Probably everyone involved in psychology has heard about denial. This is an unconscious mechanism of the psyche, meaning the erasure of unacceptable material from reality; in speech it takes the form of “no” and “not”. To a trained eye, denial is quite easy to recognize. But the other defense - simultaneous recognition and non-recognition of reality - is much more difficult to distinguish. I call it "Yes and No." John Steiner, in his book Psychological Asylums, describes this phenomenon using the example of the myth of Oedipus. Having the facts that were available to the hero, he could not help but draw a conclusion about his origin and incest, but he did not. Self-punishment in the form of gouging out one’s own eyes is a metaphor for “yes and no,” meaning “I know, but I don’t want to see it.” But when I think about “yes and no,” I remember the fairy tale about the task of coming on horseback, both on foot, and dressed, and undressed. If you look closely, in life “both yes and no” occurs quite often. One girl I know considers visiting relatives a social duty: when she comes to her grandmother’s house, she almost immediately goes to bed. Thus, she both visited and did not, and communicated, and avoided communication. Or here’s an example: a woman was very afraid to go to an event in another city. On the way, sitting on the bus, she kept thinking about intermediate stops where she could get off. Thus, in her inner reality, she was both going and not going to the event at the same time. The point is that while recognizing all the facts, there is no solution, no conclusion, no point within. Relationships can also develop - or rather, stagnate - in the “yes and no” format. This applies to many long-distance relationships (a common problem today), or in cases where someone says they don't love their partner but want to continue dating or living with them. This, apparently, also applies to “trial” or “civil” marriages. “Both yes and no” provides a person with a kind of mental refuge, a safe space in which to hide from developmental anxieties. British psychoanalyst Ronald Britton wonderfully describes the “yes and no relationship.” Here is an excerpt from his article “Narcissistic Space”: “When we decide to live with someone in an intimate relationship - whether with a person of the same or opposite sex, in a legal marriage or not - we are faced with problems of shared space, physical and mental. In these days of informal sexual arrangements, some people, spurred on by the claustrophobia of the marital space, imagine that they can escape the matrimonial living room by endlessly inhabiting the hallway. They are like people who, well into adulthood, continue to imagine that they are on the threshold of adulthood. in analysis they think that what is happening is a dress rehearsal and not a performance; they do not realize that this is their own concrete way of going through the analysis. And so they may be tempted to vaguely imagine. that the "real" analysis or the "real" marriage will happen later, perhaps with another as-yet-unknown person at some unspecified future time. Thus, when they are married or in analysis, they tell themselves that they are still on the threshold. This, paradoxically, can lead to endless unsatisfactory relationships or - in much the same way - to endless analyzes. What does not begin properly cannot end properly. This is one of the possible reactions to the fear of being captured, consumed, invaded, or even destroyed by the psyche of another person. There are other defensive solutions that are commonly adopted to deny this difficulty, but they all draw attention to the problem. Based on their analysis, the class of people I have just described has nothing to fear as much as they imagine. In other words, they are already able to withstand the general mental space better than they think they can handle. This, of course, is difficult for them,