A narcissistic personality organization can fundamentally alter the very capacity to love. What may outwardly appear to be a deep emotional attachment often turns out to be an attempt to overcome longstanding frustration, appropriate the qualities of another person, or escape an unbearable internal experience.
This is why the psychoanalytic understanding of the love relationships of narcissistic personalities goes far beyond the conventional notions of "selfishness" or "self-love."
Otto Kernberg demonstrates that the differences between a healthy capacity for love and pathological narcissism become especially evident in intimate relationships. In his book Love Relations: Normality and Pathology (1995), he writes:
“ The psychoanalytic study of the love relations of the narcissistic personality might begin with a comparison between couples in which one or both partners suffer from narcissistic personality disorder and couples showing no such signs.
A person with nonpathological narcissism has the capacity to fall in love and to maintain a love relationship over an extended period of time.
The most severe cases of narcissistic personality do not have the capacity to fall in love, which is indeed pathognomonic of pathological narcissism.
And even narcissistic personalities who are able to fall in love for brief periods of time show remarkable differences from those with the normal capacity to fall in love.
When the narcissistic personality falls in love, the idealization of the loved object may center on physical beauty as a source of admiration or on power, wealth, or fame as attributes to be admired and unconsciously incorporated as part of the self.
The oedipal resonance of all love relations causes the narcissistic person unconsciously to attempt a relationship dominated by aggression as much as or more than by love because of deep frustration and resentment from the past, a past that in fantasy will be magically overcome by sexual gratification from the new object. Oedipal rivalry, jealousy, and insecurity are compounded by preoedipal aggression displaced to the oedipal realm.
Narcissistic patients evince an unconscious fear of the love object, related to projected aggression; they also show a remarkable absence of internal freedom to become interested in the personality of the other. Their sexual excitement is dominated by unconscious envy of the other gender, by deep resentment because of what has been experienced as a teasing withholding of early gratification, by greed and voracity, and by the hope of appropriating what was withheld in the past in order to eliminate longing for it.
For the narcissistic partner, life proceeds in isolation; dependency upon the other is feared insofar as it represents acknowledgment of both envy and gratitude for the dependency; dependency is replaced by self-righteous demandingness and frustration when demands are not met. Resentments build up and are difficult to undo in moments of intimacy; they are more easily resolved by splitting disparate experiences from each other, maintaining peace at the cost of fragmenting the relationship. In a worst-case scenario, a stifling sense of imprisonment and persecution by the other evolves. Unacknowledged and intolerable aspects of the self are projected onto the partner to protect an idealized self-image. Unconscious provocation of the partner to comply with the projected aspects of the self is matched by attacks on and rejection of the partner thus misperceived.
The symbolic incorporation of the admired features of the other may serve as narcissistic gratification:
a narcissistic woman who has married a famous public figure may continue to bask in his public prominence. In the privacy of the home, however, she may experience unmitigated boredom, aside from unconscious conflicts around envy. The absence of joint values precludes opening an area of new interests that would provide a new view of the world or other relationships.
The absence of curiosity about the other, a relationship in which immediate behaviors are reacted to rather than reflect concern for the other's internal reality—a central problem of the narcissistic personality related to underlying identity diffusion and lack of capacity for empathy in depth with others—closes the door to understanding the other's life.
Sources of gratification are lacking, and boredom, failure to contain aroused rage, chronic frustration, and a sense of being imprisoned by the relationship prevail, in addition to the unavoidable activation of unconscious conflicts from the past and the outbreak of frustration and aggression in the couple's intimate relationship.
Most dramatically, in the sexual realm, unconscious envy of the other transforms the idealization of the other's body into its devaluation, fosters the transformation of sexual gratification into the sense of having successfully invaded and incorporated the other, eliminates the richness of the primitive object relations activated in normal polymorphous perverse sexuality, and descends into boredom”.
(c) Yuliia Holoporova,
Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy