What makes love mature? Why do some couples strengthen their bond over the years, while others remain caught in endless conflict?

In 1967 Henry Dicks approached the study of the capacity for a mature love relation in terms of dimensions of interaction established in a marital relationship. By examining marital couples individually and jointly from a psychoanalytic perspective, he mapped out a frame of reference that permitted an analysis of the reasons for chronic marital conflict as well as the outcome of such conflicts, whether the destruction of the couple, the maintenance of an unsatisfactory and conflictual equilibrium, or resolution of the conflict.

Dicks found that there were three major areas in which couples related to each other:

• their conscious mutual expectations of what a marital relationship should provide;
• the extent to which their mutual expectations permitted harmonizing their own cultural expectations and also integrating them in their cultural environment;
• the unconscious activation of past pathogenic internalized object relations in each partner and their mutual induction of roles complementary to these past object relations.

Couples established a compromise formation between their unconscious object relations, which were often in sharp conflict with their conscious wishes and mutual expectations.

This mutual role induction was achieved by projective identification and proved to be a strong factor in determining the couple's capacity to obtain gratification.

Dicks emphasized how sexual conflicts between the partners were the usual territory in which marital conflicts and unconsciously activated object relations were expressed, and he pointed to the sharp contrast between these activated object relations and the couple's initial mutual idealization.

Otto Kernberg, M.D.—one of the most renowned psychoanalysts of our time—offers his perspective on what constitutes mature sexual love and why it can represent a profound challenge for a couple. Building on the work of Henry Dicks, he identifies three key domains of couple interaction:

- their actual sexual relations,

- their consciously and unconsciously predominant object relations,

- their establishment of a joint ego ideal.

The capacity for mature sexual love is expressed within these domains. We will examine each of them in detail, and today we turn to the first:

Actual sexual relations:

Otto Kernberg places particular emphasis on the integration of libido and aggression, love and hatred, with the predominance of love over hatred, in all three of these major areas of a couple's interaction.

Robert Stoller’s studies (1979, 1985) made sweeping contributions to the psychoanalytic understanding of sexual excitement, the perversions, and the nature of love. He pointed to the essential presence of aggression as a component of sexual excitement, independently reaching conclusions similar to those Otto Kernberg has reached in studying the sexual experiences of borderline patients.

He also emphasized the importance of mystery in sexual excitement and described anatomical and physiological factors that, in interaction with oedipal desires and dangers, contribute to the exciting and frustrating qualities that are so much a part of mystery. Mystery both induces and reflects sexual fantasy.

Stoller stressed the function of sexual excitement in recreating dangerous and potentially frustrating situations and overcoming them by the gratification of the specific sexual fantasy and act.

Thus, in terms of the capacity both for sexual excitement and erotic desire and for integration of preoedipal and oedipal object relations as part of love relations, the integration of libido and aggression, love and hatred, gradually emerged as a major aspect of the capacity for, as well as the pathology of, love relations.

The sadomasochistic aspects of polymorphous perverse sexuality provide an important impetus to the striving for sexual fusion and an excessive predominance of lack of tender bodily care or traumatic experiences, physical or sexual abuse, may erase the capacity for sexual response and interfere with the consolidation and development of the affect of sexual excitement. Conversely, an excessive repression of aggression, unconscious prohibitions against the early, aggressive components of polymorphous perverse infantile sexuality, may inhibit it significantly and impoverish the sexual response.

Otto Kernberg’s research demonstrates that some degree of suppression or repression of polymorphous perverse infantile sexuality is the most frequent type of sexual inhibition, importantly contributing to impoverishing the love life of couples whose emotional relations are otherwise very satisfactory. In practice, we find that:

couples may have genital intercourse regularly, with sexual excitement and orgasm, but with a developing monotony, a vague sense of dissatisfaction and boredom. In the area of sexual excitement, then, both a lack of integration of aggression and an excess of aggression may inhibit the love relationship.

All of these aspects indicate that mature sexual love is not merely a matter of passion or harmony. It is a complex and dynamic process of integrating love and aggression, closeness and separateness, idealization and realistic perception of one’s partner.

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(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,

Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy

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