“Who is in charge of the relationship?”

It is often around this issue that a hidden struggle for power, influence, and recognition unfolds over many years.

One partner seeks to control important decisions, while the other strives to preserve their independence. Conflicts arise over careers, finances, raising children, the division of responsibilities, the balance of power within the relationship, or even whose opinion carries greater weight.

According to Otto Kernberg, such struggles for dominance within a relationship often reflect much deeper intrapsychic conflicts.

In his work, Kernberg describes love relationships as a context in which unconscious object relations established in early childhood become reactivated. As a result, the partner may be experienced not only as an object of love but also as a rival upon whom one's sense of self-worth, security, and psychological superiority comes to depend.

In such relationships, the pursuit of mutuality gradually gives way to a struggle for control, recognition, and dominance. A partner's success may be experienced as one's own defeat, while intimacy itself may be perceived as a threat to autonomy or self-esteem.

According to Kernberg, mature love relationships become possible only when an individual is able to integrate love and aggression toward the same person, tolerate ambivalence, and relinquish the need to prevail over the partner in order to maintain a sense of self-worth.

Power struggles within a couple are often only one manifestation of deeper internal conflicts related to Oedipal dynamics, sexual morality, and unconscious prohibitions.

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(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,

Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy