Why is it that, for some people, love and sexual desire naturally coexist within the same relationship, while for others this integration seems almost impossible?
Dr. Otto Kernberg regards this as one of the central questions in understanding the pathology of love relationships.
According to Kernberg:
mature sexual love is one of the most complex achievements of psychological development. It requires the integration of sexual desire, tenderness, aggression, ambivalence, mature idealization, responsibility, and tolerance for the psychological separateness of the other. Only under these conditions can the loved person be experienced as a whole object rather than as a collection of fragmented and conflicting representations.
When such integration fails to occur, libidinally and aggressively charged self- and object representations remain split. The internalized object relations associated with them do not become integrated into a cohesive structure but continue to function as dissociated affective dyads. Under these conditions, love, sexual desire, aggression, dependency, and guilt are no longer organized around a single love object.
In clinical practice, we frequently encounter patients who maintain a deep emotional attachment to their spouse yet are unable to sustain sexual desire within the relationship. Intense erotic excitement, by contrast, can be experienced only in extramarital relationships, while the marital relationship remains a domain of care, responsibility, and mutual dependence. Despite repeated attempts to end one of these relationships, the same internal relational configuration is repeatedly recreated.
It is at this point that Kernberg offers a fundamentally different understanding of infidelity.
According to Otto Kernberg,
“a long-term love triangle often reflects an inability to integrate sexual desire, love, aggression, and moral prohibitions in relation to the same love object. In such cases, different partners come to serve different psychological functions: one becomes the object of tenderness, care, stability, and familial attachment, while the other embodies sexual desire, idealization, Oedipal rivalry, or narcissistic regulation of self-esteem” (Otto Kernberg, Love Relations: Normality and Pathology, 1995).
As a result, different love objects come to perform distinct psychological functions that, in a mature personality organization, would ordinarily be integrated within a single intimate relationship.
Also, within such a structure, different parts of self- and object-representations can in turn be projected onto each side of the triangle. Yet even in these cases the structure remains the same: one object serves to realize attachment relationships, while sexual desires are directed toward the other, even if there is alternation between the objects.
Throughout his work, Kernberg repeatedly emphasizes that marital infidelity does not necessarily reflect a loss of love for one's partner. More often, it reflects an inability to integrate love and sexuality, together with the persistence of primitive defensive mechanisms—most notably splitting—which maintain the dissociation of internal object relations.
Kernberg also assigns a central role to Oedipal triangulation in the development of enduring love triangles. In his view, the capacity to tolerate the existence of a third person is one of the major achievements of psychological development. When Oedipal conflicts remain insufficiently integrated, however, the triangular configuration ceases to be a developmental phase and instead becomes a stable mode of organizing intimate relationships in adult life. In such cases, the third person is not incidental but becomes psychologically necessary for maintaining internal equilibrium.
For this reason, psychotherapeutic work with such patients cannot be limited to analyzing the infidelity itself or making moral judgments about their behavior.
The central task is to understand the patient's personality organization, the degree of integration of self- and object representations, superego functioning, the nature of internal object relations, and the individual's capacity to integrate love and aggression within a single intimate relationship.
(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,
Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy