“Do you still love me?” — a question we often hear in couple therapy. At times, it reflects an attempt to preserve a particular form of intimacy—one that cannot tolerate pauses, difference, or distance. 

Intimacy in relationships can take many forms. At times, it becomes so dense that partners begin to resemble one another, and the boundary between them gradually dissolves.

At first, this may appear as ideal intimacy: mutual understanding without words, a sense of complete attunement, the absence of friction between “self” and “other.” There is pleasure in this similarity—calm, wholeness, and relief from the tension of difference.

However, over time, a different quality begins to emerge within this closeness. Instead of a meeting between two individuals, there develops a sense of “we are the same.” Difference is no longer tolerated—it is experienced as a threat and is either smoothed over or repressed. The other begins to function as a mirror: confirming, repeating, and amplifying the self.

At this point, intimacy takes on a narcissistic character. The source of satisfaction is no longer the other as separate, but their similarity. What once united now begins to close in: the relationship becomes dense, sealed, almost impermeable to difference.

It is here that tension arises without an outlet. Aggression does not disappear—it can no longer be directed toward an “other” who is experienced as separate. Instead, it is either repressed or circulates within this closed system, taking the form of irritation, devaluation, or emotional withdrawal.

What once appeared as ideal intimacy gradually transforms into a “psychic envelope” that protects against disintegration, yet simultaneously prevents development.

In this dynamic, the boundary between intimacy and fusion dissolves almost imperceptibly: what should expand the self through contact with the other begins instead to constrict it.

It is precisely at this point that we reach the level of narcissistic conflicts that organize this form of intimacy. 

Narcissistic conflicts manifest themselves not only in unconscious envy, devaluation, spoiling, and separation but also in the unconscious desire to complete oneself by means of the loved partner, who is treated as an imaginary twin. 

Didier Anzieu (1986), in developing Bion's (1971) work, has described the unconscious selection of the love object as a homosexual and/or heterosexual completion of the self: a homosexual completion in the sense that the heterosexual partner is treated as a mirror image of the self. Anything in the partner that does not correspond to that complementing schema is not tolerated. If the intolerance includes the other's sexuality, it may lead to severe sexual inhibition. 

Behind the intolerance of the other's sexuality lies the narcissistic envy of the other gender. 

In contrast, when the other is selected as a heterosexual twin, the unconscious fantasy of completion by being both genders in one may act as a powerful cement. 

Throughout many years of living together, a couple's intimacy may be either strengthened or destroyed by enacting certain types of unconscious scenarios that differ from the periodic enactment of ordinary, dissociated past unconscious object relations. 

According to Otto Kernberg, this narcissistic gratification in this twinship relationship, the wedding, we might say, of object love and narcissistic gratification, protects the couple against the activation of destructive aggression. Under less ideal circumstances, such twinship relations may evolve into what Anzieu (1986) has called a “skin” to the couple's relationship—a demand for complete and continuous intimacy that first seems an intimacy of love but eventually becomes an intimacy of hatred. 

The constantly repeated question “Do you still love me?” reflecting the need for maintaining the couple's common skin, is the counterpart of the assertion, “You always treat me like that!” signaling a shift in the quality of the relationship under the skin from love to persecution.

 Only the opinion of the other really counts in protecting one's safety and sanity, and that opinion may turn from a steady stream of love to an equally steady stream of hatred. 

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(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,

Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy