The sequence of frequent infatuations, intense relationships that rapidly become disappointing, and consequent sexual promiscuity is typical for narcissistic personalities. However, the mere recurrence of unsatisfying relationships does not yet tell us anything about the psychodynamics underlying them. A similar relationship history may be observed in different personality constellations—and may have fundamentally different underlying psychological dynamics.
Traditionally, this seemed more a feature of male psychology than of female psychology, because a “double standard” gave men within a patriarchal ideology more freedom than women.
As women have increasingly achieved social and financial independence, this clinical picture is showing up in female narcissistic patients as well.
Patients with significant masochistic tendencies also may present with a history of frequent unsatisfactory relationships that would seem to reflect a similar dynamic of promiscuity, but that, in fact, has a completely different structure.
In the case of masochistic patients, their unconscious guilt over a good relationship tends to induce its dismantling, and, typically, such patients finally get “stabilized” in relationships where they are made to suffer, in which, unconsciously, a heavy price is paid for a gratifying sexual love relation.
In other words, on the surface we may see a similar pattern—a series of relationships that repeatedly end in dissatisfaction. Yet in masochistic dynamics, the dismantling of good relationships is linked to unconscious guilt. In narcissistic dynamics, a different problem becomes central: how to preserve the idealization of the partner without confronting envy and the subsequent devaluation.
The narcissistic personalities, the search is on for a partner who, in the mind of these patients, is so extraordinarily great and gratifying that he or she will be protected from the apparently unavoidable devaluation that characterizes the love relations of these patients: somebody ideal enough to promise permanent gratification and yet, not so ideal that intense envy would tend to destroy the relation.
This is precisely where one of the central dilemmas lies: the partner must be “special” enough to sustain idealization and provide narcissistic gratification—yet their value must not become so great that the patient’s own dependence on them, their success, or their superiority begins to be experienced as a threat.
How might this dilemma be resolved in actual relationships? Kernberg describes several characteristic configurations.
Some individuals with pathological narcissism resolve this dilemma by maintaining a relationship with a person who gratifies his or her objective needs for comfort, social standing or admiration, and economic security. This relationship enables a freedom that permits them both transient sexual experiences with others and a complete dedication to a career or artistic field as a means of personal triumph that provides gratification and confirmation of one’s superiority. In these cases, the quality of intimacy itself is degraded.
Sometimes narcissistic personalities are drawn together because of their shared grandiosity and need for admiration to combine as the “beautiful couple,” or “power couple” that affords maximum gratification of their need to be seen as superior.
In other cases, a narcissistic person selects a partner with such apparent negative features that the patient’s own superiority is highlighted by contrast and thus has a stabilizing effect.
Or the couple may exist in a narcissistic bubble in which one person may inordinately and rigidly idealize the partner seen through the halo of his or her own grandiosity, and demand that others see the person in the same light regardless of the individual’s actual characteristics.
On the surface, these relationships may look very different: a partner who serves as a source of comfort and status, a “power couple,” a relationship with an obviously weaker partner, or mutual grandiose idealization. Yet in each of these configurations, an important clinical question concerns the function the partner serves for the pathological grandiose Self—and the extent to which the separateness of the Other, dependency, and genuine intimacy remain possible within such a relationship.
These dynamics are seen in both heterosexual and homosexual relationships where one or both parties have prominent narcissistic pathology.
However, behind these ways of organizing relationships, Kernberg describes an even deeper level of conflict.
At a deeper level, we often find an intense unconscious envy of the other gender, combined with the unconscious desire to be both genders at the same time. Here a combination of narcissistic and oedipal dynamics may be involved as a defense against a highly conflictual, traumatic relation with the unavailable oedipal ideal. An unconscious identification with both parental images constitutes a fantasized, fused, primitive oedipal couple within the patient’s pathological grandiose self.
This material was prepared based on the book Treating Pathological Narcissism with Transference-Focused Psychotherapy by Diana Diamond, Frank Yeomans, Barry Stern, and Otto Kernberg.
(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,
Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy