What is falling in love? Why does it develop into deep love in some relationships but end in separation in others? Does this process follow psychological regularities?
Dr. Otto Kernberg, M.D., Honorary Chairman of the International Psychoanalytical Association, considers falling in love not as a random emotion but as a complex psychological process with its own identifiable patterns that can be studied and analyzed.
In Kernberg’s view, falling in love is both a gift and a challenge. It requires the courage to confront inner conflicts and the capacity to transform passion into mature responsibility, thereby opening the way to genuine love.
According to Dr. Otto Kernberg, the capacity to fall in love is a basic pillar of the relationship of the couple. It implies the capacity to link idealization with erotic desire and the potential for establishing an object relationship in depth. A man and a woman who discover their attraction and longing for each other, who are able to establish a full sexual relationship that carries with it emotional intimacy and a sense of fulfillment of their ideals in closeness with the loved other, are expressing their capacity not only to unconsciously link eroticism and tenderness, sexuality and the ego ideal, but also to recruit aggression in the service of love. A couple in a fulfilling love relationship defies the ever-present envy and resentment of the excluded others and the distrustfully regulating agencies of the conventional culture in which they live.
Falling in love extends far beyond individual experience—it is interwoven with social and cultural contexts, systems of values, and even unconscious collective representations of intimacy and closeness.
A man and a woman may have known each other from childhood, may have constituted a couple in the minds of everybody who knows them, they may marry, and still not really be a couple. Or they may become one secretly sooner or later: many if not most marriages are several marriages, and some consolidate only long after they have faded from the attention of their social group.
In this context, Dr. Otto Kernberg emphasizes that even formal stability—for example, marriage—does not guarantee genuine intimacy between partners.
Intimacy is achieved only when both individuals are able to move beyond formal roles and social expectations, confront their own unconscious conflicts, and integrate them into the shared space of the relationship.
Examining this topic more deeply, Dr. Kernberg notes that for patients with significant character pathology, the capacity for falling in love indicates certain psychological achievements:
- in narcissistic personalities, falling in love marks the beginning of the capacity for concern and guilt and some hope for overcoming the deep, unconscious devalua- tion of the love object.
- with borderline patients, primitive idealization may be the first step toward a love relation different from the love-hate relation with the primary objects. This occurs if and when the splitting mechanisms responsible for this primitive idealization have been resolved and this love relation, or a new one replacing it, is able to tolerate and resolve the pregenital conflicts against which primitive idealization was a defense.
- neurotic patients and patients with relatively mild character pathology develop a capacity for a lasting love relation if and when suc- cessful psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic treatment resolves the un- conscious, predominantly oedipal, conflicts.
Thus, the capacity to fall in love, to love, to care, to manage aggression, and to experience guilt reflects the level of an individual’s personality integration.
Being in love also represents a mourning process related to growing up and becoming independent, the experience of leaving behind the real objects of childhood. In this process of separation, there is also reconfirmation of the good relations with internalized objects of the past as the individual becomes confident of the capacity to give and receive love and sexual gratification simultaneously—with a growth-promoting mutual reinforcement of both—in contrast to the conflict between love and sex in childhood.
Achievement of this developmental stage permits the development of the capacity to transform falling in love into a stable love relationship, implying a capacity for tenderness, concern, and idealization more sophisticated than that of earlier developmental levels, and a capacity for identification and empathy with the love object. Now tenderness may expand into full sexual enjoyment, concern deepens with full sexual identification and empathy, and idealization becomes a mature commitment to an ideal represented by what the loved person is or stands for, or what the couple, united, might become.
In Kernberg’s conception, falling in love is neither a random passion nor merely a romantic illusion, but rather a complex stage in the development of both the individual and the couple as a whole. It is through the maturity of personality and the capacity for mature human emotions—tenderness, empathy, care, the ability to unite erotic desire with responsibility and respect for the other—that falling in love can transform into a mature relationship. This represents a shift from idealization to genuine intimacy, from illusion to responsibility. The way in which an individual passes through this stage determines whether they become capable of true love or remain limited to a transient infatuation.
(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,
Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy