Why Relationships Matter

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Unconscious relational templates formed in childhood quietly guide relationship patterns and reactions.

Jungian archetypes and Stern’s RIGs both illuminate how inner images guide relationship expectations.

With awareness, these inner images can evolve, reshaping how we love and choose partners.

We humans perpetually try to understand the world around us, seeking to simplify what is inherently complex. One of the most complex areas we encounter is relationships. Because we aren’t in others' minds, we frequently struggle to understand why people behave as they do. Recognizing habitual relationship patterns is therefore a critical step in greater self-awareness as it allows people to identify recurring dynamics that may be impacting their relationships and connections.

Numerous frameworks attempt to explain relationships—attachment theory is among the most widely known. However, as Carl Jung noted, “A model…opens up a…useful field of inquiry. A model does not assert that something is so; it simply illustrates a particular mode of observation.”1

This understanding influenced my post on what people get wrong about attachment theory. Like all models, attachment theory illustrates a particular way of observing human relationships. Yet human relationships are shaped by far more than attachment patterns: temperament, biology, culture, spirituality, and unconscious psychological processes, including deeply rooted psychological images, all play a role.

The Deep Roots of Our Relationship Patterns

Our relational experiences and perceptions “reside” in what psychoanalysts term the “relational unconscious”—an implicit psychological field shaped by past relationships, emotional experiences, and internalized roles. This explains how our reactions to others are not only based on the person in front of us, but also on internalized layers of prior experience. As a result, many people find themselves in certain relationship patterns, often unconsciously repeating the same dynamics with different partners.

I have seen this repeatedly in clinical practice. Let's take a patient of mine who was securely attached to his parents. He was comfortable with closeness and typically felt safe in relationships. Yet he struggled in his relationship with his current partner. “She’s great,” he told me. “Nothing is wrong. She’s just not who I pictured marrying.”

His phrase—who I pictured marrying—was diagnostically rich. In his relational unconscious, my patient formed an idea of “wife,” and his partner didn’t match that ideal. Rather than indicating attachment insecurity, it revealed an internalized relational image that was operating largely outside his awareness and affecting his relationship.

My patient’s image of “wife” can be understood through the concept of “Representations of Interactions that have been Generalized” (RIGs), by developmental psychoanalyst Daniel Stern.2 RIGs begin forming in early infancy through repeated relational encounters, leading the child to abstract patterns over time: “This is what happens when someone is called ‘mother.’ This is what to expect from someone called ‘wife.’”

RIGs provide a sense of continuity for self and other, but change as new experiences continually reshape the images we carry. These representations coalesce into templates with RIGs acting as models for relationships. In adulthood, a person may identify or counter-identify with the RIGs from childhood—i.e., they may follow it or reject it—which underscores the dynamic nature of the psyche and relational unconscious. These relationship templates can create both healthy and unhealthy dynamics.

Why Relationships Matter

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For example, one insecurely attached person with a history of abuse may select an abusive partner (identify), while another such person may reject anyone who appears abusive (counteridentify). Similarly, one securely attached adult may reject a stable relationship—paradoxically because they feel confident to explore (counteridentify)—while another securely attached person may fully embrace the RIGs (identify).

Jungian psychoanalysis offers a valuable lens for understanding relational templates as expressions of archetypes and complexes. Jung postulated that archetypes are innate organizing structures of the collective unconscious that allow for the representation of universally recurring aspects of experience, such as attachment and marriage. There are as many Jungian archetypes as there are human experiences.

Regularly recurring encounters constellate archetypes, which provide an invisible structure through which humans make meaning, although they are not inherited images or specific memories. The archetype’s content is supplied by collective, cultural, and personal experience, which fills the underlying forms with personally and culturally specific images, expectations, and narratives.

When lived experiences accumulate emotional intensity, they organize around these Jungian archetypes and manifest as complexes. Jung experimentally demonstrated that experience clusters into affect-laden or “feeling-toned” associations—complexes—that function as dynamic organizing centers largely outside conscious awareness. A complex consists of a core archetypal theme expressed through emotionally charged content that reflects one’s personal and cultural experiences. Complexes blend reality and imagination to shape our relational responses, perceptions, and memory.

Together, archetypes and complexes form what Carl Jung described as an inner image of relationship—an active and dynamic template through which we understand and engage in relationships. Stern’s RIGs and Jung’s complexes and archetypes overlap in fundamental ways. RIGs narrow in on the developmental shaping of relational expectations, especially during infancy, while Jungian theory accents how relational experiences are represented through lenses that integrate unconscious personal, cultural, and collective experiences and meanings. These psychic structures unconsciously influence a person’s life, personality, and relationship patterns.

Identifying Relationship Patterns, Archetypes, and Complexes

My patient’s image of “wife” illustrates this convergence. His mother was a homemaker and volunteered. His partner was career-oriented and joked that she was “allergic” to housekeeping, preferring to hire help. This difference did not signal pathology or insecurity for either person. Rather, it conflicted with an unconscious template that could be described as the convergence of RIGs, complexes, and Jungian archetypes organized around images, including “wife,” “marriage,” and “mother,” all unfolding within the relational unconscious.

Psychotherapy was about making this implicit relational field more visible, rather than addressing his attachment pattern per se. We explored his expectations and examined how collective, cultural, and personal meanings had shaped his idea of partnership. In working with affectively charged memories—especially “wife,” “mother,” “family,” and “home”—as well as images in his current life, he became less reactive when his template encountered alternative images. Consciously identifying relationship templates, archetypes, and complexes in this way can be complex, but it supports personal growth, healthier connections, and improved relationships.

With greater awareness and affective development, he could relate to his partner as she actually was, rather than as a mismatch to an unconscious image. She later became his wife.

Both Stern and Jung remind us that these relational models are neither fixed nor fate. They are living psychological structures, “dynamic presences,” continually revised as new experience is integrated.3

Ultimately, no single theory can capture the richness of human relating. Like attachment theory, Stern’s RIGs and Jung’s complexes and archetypes are relational ideas that shape our understanding of the relational unconscious. I hold them not as competing truths, but as complementary lenses, unified by their capacity to help heal relational wounds. Each diverse idea reveals how we carry our past into the present, and how new relationships can reshape even long-standing inner images.

As Walt Whitman wrote, “I contain multitudes.” Our relational lives do as well.

1. Jung, C. G., & Hull, R. F. C. (2014). The structure and dynamics of the psyche. Routledge.

2. Stern, D. (1985). The interpersonal world of the infant: a view from psychoanalysis and developmental psychology. New York, NY: Basic Books.

3. Sklarew, B., & Sklarew, M. (2011). Journey of Child Development: Selected Papers of Joseph D. Noshpitz. Routledge.

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