Is a love triangle always a story of pain, betrayal, and the arrival of someone seemingly more important to one’s partner?

In psychoanalytic terms, a love triangle reflects the inner dynamics of desire, jealousy, and fear of loss. It represents an unconscious stage on which our early love objects, childhood rivalries, and idealized images interact—shaping the way we experience love.

This is precisely how Dr. Otto Kernberg understands this dynamic, as described in his 1988 work, where he outlines the models of “direct” and “inverted” triangles.

Direct and reverse triangulations constitute the most frequent and typical unconscious scenarios, which may at worst destroy the couple or at best reinforce their intimacy and stability. 

Direct triangulation, according to Dr. Otto Kernberg, to describe both partners' unconscious fantasy of an excluded third party, an idealized member of the subject's gender—the dreaded rival replicating the oedipal rival. Every man and every woman unconsciously or consciously fears the presence of somebody who would be more satisfactory to his or her sexual partner—this third party is the origin of emotional insecurity in sexual intimacy and of jealousy as an alarm signal protecting the couple's integrity.

Clinical example:

A woman unconsciously imagines that her husband is interested in another woman. This fantasy evokes jealousy that is both painful and activating, heightening her attention to the relationship.

Reverse triangulation, according to Dr. Otto Kernberg, defines the compensating, revengeful fantasy of involvement with a person other than one's partner, an idealized member of the other gender who stands for the desired oedipal object, thus establishing a triangular relationship in which the subject is courted by two members of the other gender instead of having to compete with the oedipal rival of the same gender for the idealized oedipal object of the other gender.

Clinical case:

The man displays a split between a caring object and a sexually exciting one:

• Caring object — his wife, with whom he experiences emotional closeness but little sexual desire.
  
  
• Sexually exciting object — another woman who evokes strong sexual attraction but with whom he does not experience a deeper emotional bond.

According to Dr. Otto Kernberg, when these two universal fantasies, there are potentially, in fantasy, always six persons in bed together: 

- the couple, 

- their respective unconscious oedipal rivals, 

- their respective unconscious oedipal ideals.

Dr. Otto Kernberg’s formulation arises in the context of unconscious fantasies based on oedipal object relations and identifications.One form that aggression related to oedipal conflicts frequently takes (in clinical practice and in daily life) is the unconscious collusion of both partners to find, in reality, a third person who represents a condensed ideal of one and a rival of the other. 

The implication is that marital infidelity, short-term and long-term triangular relationships, more often than not, reflect unconscious collusions between the couple—the temptation to enact what is most dreaded and desired. Homosexual as well as heterosexual dynamics enter the picture because the unconscious rival is also a sexually desired object in the negative oedipal conflict: the victim of infidelity often identifies unconsciously with the betraying partner in sexual fantasies about the partner's relationship with the jealously hated rival.

When severe narcissistic pathology in one or both members of the couple precludes the capacity for normal jealousy—a capacity that implies a certain achievement of toleration for oedipal rivalry—such triangulations easily become enacted.The couple that is able to maintain its sexual intimacy, to protect itself against invasion by third parties, is not only maintaining its obvious conventional boundary but also reasserting, in its struggle against rivals, its unconscious gratification of the fantasy of the excluded third party—an oedipal triumph and a subtle oedipal rebellion at the same time. 

Fantasies about excluded third parties are typical components of normal sexual relations. 

The counterpart of sexual intimacy that permits the enjoyment of polymorphous perverse sexuality is the enjoyment of secret sexual fantasies that express, in a sublimated fashion, aggression toward the loved object. Sexual intimacy thus presents us with one more discontinuity: discontinuity between sexual encounters in which both partners are completely absorbed in and identified with each other, and sexual encounters in which secret fantasied scenarios are enacted, thus carrying into the relationship the unresolved ambivalences of the oedipal situation.

The perennial questions "What do women want?" and "What do men want?" may be answered by saying that men want a woman in multiple roles^

- as mother, 

- as baby girl, 

- as twin sister,

- as adult sexual woman. 

Women, because of their fateful shift from the primary object, want a man in fatherly roles but also in motherly roles:

- as father, 

- baby boy,

- twin brother, 

- adult sexual man. 

And at a different level, both men and women may wish to enact a homosexual relationship or to reverse sexual roles in an ultimate search for overcoming the boundaries between the sexes that unavoidably limit narcissistic gratification in sexual intimacy: both long for complete fusion with the loved object with oedipal and preoedipal elements that can never be fulfilled.

It is these contradictions—between desire and fear, closeness and aggression—and the extent to which we can integrate them that determine how deeply we are able to love.

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(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,

Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy