Playing Pygmalion: How People Create One Another

Like Pygmalion with his Galatea, we create the characters of people in our lives. Although others appear to us to be just who they "are," there are complicated psychological processes, outside of our awareness, that lead us to experience people in ways that we ourselves construct. Psychoanalytic theory offers a wealth of understanding of how people unconsciously create what they both need and dread. But these processes are not well understood by most therapists. Too often, therapists join their patients in overlooking their own role in creating the relationships in their lives, such that it seems that patients were simply unfortunate to "have" an ungiving mother or to "find" an unloving spouse. Because processes of creation in relationships are largely unconscious, they are much harder to see. As a result, most theorists of relationships acknowledge that they exist, but offer little language or explication for how they unfold or manifest themselves. Playing Pygmalion is an effort to trace in psychological terms the subtle interplay by which people create each other.

About the Author:
Ruthellen Josselson, Ph.D., is professor of psychology at the Fielding Graduate University