Can a narcissistic personality truly love only itself?

This assumption is widespread. However, Otto Kernberg offers a fundamentally different understanding of the issue. In his view:

“The issue is not whether the investment is in the self or the object, or in the self-representation as opposed to object representations. The issue is the difference between the kind of self that is invested: whether it has the capacity to integrate love and hatred under the dominance of love, or whether it is a pathological grandiose self” (“Otto Kernberg, Love Relations: Normality and Pathology”, 1995).

As van der Waals (1965) observed, it is not that narcissists love only themselves and nobody else, but that they love themselves as badly as they love others.

But Kernberg goes one step further. He raises a question that concerns not only narcissistic pathology but the very nature of mature love:

What, in a stable love relationship, is the connection between self-gratification and enjoyment of, and commitment to, the other?

Insofar as the selected partner reflects one's own ideals, an eminently "narcissistic" quality undoubtedly permeates falling and being in love. And insofar as there is a conscious and unconscious search for complementarity—ranging from the admiration of, and gratification from, what the other can enjoy and tolerate in himself or herself and one cannot, to overcoming the limitations of one's own gender by establishing a "bisexual" union with a partner—even such complementarity, one might say, serves "narcissistic" purposes.

At the same time, insofar as the other provides gratification of both nurturing and oedipal needs and offers gratitude for what is received, the love relationship is obviously "object-related." It has altruistic features that integrate in myriad ways self-centeredness and self-sacrifice, dedication to the other, and gratification of the self.

It is for this reason that Kernberg arrives at the following important conclusion: 

normal narcissism and object relatedness complement each other.

These ideas also have important clinical implications. They require that we need to consider separately the behavior pattern at which a couple's relationship has stabilized or become frozen, and the personality structure of each of the partners.

The presence of a narcissistic personality disorder in one or both partners undoubtedly colors the nature of their relationship, and in some cases the resolution of deep, long-term marital conflict will depend on modification of the personality structure of one or both partners.

More frequently, however, the resolution of pathological interaction through psychoanalysis and psychotherapy—or separation and divorce—will reveal how much of what appeared to be narcissistic pathology in one or both partners was the result of unconscious collusion in mutual exploitativeness and aggression derived from other conflicts.

In other words, not every difficulty within a couple is the result of narcissistic personality disorder. Often, the source of destructive interaction lies in an unconscious dynamic that both partners jointly sustain within the relationship.

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(c) Yuliia Holoporova,

Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy