Why do we behave aggressively toward our partners when all we want is love? In the past, the infant’s normal demands for attention, feeding, etc. can be felt as both néed and rage. We’ve all heard that mixed-up brew when we hear a screaming, crying baby.
C. Rabin, in Winnicott and Good Enough Couple Therapy, states that: “Winnicott proposes that the mother who turns away from the aggressive child or retaliates [creates a dynamic that is]…so dangerous to the child that the child will develop a false self to attempt to comply with rather than aggress against a mother who is not capable of surviving the infant’s attacks.” The author goes on to say that when this baby, (whose expression of its primal needs were rejected,) grows up and is part of a couple, “turning away, retaliation, and cutting-off are typical couple moves that turn what might start out to be a bid for connection to a destructive sequence.”
That’s why.