Love has always been one of the central themes in culture and social thought.
But do we truly understand what lies behind this feeling — why some relationships grow stronger while others fall apart?
Dr. Otto Kernberg, M.D., psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and psychotherapist, sought answers to these questions. In his research, he revealed the hidden forces that shape love relationships and demonstrated why, without understanding these forces, it is impossible to speak of love in its deepest sense.
In contrast to the abundance of studies on the sexual response from a biological perspective, little had been written about it as a subjective experience.
Otto Kernberg, explored this subjective aspect with patients, and soon found myself dealing with unconscious fantasies and their roots in infantile sexuality—in short, back to Freud.
From clinical experience, it has become clear that through mutual projective identification that couples reenacted past “scenarios” (unconscious experiences and fantasies) in their relationships and that fantasied and real mutual “persecution” derived from the projection of the infantile superego—as well as the establishment of a joint ego ideal— powerfully influenced a couple's life.
Otto Kerberg notes that it was almost impossible to predict the destiny of a love relation or marriage on the basis of a patient's particular psychopathology. Sometimes different types and degrees of psychopathology in the partners seem to result in a comfortable match, at other times the differences seem to be the source of incompatibility.
The questions “What keeps couples together” and “What destroys their relationship” - these questions prompted Dr. Otto Kernberg to study the underlying dynamics of couples in intimate relationships. The starting point for Dr. Otto Kernberg was the treatment of patients by psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, the evaluation and treatment of couples suffering from marital conflict, and particularly the long-term follow-up study of couples through the window of the psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy of individual patients.
Dr. Otto Kernberg established that it is impossible to study the vicissitudes of love without the vicissitudes of aggression in the relationship of the couple as in the individual. Aggressive aspects of the couple's erotic relationship emerged as important in all intimate sexual relations.
Dr. Otto Kernberg found the aggressive components of the universal ambivalence of intimate object relations equally important, as well as the aggressive components of superego pressures unleashed in the couple's intimate life. A psychoanalytic object relations theory facilitated the study of the dynamics linking intrapsychic conflicts and interpersonal relations, the mutual influences of the couple and its surrounding social group, and the interplay of love and aggression in all these fields.
An understanding of the complex ways in which love and aggression merge and interact in the couple's life also highlights the mechanisms by which love can integrate and neutralize aggression and, under many circumstances, triumph over it.
(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,
Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy