Desire without love—or love without desire.

In psychotherapy, we encounter couples who have lived together for years, yet gradually lose the capacity to desire one another.

Or, conversely, relationships in which sexuality is sustained only through distance, conflict, jealousy, or the constant threat of loss.

We see patients who are capable of deep emotional intimacy yet lose sexual desire, as well as those for whom desire becomes possible only under conditions of unattainability, prohibition, or the destruction of closeness. At times, sexuality itself begins to fade precisely when the relationship becomes stable, reliable, and genuinely meaningful.

Sexual love is one of the most complex achievements of psychic development.

It does not arise automatically with sexual drive or emotional attachment. On the contrary, the capacity to integrate sexuality, tenderness, dependency, aggression, and the individuality of the other represents a complex and not always fully accomplished process of psychic development.

Mature sexual love is a complex emotional disposition that integrates: 

- sexual excitement transformed into erotic desire for another person; 

- tenderness that derives from the integration of libidinally and aggressively invested self and object representations, with a predominance of love over aggression and tolerance of the normal ambivalence that characterizes all human relations; 

- an identification with the other that includes both a reciprocal genital identification and deep empathy with the other's gender identity; 

- a mature form of idealization along with deep commitment to the other and to the relationship; 

- the passionate character of the love relation in all three aspects: the sexual relationship, the object relationship, and the superego investment of the couple. 

At the same time, each of these components may become a source of internal conflict.

To comprehensively explore each of the elements listed above requires the analysis of numerous psychoanalytic sources, as well as extensive clinical and life experience.

At the same time, for many patients, the capacity to sustain love, sexuality, and psychological individuality simultaneously remains unattainable. For this reason, the sphere of intimate relationships becomes a space in which the following emerge with particular intensity:

• narcissistic conflicts
• Oedipal experiences
• fears of loss, engulfment, or humiliation
• difficulties integrating love and aggression within a single love relationship
• sexual inhibition (that is, symptoms that interfere with the capacity to experience sexual satisfaction)
• triangles
• promiscuity

Our patients ask us—directly or indirectly—to help them develop and integrate this dimension of their lives. Yet we often find ourselves limited by insufficient knowledge, lack of clinical experience, and our own not always fully conscious attitudes and conflicts.

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(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,

Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy