“Two perfectly healthy people get together and it’s like hell on earth; 

two extremely troubled people get together and have a wonderful relationship!”  —

It was precisely this clinical observation that sparked Otto Kernberg’s interest in how couple relationships are formed and what determines their subsequent development. These questions were particularly important to him in his work with borderline patients, who often experience difficulties in forming couple relationships and building a married life. In his book Love Relations: Normality and Pathology (Yale University Press, 1995), he writes: 

“I noticed that it was almost impossible to predict the destiny of a love relation or marriage on the basis of a patient's particular psychopathology. Sometimes different types and degrees of psychopathology in the partners seem to result in a comfortable match; at other times the differences seem to be the source of incompatibility. 

It did not take me long to discover that it was just as impossible to study the vicissitudes of love without the vicissitudes of aggression in the relationship of the couple as in the individual. Aggressive aspects of the couple's erotic relationship emerged as important in all intimate sexual relations. But I found the aggressive components of the universal ambivalence of intimate object relations equally important, as well as the aggressive components of superego pressures unleashed in the couple's intimate life. A psychoanalytic object relations theory facilitated the study of the dynamics linking intrapsychic conflicts and interpersonal relations, the mutual influences of the couple and its surrounding social group, and the interplay of love and aggression in all these fields.

So, despite the best of intentions, the incontrovertible evidence forces me to focus sharply on aggression. But, by the same token, the acknowledgment of the complex ways in which love and aggression merge and interact in the couple's life also highlights the mechanisms by which love can integrate and neutralize aggression and, under many circumstances, triumph over it.”

(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,

Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy