Can Love Exist Without Narcissism?

Narcissism is commonly regarded as the opposite of love.

However, Otto Kernberg argues that this opposition is one of the greatest oversimplifications in our understanding of love relationships. In his book Love Relations: Normality and Pathology, he writes:

“Insofar as the selected partner reflects one's own ideals, an eminently "narcissistic" quality undoubtedly permeates falling and being in love. And insofar as there is a conscious and unconscious search for complementarity—ranging from the admiration of and gratification from what the other can enjoy and tolerate in himself or herself and one cannot, to overcoming the limitations of one's own gender by establishing a "bisexual" union with a partner—even such complementarity, one might say, serves "narcissistic" purposes.”

In other words, 

the partner often comes to embody qualities that a person values, idealizes, or seeks to integrate into their own psychological life. This is why love relationships almost always contain an element of narcissistic gratification. From a psychoanalytic perspective, this in itself is not a sign of pathology.

For example, a person may be attracted to a partner who is able to express aggression openly, tolerate conflict, or sustain intimacy without fearing the loss of autonomy. Such admiration may reflect an unconscious search for psychological complementarity rather than romantic attraction alone.

At the same time, insofar as the other provides gratification of both nurturing and oedipal needs and offers gratitude for what is received, the love relationship is obviously "object-related." It has altruistic features that integrate in myriad ways self-centeredness and self-sacrifice, dedication to the other, and gratification of the self. 

According to Kernberg, this balance between narcissistic gratification and the capacity to perceive one's partner as a separate individual is one of the defining characteristics of mature love. 

Otto Kernberg emphasizes that normal narcissism and object relatedness complement each other.For clinical purposes, what I have said implies the need to consider separately the behavior pattern at which a couple's relationship has stabilized or become frozen and the personality structure of each of the partners.

The presence of a narcissistic personality disorder in one or both partners undoubtedly colors the nature of their relationship, and in some cases the resolution of deep, long-term marital conflict will depend on modification of the personality structure of one or both partners. 

In such cases, modifying behavioral patterns or communication skills alone may prove insufficient. Enduring change is possible only when psychotherapy addresses the patient's underlying personality organization. 

More frequently, however, the resolution of pathological interaction through psychoanalysis and psychotherapy—or separation and divorce—will reveal how much of what appeared to be narcissistic pathology in one or both partners was the result of unconscious collusion in mutual exploitativeness and aggression derived from other conflicts.

This is why Kernberg argues that it is essential to analyze not only each partner's personality, but also the unconscious organization of the relationship itself. What may initially appear to be an expression of individual psychopathology often turns out to be the product of a particular interaction between two personalities, in which each partner unconsciously maintains the pathological equilibrium of the relationship. 

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(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,

Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy