benjamin Fife, Psy.D, the lecture, Link Theory: The Interpersonal and Social Dimensions of Psychic Life in Couples, presented the concept of the “Link,” an unconscious structure shaping relationships between two or more individuals, and explored its substantial implications for couple and family therapy.

Consider the familiar problems for which many couples seek therapy. They are having the same argument over and over again. They feel misunderstood or unseen. They find themselves cast in rigid roles or scapegoated as “the problem.” They come in because they are stuck. No one quite knows how things got this way or how to change them. Link Theory understands these problems not as mere “communication breakdowns,” as they are often described, but as attempts to manage the core concepts of presence and difference. 

Why Couples Keep Having the Same Arguments

When two or more people are in close emotional relationship, each inevitably brings their own needs, desires, fears, and ways of making sense of the world (originally developed alongside our earliest caregivers). Such things are what make people who they are and give them their presence. However, the presence of others introduces something “foreign, irreducible, and non-symbolizable” (Palacios Garcia 2025) that cannot be fully assimilated without being felt as something of a loss to ourselves and our imagined individualism. This difference, or “alienness,” represents the unpredictable emergence of novelty in human relationships. This quality is what makes others fun, exciting, and attractive, but over time, such difference often comes to feel threatening, not because anyone is doing something wrong or bad, but because closeness requires us to give up the fantasy that we can remain unchanged, unchallenged, or fully in control when truly relating to others. Suffering, then, is produced by such alterations by others to our subjectivity, creating what is known as a psychic wound. Linkage implies yielding something of our fantasized oneness through the “act of doing-with others” (Palacios Garcia 2025).

In couple and family therapy, this discomfort, or psychic wounding, if you like, is expressed through such recurrent conflicts as those named earlier. Rigid alliances, scapegoating, triangulation, or endlessly replayed arguments can serve as unconscious strategies to stabilize relationships by narrowing the field of possible differences allowed to exist between people. If the problem can be located in one person, one issue, or one familiar fight (in Dad, in the electric bill, in Bobby, in who does the dishes or cleans Fluffy’s litterbox), then the relationship itself does not have to confront the deeper uncertainty and perceived loss to our “onness” that comes with genuine emotional contact with others. “If only they were more like me or did things my way,” we imagine. 

Understanding Link Theory in Relationship Therapy

Link Theory represents a subtle yet quite meaningful shift in psychodynamic thought, relocating the center of mental life from the individual psyche and how it makes sense of the world to the quality of actual relational encounters. Its fundamental premise is that the mind is actively co-constituted by the various “stamps” it receives from interactions with significant others (parents, siblings, romantic partners, etc.). This position means that human experience is what is referred to as intersubjective: the self emerges not in isolation but in dialogue, tension, conflict, and resonance with other minds, similarly-formed. This emphasis on such qualities as the presence and difference inevitably introduced by others as well as the unpredictability inherent in human relationships offers a framework particularly-suited to understanding and intervening in couple and family systems, where these same relational dynamics are often the very engine of symptom formation, therapeutic focus, and change.

The concept lo vínculo (Spanish for “the link”) was introduced by Argentine psychoanalyst Isidoro Berenstein in 1989 and later elaborated upon in his 2001 paper “The Link and the Other.” Drawing from psychoanalysts Winnicott (1953), Pichon-Riviere (1956-57), and Bion (1967), he defines “linkage” as “an unconscious structure joining two or more subjects, whom it determines on the basis of a relationship of presence” (2001, p.143). Crucially, the link is not simply a metaphor or representation, but a psychic structure that configures subjects relationally, shaping both/all participants in ways that cannot be predicted by individual history alone. The process is therefore not deterministic, and thus is novel: subjects of the link cannot be predicted or controlled, and it arises only in the context of a genuine encounter with other such subjects of links (i.e. literally everyone). Subjectivity is not merely expressed in relationship, it is actively produced through it.

Janine Puget, a French/Argentine contributor to Link Theory, further challenges the notion of a single, self-contained “psychic reality.” In “Psychic Reality or Various Realities” (1995), she posits that “psychic reality can be thought of as the result of an articulation or opposition between internal reality and external reality…[it] is a singular construction, reconstruction, new construction, of ‘another possible reality to be made significant and external.’” (p.29-30) Puget is saying that there is no single, individual psychic “field” but multiple overlapping realities created through interpersonal and social engagement (i.e. links) with the family, with the State, with culture, etc. These realities based on “linking” are overtly present at the moment of relational encounter and have their own logic, effects, psychological costs, and transformations. 

Together, Berenstein and Puget describe psychic life as unfolding across two “heterologous logics”: the Logic of the One and the Logic of the Two. The Logic of the One organizes experience around repetition, continuity, and the past. The Logic of the Two, by contrast, is oriented toward presence/difference, novelty and the unpredictable creation of something genuinely new between subjects. Thus all this diceyness that comes with the unsettling realization that others cannot be fully assimilated without loss to one’s imagined self-sufficiency while also being the necessary source of novelty, creativity, and new forms of subjectivity. 

What to Expect in Psychodynamic Couples Therapy

In therapy, particularly couple therapy and family therapy, this understanding shifts the focus in meaningful ways. The work is not about, say, who is right or wrong or which partner is being responsible or irresponsible but about identifying how partners respond to one another’s differences in real time. The psychotherapy session is not merely a space for insight into individual minds but a “workshop” for creating new relational possibilities – often awkwardly, uncomfortably, and imperfectly, but with fresh and lasting impacts.

An important aspect of this work involves helping all participants (including the therapist) tolerate not-knowing. Many couples arrive to treatment hoping the therapist will provide answers, quick-fixes, or explicit rules to follow, but meaningful change emerges when couples begin to experience one another differently. Link Theory demonstrates that intimate relationships inevitably confront us with the fact that others are never mere extensions of ourselves. They have their own inner worlds, desires, and limitations, and are shaped by their own developmental experiences. Approaching and accepting this “psychic wound” created by closeness can feel like a loss, yet it is precisely this loss that makes authentic connection possible. When couples can begin to tolerate the discomfort of difference without rushing to defend against it, relationships often become more flexible, creative, and alive. This requires slowing down, getting curious, and interrogating those familiar patterns, staying with emotional discomfort, and allowing space for something new and different to take shape.

Moving Beyond Communication Breakdowns

Ultimately, the approach of Link Theory offers a hopeful reframe. When couples can recognize that conflict is often part of the process of change and not a sign of failure, they gain access to new relational possibilities generated by strength in difference. Arguments no longer have to end in withdrawal or escalation but can become moments where something important is being articulated, negotiated, acknowledged, or newly understood. Relationships are not static systems doomed to repeat the past. They are living processes, shaped continuously by the ways people encounter one another in the present. When difference is approached not as a threat but as a source of growth, couples and families can move beyond survival toward deeper connection. 

At Bay Psychology Group, our psychodynamic individual and couple therapists work to shift the therapeutic aim from solely problem-elimination to relational cultivation. The difference of others becomes a resource rather than a threat; an engine for creativity, connection, and the emergence of new possibilities. If you’d like a consultation, we can help you decide whether individual or couple work (or both) is the best fit.

References

Berenstein, I. (1989). New ideas about the unconscious family structure. British Journal of Psychotherapy, (5)(3):312-316.

Berenstein, I. (2001). The link and the other. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, (82)(1):141-149.

Palacios Garcia, E. (2025, October 25). Link theory: A distinct psychoanalytic model for understanding human interactions [Powerpoint]. Psychoanalytic Couple Psychotherapy Group Annual Psychoanalytic Couple Psychotherapy Lecture of 2025, Berkeley, CA.

Puget, J. (1995). Psychic reality or various realities. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, (76):29-34.